FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

1744-1789.

Pope’s example continued potent for fifty years after his death.  Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry.  Not only Dr. Johnson’s adaptations from Juvenal, London, 1738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, but Gifford’s Baviad, 1791, and Maeviad, 1795, and Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809, were in the verse and manner of Pope.  In Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, 1781, Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets.  But long before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which is variously described as The Return to Nature, or The Rise of the New Romantic School.

For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of towns, the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope.  The sole concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of cockneys, like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a Beggar’s Opera or a Rape of the Lock.  These, at least, were true to their environment, and were natural, just because they were artificial.  But the Seasons of James Thomson, published in installments from 1726-30, had opened a new field.  Their theme was the English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written by a true lover and observer of nature.  Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, published the year of Pope’s death, was written like the Seasons, in blank verse; and although its language had much of the formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably in the new direction.  Thomson had painted the soft beauties of a highly cultivated land lawns, gardens, forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks.  But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and France romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild.  Poets turned from the lameness of modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes.  In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions.  In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the Nibelungen Lied.  Works of a similar tendency in England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747-57, especially Collins’s Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands, and Gray’s Bard, a pindaric, in which the last survivor of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his guild.  Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the ancient Welsh and Norse poetry.  Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765, aroused a taste for old ballads.  Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, 1774-78, Tyrwhitt’s critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace Walpole’s Gothic romance, the Castle of Otranto, 1765, stimulated this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects.  James Beattie’s Minstrel, 1771, described the educating influence of Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet.  But the most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the romantic past were the Poems of Ossian and Thomas Chatterton’s literary forgeries.

In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard, whom tradition placed in the 3d century.  Macpherson said that he made his version including two complete epics, Fingal and Temora, from Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands.  A fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these remains.  Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when, many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that this was nothing but a translation of his own English into modern Gaelic.  Of the MSS. which he professed to have found not a scrap remained:  the Gaelic text was printed from transcriptions in Macpherson’s handwriting or in that of his secretaries.

But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they made a deep impression upon the time.  Napoleon admired them greatly, and Goethe inserted passages from the “Songs of Selma” in his Sorrows of Werther.  Macpherson composed or translated them in an abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the prophecies of Isaiah.  They filled the minds of their readers with images of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain torrent, the mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the windy heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal.

“A tale of the times of old!”

“Why, thou wanderer unseen!  Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why, thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear?  I hear no distant roar of streams!  No sound of the harp from the rock!  Come, thou huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard.  I look forward to Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where Fingal descends from Ocean, from the roar of winds.  Few are the heroes of Morven in a land unknown.”

Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand in 1770, at the age of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the history of literature.  His father had been sexton of the ancient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy’s sensitive imagination took the stamp of his surroundings.  He taught himself to read from a black-letter Bible.  He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry.  When only eleven years old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th century.  Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff’s.  The Rowley poems included two tragedies, Aella and Goddwyn, two cantos of a long poem on the Battle of Hastings, and a number of ballads and minor pieces.  Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English, or even of Chaucer.  His method of working was as follows:  He made himself a manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey’s and Kersey’s English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and substituted here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern equivalents.  Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace Walpole, to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the forgery, his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at once pronounced them spurious.  Nevertheless there was a controversy over Rowley, hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry.  Chatterton’s poems are of little value in themselves, but they are the record of an industry and imitative quickness, marvelous in a mere child, and they show how, with the instinct of genius, he threw himself into the main literary current of his time.  Discarding the couplet of Pope, the poets now went back for models to the Elisabethan writers.  Thomas Warton published, in 1753, his Observations on the Faerie Queene.  Beattie’s Minstrel, Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, William Shenstone’s Schoolmistress, and John Dyer’s Fleece, were all written in the Spenserian stanza.  Shenstone gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by imitating Spenser’s archaisms, and Thomson reproduced in many passages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery of the Faerie Queene.  The Fleece was a poem on English wool-growing, after the fashion of Vergil’s Georgics.  The subject was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is impossible to make poetry out of serges and druggets.  Dyer’s Grongar Hill, which mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, was composed in the octosyllabic verse of Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.  Milton’s minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray.  Collins’s Ode to Simplicity was written in the stanza of Milton’s Nativity, and his exquisite unrimed Ode to Evening was a study in versification, after Milton’s translation of Horace’s Ode to Pyrrha, in the original meters.  Shakspere began to to be studied more reverently:  numerous critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure text to the stage.  Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakspere, and one of his sweetest poems, the Dirge in Cymbeline, was inspired by the tragedy of Cymbeline.  The verse of Gray, Collins, and the Warton brothers, abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical, and not at all dramatic.  The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than Passion.  A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton’s Il Penseroso, pervades their poetry.  Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the finest quality.  His famous Elegy, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the Rape of the Lock is of the first.  The romanticists were quietists, and their scenery is characteristic.  They loved solitude and evening, the twilight vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves.  Their style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the stilted poetic diction of their classical forerunners.  Personification and periphrasis were their favorite mannerisms:  Collins’s Odes were largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy, and Simplicity.  A poet in their dialect was always a “bard;” a countryman was “the untutored swain,” and a woman was a “nymph” or “the fair,” just as in Dryden and Pope.  Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, and afraid to speak simply.  He uses too many Latin epithets, like amusive and precipitant, and calls a fish-line

  “The floating line snatched from the hoary steed.”

They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic diction.  Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary.  It lacks emotional force, except now and then in Gray’s immortal Elegy, in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, in Collins’s lines, On the Death of Thomson, and his little ode beginning, “How sleep the brave?”

The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and practice.  Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, an elaborate review of Pope’s writings seriatim, doing him certainly full justice, but ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton.  “Wit and satire,” wrote Warton, “are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal. . . .  He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse.  Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled.  Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical authors in verse.”  Warton illustrated his critical positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer.  He testified that the Seasons had “been very instrumental in diffusing a general taste for the beauties of nature and landscape.”  It was symptomatic of the change in literary taste that the natural or English school of landscape gardening now began to displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped hedges, regular parterres, etc., and that Gothic architecture came into repute.  Horace Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle, at Strawberry Hill, he made a collection of ancient armor, illuminated MSS., and bric-a-brac of all kinds.  Gray had been Walpole’s traveling companion in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and separated, but were afterward reconciled.  From Walpole’s private printing-press, at Strawberry Hill, Gray’s two “sister odes,” the Bard and the Progress of Poesy, were first printed, in 1757.  Both Gray and Walpole were good correspondents, and their printed letters are among the most delightful literature of the kind.

The central figure among the English men of letters of that generation was Samuel Johnson (1709-84), whose memory has been preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell’s famous Life of Johnson, published in 1791.  Boswell was a Scotch laird and advocate, who first met Johnson in London, when the latter was fifty-four years old.  Boswell was not a very wise or witty person, but he reverenced the worth and intellect which shone through his subject’s uncouth exterior.  He followed him about, note-book in hand, bore all his snubbings patiently, and made the best biography ever written.  It is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant to write his life, he should prevent it by taking Boswell’s.  And yet Johnson’s own writings and this biography of him have changed places in relative importance so completely, that Carlyle predicted that the former would soon be reduced to notes on the latter; and Macaulay said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion.

Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters, so common among the English.  He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a book-seller’s hack.  Gradually his great learning and abilities, his ready social wit and powers as a talker, caused his company to be sought at the tables of those whom he called “the great.”  He was a clubbable man, and he drew about him at the tavern a group of the most distinguished intellects of the time, Edmund Burke, the orator and statesman, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, and David Garrick, the great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson’s school, near Lichfield.  Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last century.  His oddities, virtues, and prejudices were thoroughly English.  He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, and had a cockneyish attachment to London.  He was a high Tory, and an orthodox churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he asserted a sturdy independence against any lord in particular.  He was deeply religious, but had an abiding fear of death.  He was burly in person, and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with snuff.  He was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a voracious and untidy feeder.  An inherited scrofula, which often took the form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of control over the muscles of his face.  Boswell describes how his features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in his chair when getting ready to speak.  He records his minutest traits, such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his superstitious way of touching all the posts between his house and the Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by chance.  Though bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when talking “for victory,” Johnson had a large and tender heart.  He loved his ugly, old wife twenty-one years his senior and he had his house full of unfortunates a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute widow, a negro servant whom he supported for many years, and bore with all their ill-humors patiently.

Among Johnson’s numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance are, perhaps, his Dictionary of the English Language, 1755; his moral tale, Rasselas, 1759; the introduction to his Edition of Shakspere, 1765; and his Lives of the Poets, 1781.  Johnson wrote a sonorous, cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses.  Here is a sentence, for example, from his Visit to the Hebrides:  “We were now treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion.  To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavored, and would be foolish, if it were possible.”  The difference between his colloquial style and his book style is well illustrated in the instance cited by Macaulay.  Speaking of Villier’s Rehearsal, Johnson said, “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet;” then paused and added translating English into Johnsonese “it has not vitality sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction.”  There is more of this in Johnson’s Rambler and Idler papers than in his latest work, the Lives of the Poets.  In this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with decided limitations.  His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope.  He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, and Dyer.  He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic poetry, and he had a comical indifference to the “beauties of nature.”  When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had, at least, some “noble, wild prospects,” the doctor replied that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London.

The English novel of real life had its origin at this time.  Books like De Foe’s Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Journal of the Plague, etc., were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels.  The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot.  The first English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with his Pamela, the story of a young servant girl, who resisted the seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue, became his wife. Clarissa Harlowe, 1748, was the tragical history of a high spirited young lady, who being driven from home by her family, because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her, fell into the toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake.  After struggling heroically against every form of artifice and violence, she was at last drugged and ruined.  She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa.  Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson’s portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig.  All of these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson’s subjective cast of mind.  He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated touches. Clarissa Harlowe is his masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine’s virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly mad.  In Richardson’s novels appears, for the first time, that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature. Pamela was translated into French and German, and fell in with that current of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise, 1759, and Goethe’s Leiden des Jungen Werther, which set all the world a-weeping in 1774.

Coleridge said that to pass from Richardson’s books to those of Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves.  Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men.  The latter’s first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela.  The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela’s by her master.  This reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, had the book gone on simply as a burlesque.  But the exuberance of Fielding’s genius led him beyond his original design.  This hero, leaving Lady Booby’s service, goes traveling with good Parson Adams, and is soon engaged in a series of comical and rather boisterous adventures.

Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life with a bold, free hand.  He was a gentleman by birth, and had made acquaintance with society and the town in 1727, when he was a handsome, stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appetite for pleasure.  He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the stage; married, and spent his wife’s fortune, living for awhile in much splendor as a country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced condition as a rural justice with a salary of 500 pounds of “the dirtiest money on earth.”  Fielding’s masterpiece was Tom Jones, 1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels.  Its hero is very much after Fielding’s own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted, forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness.  The same type of character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in Amelia, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding’s wife.  With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness, hypocrisy, and cowardice.  Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of Fielding’s most admirable creations.  For the regulated morality of Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted instinct.  His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and his ideal of character is manliness.  In Jonathan Wild the hero is a highwayman.  This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and is one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of Fielding’s writings.

Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference.  He was a Scotch ship-surgeon and had spent some time in the West Indies.  He introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire.  Both Fielding and Smollett were of the hearty British “beef-and-beer” school; their novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded; low life, physical life, runs riot through their pages tavern brawls, the breaking of pâtes, and the off-hand courtship of country wenches.  Smollett’s books, such as Roderick Random, 1748, Peregrine Pickle, 1751, and Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1752, were more purely stories of broadly comic adventure than Fielding’s.  The latter’s view of life was by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature.  “The generous wine of Fielding,” says Taine, “in Smollett’s hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop.”  A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770.  The influence of Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage, who finished his Adventures of Gil Blas in 1735, are very perceptible in Smollett.

A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, 1759-67, and the Sentimental Journey, 1768. Tristram Shandy is hardly a novel:  the story merely serves to hold together a number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, conceived with rare subtlety and originality.  Sterne’s chosen province was the whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais.  His books are full of digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings, mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. Coleridge and Carlyle unite in pronouncing him a great humorist.  Thackeray says that he was only a great jester.  Humor is the laughter of the heart, and Sterne’s pathos is closely interwoven with his humor.  He was the foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith’s, for example.  Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue.  A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting.  He enjoyed the titilation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the window, and saying, “There is room enough in the world for thee and me.”  It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even from such trivial occasions.  He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little.  Less coarse than Fielding, he is far more corrupt.  Fielding goes bluntly to the point; Sterne lingers among the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it.  Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages seduce.  He is full of good sayings, both tender and witty.  It was Sterne, for example, who wrote, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”

A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best, novels of domestic and rural life.  The book, like its author, was thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies.  Very improbable things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic.  But its characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and purity, and with touches of a most loving humor.  Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith’s father, a poor clergyman of the English Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country parson in Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, 1770, who was “passing rich on forty pounds a year.”  This poem, though written in the fashionable couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. Johnson so that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists did, perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins to recall English poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country life.

Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few other plays, the stage had now utterly declined.  The novel, which is dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and to represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely, than the theater could do.  In the novelists of the 18th century, the life of the people, as distinguished from “society” or the upper classes, began to invade literature.

Richardson was distinctly a bourgeois writer, and his contemporaries Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith ranged over a wide variety of ranks and conditions.  This is one thing which distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century from that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all previous centuries.  Among the authors of this generation whose writings belonged to other departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned, in passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published from 1776-88, and Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary quality.  The romantic poets had addressed the imagination rather than the heart.  It was reserved for two men a contrast to one another in almost every respect to bring once more into British song a strong individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of speech.  These were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns (1759-96).  Cowper spoke out of his own life experience, his agony, his love, his worship and despair; and straightway the varnish that had glittered over all our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away.  Cowper had scribbled verses when he was a young law student at the Middle Temple in London, and he had contributed to the Olney Hymns, published in 1779 by his friend and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but he only began to write poetry in earnest when he was nearly fifty years old.  In 1782, the date of his first volume, he said, in a letter to a friend, that he had read but one English poet during the past twenty years.  Perhaps, therefore, of all English poets of equal culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books and the most to the need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings.  Cowper had a most unhappy life.  As a child, he was shy, sensitive, and sickly, and suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whither he was sent after his mother’s death.  This happened when he was six years old; and in his affecting lines written On Receipt of My Mother’s Picture, he speaks of himself as a

  “Wretch even then, life’s journey just begun.”

In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum, where he spent a year.  Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a broken man and remained for the rest of his life an invalid, unfitted for any active occupation.  His disease took the form of religious melancholy.  He had two recurrences of madness, and both times made attempts upon his life.  At Huntingdon, and afterward at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness did all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his wounded spirit.  His two poems To Mary Unwin, together with the lines on his mother’s picture, were almost the first examples of deep and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century.  Cowper found relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered round of quiet household occupations.  He corresponded indefatigably, took long walks through the neighborhood, read, sang, and conversed with Mrs. Unwin and his friend, Lady Austin; and amused himself with carpentry, gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which gentle animals he grew very fond.  All these simple tastes, in which he found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in his best poem, The Task, 1785.  Cowper is the poet of the family affections, of domestic life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the fireside, the tea-table, the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house, and the rabbit-coop.  He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a barometer, a piece of needle-work.  But Cowper was an out-door as well as an in-door man.  The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills.  Nevertheless Cowper’s natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson’s. The Task reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France and which issued in the French Revolution.  In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator; of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher; of John and Charles Wesley, and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English Church.  John Newton, the curate of Olney and the keeper of Cowper’s conscience, was one of the leaders of the Evangelicals; and Cowper’s first volume of Table Talk and other poems, 1782, written under Newton’s inspiration, was a series of sermons in verse, somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting, dancing, and theaters.  “God made the country and man made the town,” he wrote.  He was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the invalid and the recluse.  Byron called him a “coddled poet.”  And, indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him.  He lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine delicacy.  But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he retained a charming playful humor displayed in his excellent comic ballad, John Gilpin; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him,

  “How when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed
  He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted.”

At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose, called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns.  Cowper read the book through twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect, pronounced it a “very extraordinary production.”  This momentary flash, as of an electric spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief British poets of their generation, but of two literatures.  Scotch poets, like Thomson and Beattie, had written in Southern English, and, as Carlyle said, in vacuo, that is, with nothing specially national in their work.  Burns’s sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his country a hearing beyond the border.  He had, to be sure, a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him, and his immediate models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but these remained provincial, while Burns became universal.

He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of “bonny Doon,” in a clay biggin not far from “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk,” the scene of the witch dance in Tam O’Shanter.  His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with poverty.  The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was lightened by love and homely pleasures.  In the Cotter’s Saturday Night, Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents’ household, the rest that came at the week’s end, and the family worship about the “wee bit ingle, blinkin’ bonnily.”  Robert was handsome, wild, and witty.  He was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his last, were of “the lasses.”  His head had been stuffed, in boyhood, with “tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights,” etc., told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman who lived in the family.  His ear was full of ancient Scottish tunes, and as soon as he fell in love he began to make poetry as naturally as a bird sings.  He composed his verses while following the plow or working in the stack-yard; or, at evening, balancing on two legs of his chair and watching the light of a peat fire play over the reeky walls of the cottage.  Burns’s love songs are in many keys, ranging from strains of the most pure and exalted passion, like Ae Fond Kiss and To Mary in Heaven, to such loose ditties as When Januar’ Winds and Green Grow the Rashes O.

Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Mauchline, where he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father’s death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern.  There, among the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers’ sons, shepherds from the uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he would discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the singing and ranting, while

  “Bousin o’er the nappy,
  And gettin’ fou and unco happy.”

To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs, John Barleycorn and Willie Brewed a Peck o’ Maut, but the headlong fun of Tam O’Shanter, and the visions, grotesquely terrible, of Death and Dr. Hornbook, and the dramatic humor of the Jolly Beggars.  Cowper had celebrated “the cup which cheers but not inebriates.”  Burns sang the praises of Scotch Drink.  Cowper was a stranger to Burns’s high animal spirits, and his robust enjoyment of life.  He had affections, but no passions.  At Mauchline, Burns, whose irregularities did not escape the censure of the kirk, became involved, through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton, in the controversy between the Old Light and New Light clergy.  His Holy Fair, Holy Tulzie, Two Herds, Holy Willie’s Prayer, and Address to the Unco Gude, are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy.  But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language, and the violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from his Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish, and Prayer in Prospect of Death.

His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for Jamaica, when the favor with which his volume of poems was received, stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh.  There the peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether favorable to Burns’s best interests.  For when society finally turned the cold shoulder on him, he had to go back to farming again, carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect.  He leased a farm in Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as exciseman for his district.  But poverty, disappointment, irregular habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an untimely death at the age of thirty-seven.  He continued, however, to pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force.  “The man sank,” said Coleridge, “but the poet was bright to the last.”

Burns is the best of British song-writers.  His songs are singable; they are not merely lyrical poems.  They were meant to be sung, and they are sung.  They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous, popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line.  Such are, for example, Auld Lang Syne, My Heart’s in the Highlands, and Landlady, Count the Lawin.  Burns had a great, warm heart.  His sins were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues.  His elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of nature.  His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines To a Mountain Daisy, To a Mouse, and The Auld Farmer’s New Year’s Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie.  Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song.  Of his national anthem, Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, Carlyle said:  “So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode.”

Burns’s politics were a singular mixture of sentimental toryism with practical democracy.  A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been “out” in ’45 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland.  To this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as Over the Water to Charlie.  But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in the Twa Dogs, the First Epistle to Davie, and A Man’s a Man for a’ that.  His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise.  The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.