novel. Perhaps it is the greatest, though Walter Pater gives the palm to Thackeray's Henry Esmond.

In Amelia, Fielding's third novel, excellence in woman is what the author sought to depict. Patient and saintly is the woman whom he describes, and the book is full of shadows. Yet it is humorous, too, though with the sort of humor that leads to thought and to an "undersmile" only, rather than to laughter. Fielding wrote other books, but these three are the excellent ones.

He had been a dramatist before he became a novelist. From his dramatic failures he had learned this much : how to combine men and women in circumstances that would reveal their characters, and how to adjust minor crises to one another in the development of a greater and inclusive crisis in their lives. But the novelist had yet to learn that the fatal "average reader" resents episodes or turnings aside from the main current of the story. Even Tom Jones suffers from this, great as the book is in all other respects. Fielding called himself "an historian of human nature."

Tobias Smollett. - The three successful books of Tobias Smollett were The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, and the Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. In the first two there are many good things, in the third some great things. In all three are many amusing things. Roderick Random is the first English novel of the sea, but the American Cooper was yet to teach the English novelists many things in connection with the sea. Throughout all three of the books there are typical sea- and lands-men, most of them caricatures rather than characters, however. A Scotch schoolmaster advertises that he can teach Englishmen how to pronounce correctly the English language! We owe to Smollett the first novel of the sea, the first national types, and many of the mechanical contrivances of horror that later distinguished

Humphrey

the work of the "school of terror in romance. Clinker is the best of the books by this author. It is comic, but it also is philosophic. It has within it few of the things that make many of the pages of Smollett's other books disagreeable to many present-day readers.

Laurence Sterne. Laurence Sterne, a man richly playful in his wit, wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Like Shakespeare, Sterne had a most original faculty for helping himself to anything he could find in others' books that would serve his purposes. It was from the old French and English humorists and from the Queen Anne wits, especially Dean Swift, that many of his witticisms were "lifted," but they were all put to good use and made his own witticisms, for, as Lowell has written," "Tis his at last who says it best." Both Smollett and Sterne, as well as Fielding, were much indebted to Cervantes for their kindly satiric view of life, though Smollett degenerated at times into odious vileness. Sterne's works are formless. But he did not intend in them to tell plot-stories, but only to record the author's views and opinions. He has created immortal characters, of whom Uncle Toby is the chief. He has also written some sentences that might be thought to have come from greater sources. "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," for example, is not from the Bible, but from Laurence Sterne.

The Sentimental Journey zigzagged through much of the revolt of the emotions against the coldly severe moral and intellectual tendencies of the age, as well as through France and Italy. Fortunately, to keep him from being "thought" by some unthinking person to be a mere imitator of Rousseau, Sterne zigzags through a great deal of the highly ludicrous also. Seventeen hundred and sixty-eight was the year of the Senti

mental Journey's publication. Only a few years before this Jean Jacques Rousseau published the book in which he had said, "The Heart is good; listen to it; suffer yourself to be led by Sensibility and you will never stray, or your strayings will be of a creditable sort." This is right enough so far as it goes, but it led Rousseau into sentimental whining, while Sterne never made such doctrine the ground for self-pity. To hoax and to uncover absurdities was his purpose, even when he dwelt upon real distress. Incidentally, it should be said that a chapter or two in this second book of Sterne's cannot be excelled in any comparison with other pages of excellent prose. The school of terror. Of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, William Beckford's History of the Caliph Vathek, Matthew Gregory Lewis's Monk, and Mrs. Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, we need only say here that they were foundation stones for the rather hideous pseudo-supernatural structure known as the "school of terror." The first of these books was printed in 1764 and the last in 1794; the other two, between these dates. These works were early called gothic, in the somewhat distorted sense of grotesque and barbarous. Into this grotesquely barbarous work came elements of the pseudo-supernatural and of the eighteenth-century German handling of the medieval; but it takes a twentieth-century reader's hardest endeavors to induce an attitude of anything else than amusement at what the late years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth century shuddered at as unspeakably terrible.

Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Frances Burney was greatly praised by her contemporaries, including even Doctor Johnson. She was the first of writers to show that in the art of novel writing women have a place established beyond cavil. Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Charlotte

Brontë, George Eliot, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, May Sinclair, it is a renowned list. Frances Burney's best-known novel is Evelina. Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, printed in 1800, is packed with unpremeditated humor. Miss Edgeworth is the creator of the international novel, made so famous to-day by Henry James. Irish character is perfectly delineated in her work. Sir Walter Scott thought her wonderful. She will be mentioned again, for she made straight the way for the almost omniscient and errorless Jane Austen.

V. PHILOSOPHERS AND HISTORIANS

The philosophers in Great Britain during this century were the Earl of Shaftesbury, Bishop Berkeley, Bishop Butler, and David Hume. The historians were William Robertson and Edward Gibbon. Hume was a historian as well as a philosopher. Edmund Burke and Adam Smith might well be called political philosophers.

Philosophy. Shaftesbury's name is always associated with the philosophy of optimism. He had much effect upon Alexander Pope. Shaftesbury reasoned about beauty in the arts, and tried to harmonize the beautiful, the good, and the true. He was less psychological than Burke in reasoning about the beautiful, but his theories still survive in the thinking of those who are interested in the arts. Bishop Berkeley questioned the real existence of matter in quite a Platonic fashion, and has been the inspirer of numberless thinner thinkers in the same fashion. Butler, in his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, attempted to harmonize authority and reason. His book is still used as a

textbook in a college here and there. Henry Drummond in the nineteenth century was stimulated by him to write a very popu

lar book entitled Natural Law in the Spiritual World. David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature limited all our knowledge to the phenomena revealed to us by experience. His book was later published under the title of Concerning the Human Understanding. Burke's political philosophy was revealed in the speeches and letters we have discussed in connection with the essayists of this century.

Adam Smith's greatest work was the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. It has been affirmed that if this book had been written ten years earlier, the American Revolution would not have occurred. In it Smith maintained that labor is the source of wealth, and that the laborer should be given complete freedom to pursue his own interests in his own way. All laws, he claimed, to restrict the freedom of the laborer are stumblingblocks in the path of the increasing wealth of a nation. Adam Smith was the founder of the science of political economy, and also the first strongly and intelligently to set forth the theory of free trade.

History. David Hume's History of Great Britain was written in polished and noble style, and was so interesting that it was read as eagerly as if it were a novel. He was not an accurate historian, but his work is of great value because his philosophical reflections are uttered in such a way as to be easily understood by the general reader. William Robertson wrote a History of the Reign of Charles V. Robertson was most graceful in style, and greatly influenced Carlyle, not in style, but in historical research. But the inimitably great historian was Edward Gibbon. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is not far short of being the most famous historical work ever written. Certainly it is the most eminent of the eighteenth century. Professor Freeman, himself a prominent historian, has said of Gibbon, "He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom