that the Tatler printed much of Steele's work as by one of Swift's characters, Isaac Bickerstaff. Many men were talented in the Great Britain of the time of Swift, but he alone was the great genius, the most powerfully original man of his time. Unfortunately, Swift chose always to be a satirist, and hence much that he wrote is not acceptable to the average reader. The greatest of his essays was The Tale of a Tub, a biting satire upon criticism, describing in vitriolic phrases the Goddess of Criticism drawn in a chariot by geese. The Battle of the Books is almost as famous. It is a mock-heroic account of a desperate battle between ancient and modern books. These two essays were published in 1704, though written a few years earlier.

Oliver Goldsmith. An author with a clear and simple style was Oliver Goldsmith, who, after contributing to a number of periodical journals, started one of his own, known as The Bee. In this he published many Essays which were later collected in book form. One of the periodicals produced his Chinese Letters, afterwards published in 1762 as The Citizen of the World. These papers represented what an Oriental saw and thought while visiting England. Goldsmith was an excellent sketcher of character, as well as a mild critic of society. He was not able to make the characters he created act very vigorously; nor did he see in society the corruption which Swift so clearly saw and poured burning maledictions upon, and which Cowper was later so deeply to bemoan. But "Where is now a man who can pen an essay with such ease and elegance as Goldsmith?" asked Dr. Johnson.

Samuel Johnson. The Essays of Montaigne had been translated from the French into English by John Florio as early as 1693, and had been used by both Shakespeare and Bacon. Montaigne's essays had been the reflections of a personal view of himself and of human society, while those of Bacon

had depended for their weight upon impersonal authority. Bacon is full of reference to others for support of his thought, while Montaigne judged all ideas and all moods by his own thought and his own feeling. Most of the essayists of the days of Swift and Steele and Goldsmith were more of the type of Montaigne than of Bacon. But Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his periodicals, the Rambler and the Idler, turned aside from the grace and lightness which he acknowledged to be so good in Goldsmith, to the ponderous and authoritative tone of Bacon. Still, many of his essays are most readable. One on The Advantages of Living in a Garret is very ingenious and very entertaining in thought, even though heavy in style. Johnson's Lives of the Poets is a collection of unequal value, for many of the critical statements in the various lives are false, though many others are the truest ever uttered, and most of them are nobly said.

Dr. Johnson's style is not so bad as it is generally said to be, and it gradually grew less big-worded. He was over-languaged, it is true, but he regretted it, for during his later years he once said of Robertson, the historian, " If his style is bad, that is, too big words and too many of them, I am afraid he caught it of me." Edmund Burke. The richly splendid, sumptuous, majestic writing of Edmund Burke, in both his letters and speeches, really constitutes something very like a series of essays. The speeches, being like essays, were not often listened to attentively, and, by many who were most interested in what he had to say, not listened to at all. Charles James Fox tells how members of the House of Commons would rise and leave the House when Burke came to speak, but the next morning would wear to shreds the printed copies of his speech, so keen were they to grasp the significance of every word he had uttered. Burke, paradoxically, was the world's greatest orator, but a rather poor speaker.

His Inquiry into the Nature of the Sublime and the Beautiful is of great value. It is one of the very earliest studies in æsthetics which is based upon psychological thinking, and it was the germ of nearly all of later speculation upon the principles of art criticism.

Two of Burke's pamphlets, Observations on the Present State of the Nation and Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, show their author to have been the foremost of all the effective political philosophers of that day. His speeches on American Taxation and on Conciliation with the American Colonies, published in 1774, were of more than transitory interest, not to Americans alone, but to Englishmen as well, for many Englishmen, in spite of Dr. Johnson's answer, Taxation no Tyranny, even then believed that the revolt of the American colonies was a battle for English freedom everywhere, and many still believe that without that revolt there would not now be in the world a "great English Republic," the United States, worthy to take large part in the building of man's future. But Burke's three greatest works were published between 1790 and 1797,- Reflections on the Revolution in France, Letter to a Noble Lord, and Letters on a Regicide Peace. To Burke in these papers, there was no dawn of liberty in the French Revolution, but a bloody sunset of the nations sinking into gloomy twilight.

Burke was a man of most rare ability, the greatest prose writer of the end of the century, as Swift had been the greatest of its beginning. Perhaps De Quincey comes as near as any to inheriting a small share of the wondrously balanced and vehement and picturesque style of this master. Yet Burke was a master without a "school," for his genius, unlike Addison's, was greater than his talent, and, as we have already said, it is only the second-rate man who makes a school of writers. Beside him, De Quincey is weak. Burke was the greatest of true