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Fielding more than once refers to the pains he had taken in composing these prefatory chapters. Like Richardson, he professed also to foresee that he was inaugurating a 'new Province of Writing;' and it must be admitted that he has no real rival in his own line until the days of Waverley. But he had more than one contemporary of genius. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, indeed, thought, upon its first anonymous appearance, that Smollett's Roderick Random was written by her clever kinsmansupposition which proves her ladyship to have been a better judge of merit than of style. It would be hard to compare, say, the visit to Parson Trulliber (see p. 342) with any page of Roderick Random and fail to see that they are from different pens. But Smollett's three best novels abound with incident and character, however grotesque; and he deserves the credit of being the first, since Congreve, to depict the British seaman, a task for which his own experiences as a ship's surgeon in the Carthagena expedition had given him exceptional facilities. In Humphry Clinker, too, he contrived to write a novel in letters which (without any appreciable plot) is amusing from beginning to end; but then he cleverly avoids the tedium of the plan by never having his epistles answered. His method in fiction, however, is the method of Le Sage, and so far retrograde; but his racy, if reckless, genius has given him many successors. Sterne, again, with his two great books, would add distinction to any epoch. But the Sternesque humour stands by itself, defying the imitator and the disciple alike. He is alone, and he has no school. 'My Uncle Toby' and Yorick, Mr Shandy and Corporal Trim, have passed into the national 'study of imagination;' but the genius of the author, vacillating between tears and laughter, between sentiment and sheer polissonnerie, between method and madness (the word must out), is too unique and several a thing to influence the production of any writer not correspondingly endowed by nature. To write a Tristram Shandy or a Sentimental Journey there is no way but to be Sterne; and Sternes are not turned out in bakers' batches. Of other novels of the period which owe their existence to the fashion set by Fielding and Richardson,

although they are too strongly marked by their writers' individuality to resemble them, are Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and Johnson's Rasselas. But Johnson's Rasselas is scarcely a novel at all; it is an expanded Rambler, without scheme or beginning, and derives its import mainly from its magisterial manner, and its resigned and lugubrious philosophy of life. Goldsmith's exquisite little story has this peculiarity-it is at once both local and cosmopolitan. Dr Primrose and his family are English types; but at the same time they belong so completely to humanity at large that they can be transferred to any other country without sense of incongruity-that is, to any country where there is a recognised Church and the family is an established institution. In the matter of plot the Vicar of Wakefield can scarcely be said to be constructed at all. Neither Goldsmith nor Johnson, therefore, any more than Sterne or Smollett, contributed greatly to the evolution of the Novel-form; and in this connection, the Evelina and Cecilia of Mme. D'Arblay, which did introduce variations in the matter of social portraiture — variations important enough to make their writer the admitted precursor of Jane Austen-must be held to lie more properly within the scope of the present summary.

But if to found a school be the surest test of novelty, such a triumph must certainly be conceded to Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto. In 1764 that accomplished virtuoso, after a prolonged flirtation with the painted windows and plaster battlements of Strawberry Hill, dreamed that, on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase, he saw a gigantic hand in armour, and straightway fell to scribble a story on the subject. He began (and ended) without a plan; but discovered (in his second edition) that he had combined the old supernatural agencies of Scudéry and the rest with the new personages of Tom Jones and real life; and, in other words, had invented Gothic romance. 'The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days,' he declared, 'were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion.' He would make his heroes and heroines natural in all these things, borrowing only from the elder school some of the imagination, invention, and fancy which, in the literal reproduction of life, he thought too much neglected. The blend proved a popular one. To the Castle of Otranto, with its sighing portraits, and

cowled skeletons, and monstrous helmets, followed, a few years later, the Old English Baron of Miss Clara Reeve, who made her marvels slightly more credible, an innovation which Walpole, perhaps not unnaturally, regarded as insipid. After Miss Reeve came the greater Mrs Radcliffe, and the closing century supp'd full with horrors.' Clanging portals, echoing corridors, hollow voices, haunted chambers, moth-eaten manuscripts, and daggers that dripped blood became the order of the day. To make the Gothic compound more heady, the tear of sensibility was freely mingled with the goblet, and the sophisticated draught held the drugged public captive until the secret was explained, generally-and in this Mrs Radcliffe, too, differed from Walpole-by simple and natural causes. A quiet home-keeping lady, who described Switzerland and Italy without visiting those countries, Ann Radcliffe must have possessed considerable powers of imagination, and certainly moves a terror skilfully. The influence of The Italian and The Mysteries of Udolpho is to be traced in Lewis, Maturin, and others, and even in the great Wizard of the North himself. As might be anticipated, Gothic romance did not escape the satirist. It was broadly burlesqued in the Heroine of E. S. Barrett, and, with a finer touch, in the admirable Northanger Abbey of Jane Austen, which, although not published until 1818, had been actually written very soon after the first appearance of The Italian.

The Novel, as the chief gift of the Eighteenth Century to English letters, has, of necessity, occupied exceptional space; and, for its further modification under the pens of Holcroft and Godwin, Henry Mackenzie and Moore, the reader must be referred to the different accounts of those writers. We may now turn to another development of the plainsailing, prosaic spirit, which, through all its permutations, remains the leading characteristic of the epoch. Hitherto History in England had been little but chronicle and compilation, uncritical and unscientific. In the Eighteenth Century, however, there arose three writers who raised it at once to a definite art. The first of these, in point of time, was Hume. For research, as we understand it now, he cared but little. But he gave to his History of England the charm of a sequent narrative and an effortless style which was as pleasant to read as a fairy-tale. After Hume comes Robertson

with histories of Scotland, of Charles V., of America, a writer whose style was almost equal to that of his predecessor, and whose standard of investigation was somewhat higher. But both Hume and Robertson are only pioneers of the greater Gibbon. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its majestic march, its splendid sonority, and its sustained accomplishment, rises far beyond the flight of either, and perhaps even now constitutes the greatest gift of Clio to our literature. Patient inquiry, insight, breadth of view, and minuteness of detail are all united in this twenty years' labour. It was a new thing when it appeared; it is a new thing still: and it is not easy to conceive that a labour so concentrated and so continuous, so sustained and so single-minded, can fail of length of days.

From the history of a people to the history of one person, whether recounted by himself or by another, the transition is easy. That the Eighteenth Century can claim to have originated any particular form of Biography or Autobiography, in the sense that it can claim to have originated the modern Novel or the modern Essay, would be too much to contend. But that, in an age of prose, biographies and memoirs should abound is not surprising; and, from Anne onwards, they were not to seek. There were short biographies such as Goldsmith's Nash and Johnson's Savage,-to say nothing of the admirable Lives of the Poets; there were lengthy biographies such as Hawkesworth's Swift and Hawkins's Johnson; there were respectable and academic performances such as Middleton's Cicero, Carte's Ormonde, Lyttelton's Henry II., and Harte's ill-fated Gustavus Adolphus; there were also personal records as dissimilar as Cibber's Apology and Hume's account of My Own Life. But in the last decade of the century appeared two works, each of which, in its special kind, remains unrivalled. One is Gibbon's Autobiography, as compiled by his friend Lord Sheffield from the different sketches left by the historian, and since (1896) separately published. The version which has been so long familiar will, however, probably retain its charm, in spite of the editing to which it now appears to have been subjected; and what its writer calls 'the review of his moral and literary character,' although incomplete, must survive many memoirs that are professedly finished from headline to imprint. Nothing can be more interesting than Gibbon's account of the cir

Gibbon had planned his Decline and Fall, and it was not until 1788 that the last three of its eight volumes made their appearance. By that time Pope had been dead for more than fourand-forty years. His influence was still felt, and continued to be felt; but it was an influence that was gradually expending itself, while, side by side with it, other influences were gathering strength and volume. Slowly and almost imperceptibly at first, men were beginning to discard the gradus-epithet and the formal phrase, to substitute blank verse for the machine-made heroic couplet, to exercise themselves tentatively in older and long-neglected stanzaic forms, to write Odes and Elegies and Sonnets, and above all to exhibit an enfranchised proclivity towards romantic expression and the imitation of nature. That this was done systematically or all at once is not to be advanced. But that it existed is manifest from the attitude of such of those conservatives in poetry as still clung to the practice and teaching of Pope. In Goldsmith's first book, the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, he is found condemning blank verse as a 'disagreeable instance of pedantry,' and as a measure which nothing but the greatest sublimity of subject can render pleasing.' In the Dedication to the Traveller, he returns to the charge. The art of poetry, he says, is in danger from 'the mistaken efforts of the learned to improve it.' 'What criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse, and Pindaric odes, choruses, anapests, and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence!' Elsewhere he falls foul of the fashion set by Gray's Elegy, which he regarded as 'overloaded with epithet,' and seriously proposed to amend by 'leaving out an idle word in every line;' while of Pope he writes that he 'carried the language to its highest perfection; and those who have attempted still further to improve it, instead of ornament, have only caught finery.' These last lines were written in 1764, and it is clear that, in the opinion of the author of the Traveller, which appeared in the same year, a considerable change had already come over the spirit of English poetry since Pope's death.

The change, in reality, had begun before that date, with the solemn-paced blank verse-then second only to that of Milton-and with the accurate nature-painting of Thomson's Seasons, and his revival in the Castle of Indolence of the Spenserian Stanza. After Thomson comes

Young, who, beginning as a Popesque satirist, proceeded, long after middle age, as the unrhyming author of those sombre and declamatory Night Thoughts which at once reflected and dominated the brooding unrest of the age. To Thomson followed the 'oaten stop' and 'pastoral song' of Collins, whose Persian Eclogues and Odes, with their clear-toned and varied music, brought new harmonies into English metre-harmonies which were farther elaborated by the patient art of Gray's undying Elegy and his wonderful Pindaric Odes. These since the lesser names may be here omitted-were, save for the spasmodic outbreak of post-Popian satire in the hectoring couplets of Churchill's Rosciad, the dominant influences in English poetry until the date of Goldsmith's Traveller, which (like his later Deserted Village) was in the old manner, reflected through a medium more modern than its author imagined. Then, stirring men's minds with portentous cloud-form and shadowy suggestion, came the mysterious utterances of Macpherson's Ossian; to be succeeded by those Reliques of Percy, which opened to English poetry so much of unlessoned art and primitive simplicity; by the medieval forgeries of Chatterton; and by the revelation, in Warton's History, of the neglected riches hidden in the barbaric and half-lit past which lay behind Dryden. All these things, with their searchings and unveilings, were 'prologue to the omen coming on,' and 'harbingers preceding still the fates' of that splendid advent, with the approaching century, of the new-risen spirit of Romance. There were still writers, the Whiteheads and Hayleys and Sewards and Darwins, who clung feebly and ineffectually to the passing classic fashion; but of those who fill worthily the space between the epoch-making Ossian of 1763 and the still more epoch-making Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the greatest names are Cowper and Burns and Crabbe and Blake. The first two belonged to the Eighteenth Century as defined at the outset of this paper; the last two far outlived it. Owing nothing to each other, distinct in gifts and speech, and having only in common their poetical sincerity, it is sufficient to say of them here that Cowper and Crabbe, more or less, but in a manner coloured strongly by an altered environment, preserved the old tradition, while Blake and Burns are too original and individual to be discussed except with that larger treatment which they will hereafter receive in this volume. But those who wish to estimate

the immense distance between 1700 and 1800, measured poetically, will do well to contrast passage of the Essay on Criticism with such a lyric as Robert Burns's 'O, my luve's like a red, red rose,' or the 'Tiger, Tiger burning bright' of William Blake.

Turning to the Drama of the time, it must be confessed that the field is not a rich one, either for crop or diversity of product. When Anne came to the throne, the Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, as Macaulay styles them, were reduced to two. Wycherley had ceased to write for the stage; Congreve's last play, The Way of the World, had been played; and Vanbrugh and Farquhar were the only members of the group who were still in practice as playwrights. For many years to come their successors were only minor artists. Steele, in two or three average comedies, endeavoured honestly to purify the theatre in the sense of the precepts of Jeremy Collier, while Lillo, in George Barnwell and the Fatal Curiosity, seemed to promise a something which was not afterwards performed. Fielding maintained the Congreve tradition in its indecency only; and Cibber, Garrick, Macklin, Murphy, the elder Colman, Hoadly, Foote, and a number of lesser writers, purveyed the acted but now unreadable comedies and farces of the day. The chief novelties in stage composition which the Eighteenth Century contributed to dramatic art were the alreadySmentioned Ballad-opera of Gay and his imitators; and the semi-serious genre, which, based upon the comédie larmoyante of Voltaire and Diderot in France, became, for a brief season, the Sentimental Comedy of England. This latter, which has been not inaptly described as a 'mulish production, with all the defects of its opposite parents, and marked with sterility,' professed to deal with the virtues and distresses of private life rather than with the vices and faults which had hitherto been regarded as the legitimate quarry of the Comic Muse. Cumberland's West Indian and Kelly's False Delicacy are the most successful examples in this short-lived kind. Then, as a protest against the Comedy of Tears, and in avowed imitation of 'the poets of the last age,' Goldsmith endeavoured to lead the public taste once more back to Nature and Humour. He followed up his Good Natur'd Man by his inimitable She Stoops to Conquer, to whose perennial qualities in vis comica, dialogue, plot, and character its stage popularity even to this hour abundantly testifies. His only competitor

is Sheridan, whose three best plays, The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic, by their unflagging wit and brilliancy, reach a point of excellence which has never since been attained.

For nearly forty years after the Guardian of 1713, at which date we interrupted our account of the Essay, no successor of any importance assumed the mantle of Addison and Steele. Imitators there were in plenty; but, with the exception of the Champion of Fielding, more memorable by its author than its matter, none deserves a record until we reach the Rambler and Idler of Johnson. But even the Rambler and Idler, vigorous and weighty as is their writer's style, follow the Queen Anne model 'as a pack horse would do a hunter'-to use Lady Mary's illustration; and the same must be said of the Adventurer of Johnson's disciple, Hawkesworth. In the World and the Connoisseur, where the touch was lighter, and the pens those of wits like Walpole and Chesterfield, the Essay regained a certain buoyancy and verve. But the high-water mark of the midcentury examples in this species of writing is reached by Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, which, in its first form, appeared in the columns of Newbery's Public Ledger. After this, there is nothing which deserves serious record. The mention of the Public Ledger, however, serves to remind us once more of the extraordinary increase which, in spite of prohibitive stamp-duties and other obstacles, had taken place in the periodical press since the first establishment of the Daily Courant in 1702. In 1756 began the London Chronicle, that

folio of four pages, happy work, Which not e'en critics criticise

and for which Johnson wrote the 'Introduction' (at about twopence a line); in 1760 the Public Ledger. In 1772 followed the Morning Post; in 1788, the Times; and these were a few only of the daily papers. Another fruitful feature of Journalism was the Monthly Magazine, which, from the issue by Edward Cave in January 1731 of the first number of the Gentleman's Magazine; or, Monthly Intelligencer, grew and flourished vigorously to the end of the century. Mr Urban's purpose, according to the preface to his first volume, was 'to give Monthly a View of all the Pieces of Wit, Humour, or Intelligence, daily offer'd to the Publick in the News-Papers' (of which he estimates that no less than 200 Half-sheets