manner he is unrivaled and he is a very perfect exponent His relation to life and to nature is not that of his age. of a great poet. The romanticism which sees in life something vague, incomprehensible, and mystic, and finds mysterious beauty and significance in the world, is foreign to him as it was foreign to the spirit of his time. In Thomson and Collins there was an undercurrent of romanticism shown in the comprehension of the beautiful in nature and of the fundamental forces in humanity. This impelled them to leave the heroic couplet and use poetic forms which are capable of more varied music. Nevertheless, Pope is the representative poet of his day and was the accepted model till, with the opening of the eighteenth century, men recognized that the songlike qualities of verse are essential and attractive. QUESTIONS What philosophical school does the line of thought in Pope's "Essay on Man" represent? 66 Compare the satirical methods of Pope in the "Dunciad" and Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," with those of Dryden in "Absalom and Achitophel." What class of readers are benefited most by the Spectator? Indicate some of the features in the papers contributed to it, which tended to educate and refine the manners, and chasten the thought of its readers. BEERS, H. A. AITKIN, G. A. LITERARY REFERENCES History of Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century. BELJAME, A. Le Public et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au 18ème siècle. DOBSON, H. A. Steele. (E. W.) DENNIS, J. Age of Pope. DOBSON, H. A. Eighteenth Century Vignettes. DOBSON, H. A. Henry Fielding. (E. M. L.) Gosse, E. W. History of Eighteenth Century Literature. JOHNSON, S. Lives of the Poets: Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, and Gray. Ed. by M. Arnold. LOWELL, J. R. Fielding. (In his Democracy and other Addresses.) LOWELL, J. R. Pope. (In his My Study Windows; also in North American Review, v. 112.) PERRY, T. S. English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. PHELPS, W. L. Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement. STEPHEN, L. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. THACKERAY, W. M. English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century. Articles in the Dictionary of National Biography on Defoe, Gay, Prior, Hogarth, Steele, Savage. CHAPTER VIII THE GEORGIAN PERIOD (1744 to 1800) Historical References AUBREY, LECKY, and KNIGHT as for previous chapter. PHILLIMORE, J. G. History of England during the Reign of George STANHOPE, P. H. (Viscount Mahon, 5th Earl Stanhope.) History of England, 1713-1783. 7 v. WRIGHT, T. England under the House of Hanover. 2 v. MORRIS, E. E. Early Hanoverians. (Epochs of Modern History.) ROWLEY, J. Settlement of the Constitution, 1689–1784. MORLEY, J. Life of Edmund Burke. TREVELYAN, G. O. Early History of Charles James Fox. THACKERAY, W. M. MACAULAY, T. B. The Four Georges. Essays on "Warren Hastings," "William Pitt,” and "Boswell's Johnson." Letters of Junius. Historical THE second half of the eighteenth century is marked by very important advances in national industry and wealth, and by a broadening of the sentiments of philanthropy and sympathy with the oppressed. Canada and India were won for England, and though the colonies of America established their independence, Great Britain became a great world power. George III., a narrow-minded and reactionary king, attempted to reassert the principles of absolutism, with the effect that constitutional liberty was established more firmly than ever. The liberty of the press was affirmed by judicial decisions which are its foundations to-day. The right to publish the debates in the House of Commons was won. The cynical tone of the men of the former period gave way to a more enthusiastic patriotism. It was an age of great orators and debaters, and though the basis of representation was absurdly unjust, the principles of constitutional law and constitutional freedom were eloquently expounded in the House of Commons. The rise of Methodism democratized religion and reacted to awaken the Established Church from its lethargy. John Howard visited the prisons and aroused public indignation and pity by his accounts of the barbarous treatment of prisoners. William Wilberforce began the agitation against the slave trade which resulted in the next century in the abolishment of the system in all the English colonies. It was, however, in the industrial world that the change from the ancient to the modern is most striking. The steam engine was invented by James Watt in 1769. It released the immense store of energy in the English coal fields. The making of cast iron by the use of coke was first successfully accomplished in 1735. The puddling furnace was invented in 1784, grooved rolls for the manufacture of wrought iron in 1783, and cast steel in 1740. Mechanical spinning and weaving were invented by Arkwright and Hargreaves in 1763 and 1769. The basic inventions of all the great modern industries, except the applications of electricity, were made in the eighteenth century. Pure mathematics dates from Sir Isaac Newton in 1687, but applied science, which underlies our modern civilization, was developed later. The great, rich, manu facturing, and commercial England that we know entered upon its career in the eighteenth century. As we shall see, the Georgian era did not witness the advent of any poet of the first rank. Imaginative interpretation was timid and confined itself largely to conventional channels. Pope was regarded as the poetic model. There was little rebellion against settled modes of thinking, but a general acquiescence in conventional opinion. Toward the close of the century, however, the French Revolution aroused men to criticise the foundations of things, and Robert Burns expressed in his songs some of the instincts of the democracy which in the next century were to revolutionize men's ways of looking at social rights and duties, and showed them that the lyric was the most natural and charming form of poetry. Of the Georgian period, or latter half of the eighteenth century, Dr. Samuel Johnson is the representative figure. Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784. His father was a bookseller and bookbinder at the cathedral town of Lichfield, and on market days opened a stall in the neighboring town of Birmingham. The son received his early education from a schoolmaster named Hunter, of whom he said in later years, "Sir, he beat me well, without that I should have done nothing." Vigorous corporal punishment was so general in the eighteenth century as a means of stimulating the minds of the young that Johnson's experience was by no means exceptional. He was regarded as a prodigy, especially in his knowledge of Latin, and was sent to Oxford in 1728, where he remained three years and a half without taking a degree. This was no doubt an unhappy period of his life, as he was poor and proud and was worried by debts and tormented by religious |