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-eminent for the genius that adorned and the abominations 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 deemed to 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 capacity; but since the circumstances of no previous

period of human history have been altogether so calculated to awaken, inspirit, and perfect every species of intellectual energy, it is no arrogant assumption in favor of the living, no disparagement of the merits of the dead, to assert the manifest superiority of the former in developed powers-powers of the rarest and most elevated kind in poetry.

CHAPTER IV.

BRITISH NOVELS AND ROMANCES.

IN what are properly called novels, fictitious narratives of common life, the period between Pope and Cowper was more prolific than any preceding one. Indeed, the genuine novel was yet a novelty, which originated, or, rather, was introduced in the merry reign of Charles II., but never had been carried to its height of humor and reality till Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson, each in his peculiar and unrivaled way, displayed its utmost capabilities of painting men and manners as they are.

These were followed by "numbers without number," and without name, that peopled the shelves of the circulating libraries with the motley progeny of their brain.

"The Waverley Novels," by Sir Walter Scott, are undoubtedly the most extraordinary works of the age; but exceedingly faulty in one literary point of view. The author, in his best performances, has blended fact and fiction, both in incidents and characters, so frequently, and made his pictures at once so natural to the life, yet often so contrary to historical verity, that henceforward it will be difficult to distinguish the imaginary from the real with regard to one or the other; thus the credulity of ages to come will be abused in the estimate of men, and the identity of events by the glowing illusion of his pages, in which the details are so minute and exquisite, that the truth of painting will win the author credit for truth of eve