prefixed to the Epistles will help in the analysis. Why did Pope address this work to Lord Bolingbroke? Look up the record of Bolingbroke's career and find out the facts of his political and literary achievements.

Of the numerous minor poets who followed Pope in his use of the couplet, and who exhibited the characteristics of the artificial school, the following are the most prominent.

The
"School"
of Pope.

Matthew Prior (1664-1721) was a poor boy in Dorsetshire when discovered by the Earl of Dorset reading Horace behind a tavern bar. By the generosity of that nobleman he was sent to Cambridge. Later he entered politics, became Secretary of State for Ireland, and finally Ambassador to France. With Pope and Swift he joined in the project of the Scriblerus Club and wrote satirical poems and tales. John Gay (1685-1732), a member of the same distinguished group, was especially noted for his Beggar's Opera (1728), conceived also with satire as its intent. His Shepherd's Week (1714) consists of six burlesque pastorals. Trivia (1715) is a satire upon city life. The work of Edward Young (1684-1765) was of a more serious sort. He composed three tragedies: Busirus (1719), The Revenge (1721), The Brothers (1728); but he is best known as the author of Night Thoughts (1742–45), nine books of prosy moralizing, much esteemed by his generation. The Grave, a serious didactic poem of 800 lines by Robert Blair, a Scotch poet, is of much greater value, but shows the same quality of tone.1 In the poetry of James Thomson, however, another key is struck. A real appreciation of nature gives distinction to his Seasons, four long poems It is refreshing to find even within 1 See page 304.

James Thomson, 1700-48.

in blank verse.

THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

265

the lifetime of Pope a spirit of simple pleasure in the naturalness of nature, such as is conveyed in these lines from Thomson's Summer:

"Hence, let me haste into the mid-wood shade,

Where scarce a sunbeam wanders through the gloom;
And on the dark-green grass, beside the brink

Of haunted stream, that by the roots of oak
Rolls o'er the rocky channel, lie at large,
And sing the glories of the circling year."

Thomson, like Blair, was a Scotchman; a graduate of Edinburgh, he had come to London and was making his living as a tutor when he found a publisher for his poem on Winter, in 1726. That on Summer followed in the next year, and Spring was published the year after. The poem on Autumn did not appear until 1730. Thomson wrote several plays and many vigorous songs, of which Rule Britannia is best known. The Castle of Indolence (1748), his last important work, is in the old Spenserian stanza, and suggests the indolent languor of its theme with consummate effect. The charm of nature is always present in the poetry of Thomson. Undisturbed by the tastes and influences of the artificial school, he pursues his independent course, and sounds the note which grows clearer and stronger in the latter half of the century, until it reaches its fullness of tone in the songs of Robert Burns.

III. THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL.

It is customary to date the beginning of the English novel at about the middle of the eighteenth century, when Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding introduced, to a large and delighted circle of English readers, what appeared to be a distinctly new form of literary creation. But the essential quality in all works of fiction is the story, and it is to a far earlier period

than this that we must look for origins in this depart ment of literature.

The love of the story is as ancient as the race, and The Real the art of story-telling is as old as literature. Beginnings. As we have seen, the spirit of the story-teller held undisputed sway in Saxon hall and Norman castle, where gleeman and minstrel moved their rough audiences at will. The genius of the true story-teller lived in Chaucer; indeed his sketches of the Canterbury pilgrims, and particularly his portraitures of character in the metrical romance of Troilus and Criseyde, bring his work in very close relation with the productions of the novelists themselves. The prose romances of the Elizabethan age, the artificial compositions of John Lyly, of Sidney, of Lodge, and of Nash, together with the scores of imitations and translations which were in vogue at the close of the sixteenth century, exhibit comparatively little of that realistic quality essential to the novel. The spirit of these narratives was frankly unreal, and the art of the Elizabethan romancer was directed as far as possible away from the realities of common experience. The creations of the great dramatists were infinitely nearer the life of humanity. Nature, if she found any interpreter at all, spoke not in the romance but in the play. There was, however, one development of the fictitious narrative in that age which was significant of a new interest in the details of real life. This we find in the rogue romance, a natural outgrowth of the older romance of chivalry, which had supplied the Spanish and Italian models for Sidney's Arcadia and the works of that class. In both Spain and Italy these rogue stories were extremely popular. The hero of the adventures recounted was always a rascal, clever, impudent, immoral; his career was one of intrigue and scandal. The Spanish word

picaro (rogue) gave to this group of stories the name picaresque; and by this name they are usually described. Numerous translations of Italian novelle had made the material familiar to English readers, and the romance of roguery became popular in England.

Fore

The Pilgrim's Progress may, in a way, be identified by its method with this class of works, however widely divergent in spirit and tone. At runners. all events, Bunyan's hero, struggling amid the perils of the world, was a very real character to the devout Puritan who eagerly turned its pages. Many a pious reader of that day, with head bent over the record of Christian's falls and Christian's triumphs, must have whispered softly to himself, while tears rolled down his cheeks, "It is I; it is I!" Hardly more than a step was needed to usher in the novel: that was to drop the allegory and to describe men and women in the relations familiar to us and amid the surroundings of the world in which we live. Still more significant of the coming narrative than even the story of Bunyan's pilgrim was the appearance of that genuine character from English country life discovered by Steele and Addison. Sir Roger de Coverley is one of the personalities of English fiction, although the portraiture is presented only in a series of sketches, and belongs neither to the novel nor the stage. But a real beginning in the art of novel writing was made when, in 1719, Daniel Defoe published his inimitable narrative, Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe was a prominent figure among the busy men of letters who, by their intellectual strength Daniel and the elaborate elegance of their literary Defoe, form, gave character to English literature in the age of Anne. He was not only contemporary with Addison, Steele, and Swift, but was engaged in the

1659-1731.

1

same political battles; his interests were as keen, his services perhaps as notable as theirs. Like the rest he was a moralist, and although less skillful than they, used satire as his weapon. Yet while thus employed, sometimes opposing them, sometimes coöperating with them, he was never personally of them. By birth and inclination Defoe was democratic. His father was a butcher, plain James Foe, who knew nothing of the prefix to the family name, which for some shrewd reason his son assumed when about forty years of age. Selfreliant, courageous, enterprising, inventive, Daniel Defoe made the interests of the people his study. Indeed he did this often to his own disadvantage, for his personal interests were sometimes sacrificed or forgotten, and business failures were frequent incidents in his peculiar career.

Personal
Career.

Defoe's parents were well-to-do people of the trading class, living in London, where he was born in 1659 or 1660. Although never in attendance at either of the universities, Daniel Defoe received a good education at an academy in Newington, then under the direction of Charles Morton, "a rank Independent," as his enemies called him, who in 1685 emigrated to America, and eventually became vice-president of Harvard College. Defoe seems to have been blessed with an inquisitive mind, and to have been curiously concerned to elucidate his own theories and correct the opinions of others. With astonishing energy he threw himself into the active life of his age, won fame as a political writer, both in pamphlets and periodicals, established one of the first newspapers, the little Review, which he conducted for some eight or nine years, moralized in print upon almost every conceivable theme, composed ballads and satires, which won the hearts of the people, and at sixty years of age made