was second only to that of the Elizabethan
age. The famous essays of Richard Steele
and Joseph Addison appeared in The Tatler,
The Spectator and The Guardian, periodicals
mostly made up of these and other essays.
The most forcible prose-writer of the age was
Jonathan Swift, whose Tale of a Tub is a satire
against all churchmen outside the Anglican
state-church; while Gulliver's Travels is
an ingenious and humorous satire against
mankind.
Alexander Pope was the chief poet of the day. His Essay on Criticism was written at 21. His Rape of the Lock and his Dunciad are keen and bitter satires. The Essay on Man is full of brilliant sayings, often quoted. Thomson's Seasons showed a heart in love with nature. Gray's Elegy and Ode on Eton College are perfect specimens of finished verse, as are also the Odes of William Collins.
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is the one of his many works that has given him lasting fame. Samuel Richardson's Pamela was the first modern novel. A much greater writer, Henry Fielding, followed him, whose Tom Jones is one of the best of English novels. Then came Sterne with his wonderful humor, exemplified in his Tristram Shandy.
In history Hume and Robertson gave a new character and aim to the treatment of the past; and Hume's History of England and Robertson's History of Scotland and History of Charles V were the first of what might be called modern histories. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire took even higher rank. In philosophy and kindred subjects the great names were Berkeley, Hume, Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) and Joseph Butler (Analogy).
Johnson and Goldsmith are brilliant examples of the miscellaneous writers of their day. Johnson's Lives of the Poets is that one of his works which is most read at present. Some of these essays are classics. Goldsmith's Traveller and Deserted Village are charming poems; She Stoops to Conquer is one of the most successful of English plays; and The Vicar of Wakefield long was a favorite novel wherever English is read.
Cowper's poetry had great influence on later poets. His chief poem is The Task; John Gilpin shows his humor; Lines on the Receipt of My Mother's Picture his tenderness. The poems of Burns have a depth and intensity of passion and sweetness of rhythm that have made them widely popular. Among them are Highland Mary, Tam O'Shanter and The Cottar's Saturday Night.
The fullness of the literature of the 19th century makes it impossible to go into details. A new poetry of imagination and feeling had begun to spring up before the century opened. Coleridge devoted but a small part of his life to poetry, but his Christabel, The Ancient Mariner and Love are gems of English verse. Wordsworth's Excursion is but a fragment of a vast plan. Walter Scott was the poet of the Scotch chivalric legends, which he embodied in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion and The Lady of the Lake. But Scott left poetry for fiction when Byron suddenly became the first poet of the day. Byron, Shelley and Keats were poets of imagination and passion. Campbell and Southey would have had much greater reputations as poets had it not been for the brilliant galaxy that shone around them. Robert Browning and Mrs. Browning have a firm place among English poets, while Tennyson (1809-92) was the greatest poet of the past century and its chief representative of that grand English song which has done much to elevate the national character and refine the human heart.
In 1802 a few brilliant young men started the Edinburgh Review. Other reviews and magazines followed, and for them much of the most brilliant writing of the first half of the century was done by such men as Brougham, Mackintosh, Lockhart, Wilson (“Christopher North”), Macaulay, Carlyle, Lamb and De Quincey.
Beginning with Scott's 30 odd novels, which have entranced the world by their wonderful stories so vividly told, and coming through those of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronté, Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Dinah M. Muloch, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Kingsley, George Macdonald, R. D. Blackmore and George Meredith to those of Wm. Black, Thomas Hardy, J. M. Barrie, Walter Besant, Rudyard Kipling, Hall Caine, S. R. Crockett, Conan Doyle and Mrs. Humphry Ward, the novel has become the largest department of English literature.
In the number of these writers of fiction, naturally the range covered by the novel in our time is an enormous and varied one. There hardly is a domain which is deemed foreign to it, even outside its natural field of adventure, with its pictures of social life and its studies in and portrayal of character. Happily its legitimate function of entertainment in a wearying and engrossing age has not been lost, in spite of the ultrarealistic tendencies of the novel and its degenerating trend in the hands of ambitious but unpleasant and sometimes unwholesome writers. In this prolific department of literature it is gratifying to find the public taste, in the main, quickly nauseated with the pernicious in fiction and reverting, with unfeigned pleasure, to the historical romance in the successors of the gallant school of Scott.
The student of history has in the past half-century had much to entertain as well as instruct him in many solid and enduring contributions. The writers are many who have brought not only high scholarship, industry and great powers of research, but the rare gifts of animated and picturesque style. The master historians include—besides Macaulay, Carlyle, Grote, Milman, Hallam, Merivale,
