Nor can we fail to be struck with the versatility of the new writers. There is nothing that touches human nature for which they have not eyes and ears; the foibles of the people, the manners of mistress and maid, the little civilities and incivilities of every-day life, thoughts grave and gay, lively and severe, passing through the busy worka-day brain, or touching the human heart, all these are vividly reflected in this beautiful humane and lucid literature.

The freaks and intellectual subtleties of the preceding age, which gave an artificial air to English prose, were soon purged away, since the reading world was no longer whimsical and subtle. It was a bright, clear-headed public, frivolous, off-hand and busy, for whom De Foe, Swift, Steele and Addison wrote so charmingly in that splendid age of literature we call the classic period. Narrowly interpreted as meaning a literature structurally similar to Latin or Greek, or taking its inspiration from classical authors, no term could be more inappropriate. It was Milton in the seventeenth, not Swift in the eighteenth century, who tried to assimilate the literature of England to that of Italy, and Milton's, in spite of the splendour of its poetical vocabulary, is not a good working prose. That of the eighteenth century was natural and English to its last fibre. Deeply convinced as these writers were of the supreme beauty of the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome, freely as they embellished their own with classical allusions and metaphors, it was not these which made their prose pre-eminent, but the lucidity of it, its easy grace, its admirable form, and its polished reserve. Although humane, it is rarely personal. You may search fruitlessly among the sprightly authors of this period for what we call a "human document." With all their sparkle, their ready wit, and keen observation, they took care to conceal their own weaknesses. Never do you find them wearing their heart upon their sleeve. They laugh at others without revealing themselves, and in these days of aggressive personality we may count that to them for righteousness.

But there is a drawback to this polished reticence, for in it lies the secret of their failure, obvious enough to us, to portray human passion. Except Richardson, none, even of their best novelists, really takes an interior view of the human heart. Their standpoint is always exterior, nor can it be anything else, since the soul that does not study itself, and that dares not for peril of ridicule reveal its own secrets, cannot portray the passions of mankind.

Again, that admirable lucidity, which never leaves us in doubt as to their meaning, due in part to short sentences, in part to precision in the use of words-this also has its drawbacks, when it leads to shallowness, to the sacrifice of detached and remote thought, and to the delineation only of the coarser and more obvious, in preference to the delicate and evanescent, because the latter are hard to express, the former easy. A stream, we know, may often be clear, not because the water is limpid, but because it is shallow.

As to purity of diction, I think we must accord the prose writers of the early eighteenth century high praise. They kept their prose and verse well apart. Cowley had done this with exceptional success in the previous century, but he was the only great writer in both branches who did. Nor do they, like their predecessors, involve themselves in perplexing ambiguities, adopt roundabout phrases, mar their style by tediously elaborate embellishments, drag in far-fetched words of doubtful meaning, or sink into mere rhetoric. Nor do you find them stringing half a dozen independent sentences together, as Milton so frequently does, of which the following is by no means an isolated example :

If in this most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness [in writing for the public after careful preparation], if no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book writing, and if he be not repulsed or slighted, must appear in print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and surety, that he is no idiot or seducer, it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning.

You see how clumsily these clauses are tagged one to another, like barges towed along the stream, and what a hazy effect the passage leaves upon your mind. The classic authors are entirely free from this blemish.

Yet another conspicuous merit of theirs is their admirable sense of proportion. You know how tiresome an author becomes who allows a passing illustration to lead him off into long, wearisome digressions, a vice frequent amongst seventeenth century writers. Even Locke, who as an authority on the human understanding, ought to have been superior to this fault, cannot free himself from it. Thus, when illustrating the folly of insular egotism, by the example of the Marian Islanders, who thought themselves the only people in the world, he drifts away into a prolix account of the early Spanish voyages between Acapulco and Manilla, for no other apparent reason than to air his reading. A fine sense of proportion kept the classic writers of our Augustan age free from this vice.

Turning from prose to poetry, for that we must do, although we lose thereby the sunlight, we shall find the same qualities, lucidity, order, reserve, and just proportion; but I think while you enumerate these merits, you feel you are leaving out others far more essential; that lacking inspiration, insight, sincerity, and conviction, no poetry to you can be anything but the empty case of the chrysalis from which the butterfly has flown. Some have felt this so strongly as to assert that there was no real poetry in the early eighteenth century. We need not go so far as that, for poetry has many forms, and we cannot forget how beautifully polished are the couplets of Pope, how tender the elegiac grace of Gray. Yet in an age so singularly rich in noble prose, the paucity of true poetry is remarkable. The further on we go in the century, the worse off we find ourselves, and when we come to Hayley and Erasmus Darwin we give up in despair.

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Many causes, no doubt, conspired to produce this singular sterility. There was the baleful example of. contemporary French verse, feeble, mechanical, and uninspired; a growing tendency to assimilate poetry to prose, through the unskilful employment of blank verse; ever-growing reliance on antiquity, on books and secondhand observations, in place of a direct appeal to nature; a certain mental dishonesty, or at least cowardice, which shrank from the expression of genuine thought and feeling, substituting for it conventionalised expressions and verbal approximations. Beyond all these, deeper than all these, lay a strange incapacity to appreciate the enormous scope and power of the human imagination, an inability which lay upon poetry like a nightmare, paralysing the productive faculty.

Wordsworth remarks that the higher operation of the imagination does not require the stimulus of a romantic situation. An earthquake, a shipwreck, a tornado, were wanted to rouse the sluggish pulse of an eighteenth

century poet. What they liked was a neat clean-cut plan, logical and well connected. When by good fortune they hit on this, they could reel off verses for as many cantos as they liked. You can trace their mechanical methods by the arguments with which they prefaced their poems. One example, from Mallet, the friend of Thomson, will suffice. The poem to which the synopsis is prefixed is one which no one ever reads now, called The Excursion.

Canto I.--Invocation, addressed to Fancy. Subject proposed. A short excursive survey of the earth and heavens. The poem opens with a description of the face of nature in the different scenes of morning, sunrise, noon with a thunder-storm, evening and night, with the character of a friend deceased. With the return of morning Fancy continues her excursion, still northward. A view of the Arctic continent and the deserts of Tartary, from thence southward: a general prospect of the globe, followed by another of the middle part of Europe, supposed Italy. A city there upon the point of being swallowed up by an earthquake: signs that usher it in: described in its causes and effects at length. Eruption of a burning mountain, happening at the same time and from the same causes, likewise described. Canto II contains, on the same plan, a survey of the solar system and of the fixed stars.

This is entirely typical of the mechanical structure of an immense volume of eighteenth century verse. The editor of Mallet's reprint in Bell's Poets, suggests that the excellence of writing may, in this case, atone for "irregularity in the composition!" If Mr. Mallet's poem is irregular, one wonders what a regular poem would look like. The smaller the poet the more loudly, as a rule, does he invoke his muse, and the more gorgeous the plan on which he sets out. You search in vain among the groaning mountains of such laborious verse for one wee little mouse of frank original observation, one scintilla of genuine unforced feeling. For all that to us is lovable, winning, moving, for all that stirs us, wafts us