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PART V I.

MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE.

LAbridged from Montgomery's Lectures.]

CHAPTER I.

ENGLISH LITerature unDER THE TUDORS AND THE FIRST STUARTS.

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FROM the reign of Elizabeth to the protectorate of Cromwell, inclusively, there rose in phalanx, and continued in succession, minds of all orders and hands for all work, in poetry, philosophy, history, and theology, which have bequeathed to us such treasures of what may be called genuine English Literature, that whatever may be the changes of taste, the revolutions of style, and the fashions in popular reading, these will be the sterling standards.

The standard of our tongue having been fixed at an era when it was rich in native idioms, full of pristine vigor, and pliable almost as sound articulate can be to sense-and that standard having been fixed in poetry, the most permanent and perfect of all forms of literature, as well as in the version of the Scriptures, which are necessarily the most popular species of reading— no very considerable changes can be effected.

Contemporary with Milton, though his junior, and belonging to a subsequent era of literature, of which he became the great luminary and master-spirit, was Dryden. His prose (not less admirable than his verse), in its structure and cadence, in compass of expression, and general freedom from cumbersome pomp, pedantic restraint, and vicious quaintness, which more or less characterized his predecessors, became the favorite model in that species of composition, which was happily followed and highly improved by Addison, Johnson, and other periodical writers of the last century. These, to whom must be added the triumvirate of British historians, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, who

exemplified, in their very dissimilar styles, the triple contrast and harmony of simplicity, elegance, and splendor-these illustrious names in prose are so many pledges that the language in which they immortalized their thoughts is itself immortalized by being made the vehicle of these, and can never become barbarian like Chaucer's uncouth, rugged, incongruous medley of sounds, which are as remote from the strength, volubility, and precision of those employed by his polished successors, as the imperfect lispings of infancy before it has learned to pronounce half the alphabet, and imitates the letters which it cannot pronounce with those which it can, are to the clear, and round, and eloquent intonations of youth, when the voice and the ear are perfectly formed and attuned to each other.-(For a more full account of Dr. Johnson, we may refer you to chap. vii., sec. v.)

CHAPTER II.

FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE REIGN OF GEORGE THE THIRD.

FROM the Restoration, in 1660, to the time when Cowper had risen into full fame in 1790, may be dated the second grand era of modern English Literature, reckoning from Elizabeth to the close of Cromwell's protectorate, already mentioned, as the first.

The early part of this period (the reigns of Charles II. and James II.) was distinguished for works of wit and profligacy; the drama, in particular, was pre-emi. nent for the genius that adorned and the abomina tions that disgraced its scenes. The middle portion of the same period, from the Revolution of 1688 to the close of the reign of George II., was rather the age of reason than of passion, of fine fancy than of adventurous imagination in the belles lettres generally. Pope, as the follower of Dryden in verse, excelled him as much in grace and harmony of numbers as he might be deeme fall below him in raci

ness and pithy originality. It is to be remarked, also, that, while Pope gave the tone, character, and fashion to the verse of his day, as decidedly as Addison had given to the prose, yet, of all his imitators, not one has maintained the rank of even a second-rate author; the greatest names among his contemporaries, Thomson and Young, being those who differed most from him in manner, subject, and taste, especially in those of their works which promise to last as long as his own.'

Between Pope and Cowper, we have the names of Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, and Churchill. Of these, the two former have nothing in common with Pope; but they produced too little, and were too great mannerists themselves to be the fathers, in either line, of a school of mannerists; it is only when mannerism is connected with genius of the proudest order or the most prolific species that it becomes extensively infectious among minor minds. As for Goldsmith and Churchill, whatever they appear to have owed to Pope, they are remembered and admired for what they possessed independent of him.

Nothing in the English language can be more perfect than the terseness, elegance, and condensation of Pope's sentiments, diction, and rhyme.

CHAPTER III.

ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT AGE

WITH the exceptions already named, there was not a poet between Pope and Cowper who had power to command popular applause in any enviable degree.

Cowper's first volume, partly from the grave character of the longer pieces, and the purposely rugged, rambling, slip-shod versification, was long neglected, till The Task, the noblest effort of his muse, composed under the inspiration of cheerfulness, hope, and love, unbosoming the whole soul of his affections, intelligence, and piety, at once made our countrymen feel that neither the genius of poesy had fled from

Britain, nor had the heart of it died in the breasts of its inhabitants. The Task was the first long poem, from the close of Churchill's brilliant, but evanescent career, that awoke wonder, sympathy, and delight by its own ineffable excellence among the reading people of England.

From Cowper may be deduced the commencement of the third great era of modern English literature, since it was in no small measure to the inspiration of his Task that England is indebted, if not for the existence, yet certainly for the character of the new school of poetry, established first at Bristol, and afterward transferred to the Lakes, as scenery more congenial and undisturbed for the exercise of contemplative genius. Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth started almost contemporaneously in the same path to fame. These authors hazarded a new style, in which simplicity, homeliness, common names, every-day objects, and ordinary events were made the themes and the ornaments of poetry. They set forth rural sights and lights-the loves and graces of domestic life-the comforts of our own fireside the flowery array of meadows--the sparkling vivacity of rivulets, kind intercourse with neighbors, the generous ardor of patriotism, and the gentler emotions of benevolence. But these subjects were, ere long, exhausted, and they gave place to higher, more heroic, and magnificent scenes. Southey, by his marvelous excursions in the regions both of history and of romance-Coleridge, by his wild fictions of a class entirely his own, in which there is an indescribable witchery of phrase and conceit that affects the imagination as if one had eaten of "the insane root that takes the reason prisoner;" and Wordsworth, by his mysticism, his Platonic love of the supreme good and the supreme beauty, which he seeks every where, and finds wherever he seeks, in the dancing of daffodils, the splendor of the setting sun, the note of a cuckoo flitting like a spirit from hill to hill, which neither the eye nor ear can follow, and in the everlasting silence of the universe to the man born deaf and dumb-these were

the three pioneers, if not the absolute founders of the existing style of English literature; which has become so diversified, artificial, and exquisite; so gorgeously embellished and adapted to every taste, as well as so abundant in its resources by importations from the wealth of every other land, that it may challenge similitude to the grand metropolis of the empire, where the brain of a stranger is bewildered amid the infinite forms of human beings, human dwellings, human pursuits, human enjoyments, and human sufferings; perpetual motion, perpetual excitement, perpetual novelty; city manners, city edifices, city luxuries; all these being not less strikingly characteristic of the literature of this age, than the fairy land of adventure and the landscape gardening of " Capability Brown" were characteristic of the two periods from Spenser to Milton, and from Dryden to Cowper.

The literature of our time is commensurate with the universality of education; nor is it less various than universal to meet capacities of all sizes, minds of all acquirements, and tastes of every degree. Public taste, pampered with delicacies even to loathing, and stimulated to stupidity with excessive excitement, is at once ravenous and mawkish; gratified with nothing but novelty, nor with novelty itself for more than an hour. To meet this diseased appetite, in prose not less than in verse, a factitious kind of the marvelous has been invented, consisting, not in the exhibition of supernatural incidents or heroes, but in such distortion, high coloring, and exaggeration of natural incidents and ordinary personages by the artifices of style and the audacity of sentiment employed upon them, as shall produce that sensation of wonder in which halfinstructed minds delight. This preposterous effort at display may be traced through every walk of polite literature, and in every channel of publication.

Never was there a time when so great a number of men of extraordinary genius flourished together in Great Britain. As many have existed, and perhaps there may be always an equal quantity of latent caDacity; but since the circumstances of no previous

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