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but honest man, 'as violent against Greek accents," said Porson, "as he was against the Trinity, and anathematised the final as strongly as episcopacy.'

ROBERT WATSON (1730?-1781), Professor of Logic at St. Andrews, continued Robertson's Charles V in an unprofitable History of Philip II (1777).

JOHN WHITAKER (1735-1808) wrote a History of Manchester (1771-5) and a book called Mary, Queen of Scots, Vindicated (1787) which deserve a passing mention.

The Universal History, in 23 volumes, was completed in 1760, under the care of Swinton, Archibald Bower, George Psalmanazar, and others. Goldsmith wrote a preface for it, and received three guineas for the task.

D. MISCELLANEOUS
WRITERS AND CRITICS.

THOMAS AMORY (1691 ?-1788), an Irishman by descent, resided in Westminster, was a staunch Unitarian, and lived to the great age of ninety-seven. His Memoirs, containing the Lives of several Ladies of Great Britain, appeared in 1755. In The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756-66), he approaches the domain of the novel. The book is an erratic narrative written in the first person, full of humour, quotation, and meditative digression, and reminding the reader, in its oddness, of Burton's Anatomy.

SIR WILLIAM JONES (1746-1794), a celebrated Oriental scholar, and the author of many works in various branches of literature, was the son of an eminent mathematician, He was educated at Harrow and University College, Oxford, was called to the bar in 1774, and, in 1783, was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court at Calcutta, where he died in 1794. He was one of the first Europeans who studied Sanskrit, and contributed many valuable papers to the Researches of the Bengal Asiatic Society. While in India he translated from the Sanskrit, Sakúntala, a dramatic poem by Kalidása, and the Hitopadesa, a collection of fables.

He has obtained a place among English poets on account of a few original pieces and several translations from the Eastern writers, published at Calcutta in 1800.

JOHN LANGHORNE (1735-1779) was born in Westmorland, and held the living of Blagdon in Somerset. He was a preacher of some popularity, and wrote tales and poems. In company with his brother, WIL LIAM LANGHORNE (1721-1772), he published a translation of Plutarch's Lives (1770), which superseded North's magnificent version in the correct taste of the eighteenth century, and, until quite recently, was the standard English edition of the great work.

CHARLOTTE LENNOX (1720-1804) wrote two popular novels, Harriot Stuart (1750) and The Female Quixote (1752).

FRANCES SHERIDAN (1724–1766), née Chamberlaine, mother of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, wrote two very tearful novels in the sentimental manner, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and Nourjahad (1788), the first of which was greatly admired by Johnson. Her two comedies, The Discovery (1763) and The Dupe (1764), are not as able as her

novels.

JOHN HORNE TOOKE (1736-1812) was the son of a London poulterer named Horne. He received his education at Westminster, Eton, and St. John's College, Cambridge, after which, taking Holy Orders, he threw himself into the great political struggles of those days, and wrote in 1765 in favour of Wilkes. In 1773 he resigned his preferment in the Church in order to study for the bar; but the benchers refused to call him because he was a clergyman. Mr. Tooke of Purley, whose name he afterwards adopted, left him his fortune. In 1796 he was a candidate for Parliament as member for Westminster, and in 1801 was elected for Old Sarum. Previously, in 1794, he had been tried for high treason, when he was defended by Erskine. The declining years of his life were passed at his literary retreat at Wimbledon, where his friends often came to enjoy the hospitality,

humour, and philosophy of the hale and witty old man. Between 1786 and 1805 he enlarged his Letter to Mr. Dunning on the English Particle into the "ЕПЕА ПТЕРOENTA, or the Diversions of Purley, a series of dialogues upon language, in which he reduced all parts of speech to nouns and verbs. The book should be carefully consulted by every student of the English language; but many of its etymologies are fanciful and far-fetched.

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1812), who had contributed notes to Steevens' second edition of the work (1778) and had published a critical and historical supplement, containing the poems, Broke's Romeus and Juliet, and other things, in 1780, subsequently fell foul of Steevens, and brought out a Shakespeare of his own in 1790. After Boswell's death he edited four editions of the Life of Johnson, between 1797 and 1812, and his further notes on Shakespeare were The chief Shakespearean critics incorporated by the younger Boswell of this period were: (1) RICHARD in the third variorum ShakeFARMER (1735-1797), Master of Em-speare, usually known as Boswell's manuel College, Cambridge, who Malone" (1821). Malone had not published in 1767 an Essay on the Steevens' ability; but he was a Learning of Shakespeare, discussing more cautious editor, and paid with great skill the dramatist's his- more respect to the text of the first torical and classical authorities. folio.

(2) GEORGE STEEVENS (17361800), who was Johnson's partner in the Shakespeare of 1773, and became a member of the Club in 1774- He afterwards remodelled the text and, with Reed's help, brought out a new edition-actually the fourth-in 1793, in which he introduced serious textual alterations. He was by no means an universal favourite. Topham Beauclerk called him "malignant," and said that he deserved to be kicked.

(3) ISAAC REED (1742-1807) of Staple Inn, who edited the third edition of Johnson and Steevens' Shakespeare (1785), and brought out a new revised version in 1803, known as the "first variorum." The second variorum" is the revision of this in 1813.

(4) EDMUND MALONE

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Among the numerous travellers of this age should be mentioned SIR GEORGE LEONARD STAUNTON (1737-1801) and GEORGE, EARL MACARTNEY (1737-1806), who narrated their mission to China in two interesting works, Staunton's Account of the Embassy (1797) and Macartney's Journal (1807).

The two greatest names, however, are those of JAMES BRUCE (17301794), who penetrated far into Abys sinia and Central Africa in search of the source of the Nile, and

MUNGO PARK (1771-1806), whose literary achievements are far greater than those of Bruce. His famous Travels appeared in 1799. He was drowned while escaping from native attack, but his journal was preserved, and published posthu (1741-mously in 1815.

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CHAPTER XIX.

THE DAWN OF ROMANTIC POETRY.

§ 1. The revival of nature-poetry. The share of Scotland in the movement. § 2. JAMES THOMSON. The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence. § 3. WILLIAM SHENSTONE. WILLIAM COLLINS: his Odes. § 4 THOMAS GRAY. Importance of his Odes and Elegy. § 5. MARK AKENSIDE. § 6. The WARTONS and the History of English Poetry. § 7. Literary forgeries. THOMAS CHATTERTON and the medieval spirit of romance. § 8. JAMES MACPHERSON. Ossian and its appeal to the imagination. § 9. WILLIAM FALCONER and ERASMUS DARWIN. § 10. WILLIAM COWPER. § 11. GEORGE CRABBE: homeliness and realism of his poetry. § 12. WILLIAM BLAKE. Isolated character of his lyric poetry. § 13. ROBERT BURNS: his lyric poetry; its spontaneity and humour. §14. Drama from 1750-1800. R. B. SHERIDAN'S

comedies.

The return to nature

§ 1. LITERARY fashions are seldom of long duration. The classical taste in English poetry had no sooner reached its zenith in Pope than it began to disappear before the rise of a new fashion. English poetry, in the in English stilted graces of the heroic couplet, had been brought poetry. to so mechanical a perfection that every versifier was capable of writing his copy of neat machine-made lines full of regular melody and of all those artificial tricks which, by constant repetition, communicated themselves to his ear. He wrote fluently of gods and nymphs, and gave his heroes and heroines names which more or less distantly recalled the classics; he dealt in a continual supply of ingenious phrases, epigrams, and antitheses; he lived, as it were, in an elaborate garden, whose arrangements bore the least imaginable resemblance to nature. His imagination led him to nothing more natural than a grotto or a fountain. When he talked of forests, he meant trim shrubberies; when he referred to caves and deserts, he was thinking of summer-houses and rockeries. And, although it was only by degrees that the English mind freed itself from this constrained attitude, a movement in the direc tion of natural feeling becomes perceptible in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and grows in strength-albeit with rather dull and tentative efforts-through its remaining half. This movement is, in a certain sense, a reaction. The artificial spirit in English poetry was, as we have seen, a direct result of

of the

classical

school to

511 the Restoration and the fashions which it brought from France. Waller, Cowley, Dryden, and Pope, the great hierophants of this cult, take us, each of them, farther from the Attitude romantic age of Elizabethan poetry, and establish a canon of verse which removes itself very far from the standard of Shakespeare. On the other hand, these poets cannot be said to reject the claims of nature; their attitude is simply one of blindness to anything save the artificial surroundings they have created for themselves. And, when younger poets began to show their desire to see something for themselves, and to escape from the monotony of the well-ordered garden which had been so assiduously cultivated for more than sixty years, the older men were the first to praise them.

nature.

Influence of
poets on
the early
poets of

the older

The promise of the romantic movement, the return to the poetry of nature, thus sprang, in the ordinary course of evolution, from the classical school of the age of Anne; it inherited many of the traditions of the Augustan age-an inevitable tendency to stiffness, a choice of conventional words, epithets, and metaphors which speaks of the influence of Pope. At the same time, the new school of poets, with Thomson at their head, are, so to speak, sons of Pope who have been strongly affected by the earlier poets. Young, for example, whose Night Thoughts (1741-2) we have already mentioned, addresses Milton

"Ah, could I reach your strain Or his, who made Mæonides our own

nature.

-thus bracketing Pope with Milton. The choice of blank verse as the metre, both of Young's Night Thoughts and of Thomson's Seasons, shows their obligation to Milton, whose splendid fire they might imitate, but never catch. Gradually the influence of Shakespeare and the old dramatists made itself more and more felt, and grew in force until the earlier writers became the source of the living element in English literature, and the poetry of the Restoration and Revolution-the direct result, it should not be forgotten, of disturbed political conditions -was regarded as an interesting parenthesis in literary history. The growth of interest in the older poetry is manifest in the unflagging zeal with which the worthies of the eighteenth century-some of them, like Warburton, most unlikely persons -edited and re-edited Shakespeare, and even more clearly in the epoch-making publication of Percy's Reliques (1765).

Another thing to be noticed is the part which Scotland took in this great revival. Of Sir Walter Scott we need not speak at present; he belongs to a later generation, and his The part work is the full flower of romance. But Thomson, of Scotland who did more than anyone else for the early poetry in the new of nature, was a Scotsman and a native of that Border poetry.

where the English spirit had, centuries before, encountered the Celtic love of nature, and had been blended with it in a subtle and indissoluble union. The lyric poetry of the Lowlands, although its volume had in some measure ceased, had never died out; and, even in Allan Ramsay, indebted as his pastoral poetry was to the artificial school, the love of nature and of the bygone singers who had cherished it was far more conspicuous than any other external influence. Until the day of Burns and Scott, when the native poetry and prose of Scotland became a vital force in English literature, there was never wanting a series of Scottish bards who, poor and ephemeral though much of their verse was, carried on the romantic tradition and helped to keep it alive in England through the poetical deadness of the Johnsonian age. Blair and Beattie, by no means first-rate poets, were admired in England. Beattie's Hermit brought tears into the eyes of Johnson, whose rabid aversion to Scotland was not the least of his eccentricities. The same great critic, who gave rather grudging praise to Thomson, and showed an overwhelming contempt for that wild outbreak of Celtic romanticism, Macpherson's Ossian, confessed, in 1783, the hold that Scottish literature had gained on his country. "You know, sir, that no Scotchman publishes a book or has a play brought on the stage, but there are five hundred people ready to applaud him.”

§ 2. JAMES THOMSON is the greatest poet among Pope's immediate successors. He was the son of a gentleman at Ednam in Roxburghshire, and was educated at Edinburgh The early naturalists: University, where, at an early age, he was "smit 1. JAMES with the love of sacred song." Like his fellowcountryman, Smollett, he determined to seek his

THOMSON

(1700-1748). fortune in London, and, going up in 1725, lived for some time in great poverty. Another of his countrymen, David Mallet, the deist, a young man who had already shown sufficient originality to write the romantic ballad of William and Margaret (1723), was at this time his chief friend, and encouraged him to publish his poem on Winter. This, Publication the first contribution to The Seasons, appeared early of" The Seasons." in 1726, and brought the young poet into favour. He was taken up by Aaron Hill, one of those pretenders to literary fame whom Pope was very soon to lash so severely in The Dunciad; but Pope himself recognised the merits of the new poem, and not only gave advice to its author, but corrected and retouched several passages in it. In 1727 Winter was followed by Summer; in 1728 Spring, and, in 1730, Autumn, with a Hymn to Nature, completed the cycle of The Seasons. Thomson had been already for a short time a private tutor at East Barnet in the family of Lord Binning; he was now appointed governor to the son of the Solicitor-General (afterwards Lord Chancellor) Talbot, and travelled with his pupil in the South of France and Italy. Talbot, whose younger brother, it will be remembered, was the friend of Bishop Butler,

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