II. THE ESSAYISTS.

It is as difficult to separate the Essayists, Steele and Addison, in our thoughts, as the elder pair of literary twins, Beaumout and Fletcher. Their names are indissolubly linked together by their joint labours in the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian; and yet no two men differed more widely in character. Addison was an orderly, studious, silent and bashful Englishman; Steele a disorderly, jovial, laughing and rollicking Irishman. Some 400 letters of Steele are extant, and most of them, addressed to his wife-his dear Prue-are dated from a sponging-house, or temporary debtors' prison. Steele had a passion for the drama, and wrote a good many comedies, but they possess no great merit: the best of them is the Conscious Lovers. His principal strength lay in his imagination. It was he who invented the Spectator Club, with the characters of Mr. Spectator, the short-faced gentleman; Will Wimble; Will Honeycomb; and, above all, the admirable Sir Roger de Coverley; though all these portraits vastly gained by the finishing touches of Addison. The finest essays in the first seven volumes of the Spectator are from Addison's pen; and the eighth volume is entirely his own, with the exception of a very few papers by Tickell, Budgell, and one or two minor contributors. Steele's essays, though in general more varied, chatty and amusing than those signed by Addison, do not possess the profundity, the pathos, nor the quiet humour of his friend and collaborator.

Addison's reputation as an essayist is so great as to throw his merits as a poet into the shade; and yet it was his poetry that first cleared for him the way to wealth and honour. His Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax, in 1701, and the Campaign, written to celebrate the victory of Blenheim, were the first fruits of his poetical genius; but it is in his sacred poetry that he truly challenges our admiration. Burns tells us how he was affected in his youth by the poem: 'How are thy servants blest, O Lord!' and Thackeray says that the verses beginning with: The spacious firmament on high,' shine like the stars.

Like Steele, Addison composed some theatrical pieces, but with the exception of Cato, they attracted little attention. Following the then prevalent French taste, Addison strictly adhered, in this tragedy, to the unities of time and place, even at the expense of probability. The scene is constantly the great hall of Cato's castle

at Utica, and here the conspirators meet to hatch a plot against Cato; here his daughter, Marcia, is seized and carried off, and a host of other impossibilities take place, as the keen-eyed John Dennis did not neglect to point out. The piece has always been a greater favourite in France than in England; but still it contains many passages that have elicited universal admiration. Thus, in Act V, scene 1, we find Cato, at the rising of the curtain, poring over Plato on the immortality of the soul, and after weighing and accepting the arguments of the philosopher in favour of a future life, he continues:

The soul, secure in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, the 'great Cham of literature,' as he is called by Smollett, the author of the poems, London and the Vanity of human Wishes, the compiler of the first Rasselas and the Lives of the Poets, is great English dictionary, the writer of likewise an essayist. His principal essays are to be found in the Rambler (17501752) and in the less popular Idler (1758). Both these periodical works are in the style of the Spectator, and combine criticism with moral essays, tales and allegories. His style is pompous but imposing; his diction is too Latinized, but it cannot be denied a certain sonorous grandeur. Among his most interesting essays, apologues and tales we may mention his critical examination of Samson Agonistes; his observations on the versification of Milton; the history of Alamoulin, the son of Nouradin; and his charming Greenland tale of Anningait and Ajut. His Dictionary was a colossal labour for can no longer be regarded as a philological any one man to undertake, and although it by him from the English classical writers authority, the passages laboriously gleaned to illustrate the varying meaning of many words make it still a very valuable work. Johnson was no mean poet. Pope read his London with admiration, and remarked: 'The author, whoever he is, will not be long concealed.' In the Vanity of human Wishes the lines with which he closes his sketch of Charles XII. of Sweden are concise and striking:

His fall was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
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He left the name, at which the world grew pale,

To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

Very different from the learned diction of Dr. Johnson is the plain but powerful Saxon style of the great satirist, Jonathan Swift. Of essays, in the strict sense of the word, he wrote but few, but his political pamphlets are numerous and powerful. His language is such as every one can understand, for he was too much in earnest to indulge in fine writing. He always goes straight to the point, and he strikes with the demolishing force of a giant. One of his earliest productions is the Battle of the Books. His patron, Sir William Temple, a great stickler for the superiority of the ancients over the moderns, had unfortunately mistaken a spurious production, called the Letters of Phalaris for an ancient Greek classic, and finding himself worsted in a discussion with the eminent Greek scholar, Richard Bentley, obtained the assistance of Swift, to make his principal antagonists, Bentley and Wotton, ridiculous, and thus furnish himself an excuse for withdrawing from a contest which had ceased to be serious. The Battle of the Books is a mere pasquinade, and though very diverting at the time of its publication, has no great interest for the nineteenth century reader. The same observation applies to most of Swift's political pamphlets. Of Gulliver, we shall have something to say under the head of Novelists. To the same category as the Battle of Books belongs the Tale of a Tub, in which the three brothers, Peter, Martin, and John respectively represent the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the Presbyterian Church. Peter lords it for a long time over the other two; till at last they are constrained to leave him, and then John begins to exhibit the strangest eccentricities. Martin is throughout the most sensible and rational of the three. Though the language is often coarse, the sarcastic humour is highly provocative of laughter. The object of the book was, at once to ridicule the pretensions of the Church of Rome, and to discredit the dissenters.

'Cousin Swift,' said Dryden one day to his kinsman, after reading some of his verses, you will never be a poet.' Nor can we really call Swift a poet, though no man had a greater facility in finding rhymes. His poems, however, such as they are, possess ease, gaiety and smoothness, and served the purposes well for which they were written.

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Perhaps his most amusing verses those in which he anticipates how his friends will receive the news of his death. After mentioning Pope, Bolingbroke and others, he comes to his female friends, whom he supposes seated at the inevitable cardtable:

My female friends, whose tender hearts
Have better learned to act their parts,
Receive the news in doleful dumps:
"The dean is dead (pray, what is trumps?)
Then, Lord have mercy on his soul!
(Ladies, I'll venture for the vole.)
Six deans, they say, must bear the pall
(I wish I knew what king to call.)
Madam, your husband will attend
The funeral of so good a friend:
No, madam, 'tis a shocking sight,
And he's engaged to-morrow night:
My Lady Club would take it ill,
If he should fail her at quadrille.
He loved the dean-(I lead a heart)
But dearest friends, they say, must part.
His time was come; he ran his race;
We hope he's in a better place.

Swift, says one of his editors, has never been known to take a single thought from any writer, ancient or modern. Though this is not literally true, as Johnson observes, perhaps no writer can easily be found that has borrowed so little.

III. THE GREAT NOVELISTS.

Daniel Defoe (1661-1731) is usually regarded at the founder of the English novel, though his works of fiction are not novels in the restricted modern sense of the word. He first made himself known as a political writer in the time of James II. and William III., and exposed himself to persecution by his advocacy of dissenting principles. In 1702 he was three times put in the pillory, and threatened with the loss of his ears, but this cruel sentence was not executed, so that Pope, who did not love dissenters, was wrong when he wrote:

Earless on high stood unabash'd Defoe. Of his many works of fiction the two principal are: the well-known Robinson Crusoe, and the Great Plague in London. Defoe possesses beyond any other writer the power of investing all his incidents with such an air of reality that we hardly persuade ourselves they are fictitious. Robinson Crusoe has been translated into the language of every civilized nation, and probably no book has ever been such a favourite with youthful readers. The

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Henry Fielding (1707-1754), on returning from Leyden, where he had gone to study the law, wrote a few farces, the best of which was the mock tragedy Tom Thumb, but they were without exception hasty compositions, merely written to procure money, and are at present almost forgotten. Fielding, though at this time very poor, was of an excellent family, but his father, General Fielding, was himself too extravagant to relieve the wants of his son. In 1741 Richardson published his famous novel of Pamela, in which a young servantgirl, endowed with every possible virtue, is rewarded, after undergoing many trials and temptations, with the hand of her master. Fielding undertook to ridicule the sunday-school style of Richardson by giving Pamela a brother called Joseph, who, like his namesake in the Bible, likewise emerges triumphantly from temptation. This was the origin of Joseph Andrews, which was published in 1742. Richardson deals only with conventional characters, but those of Fielding are chosen from real life. The titular hero and his sweetheart Fanny are natural and pleasing personages, but the character of the odd, spirited and kindhearted Parson Adams is quite enough to make the novel popular. In the Life of Jonathan Wild, the exploits of a thief and scoundrel are recounted and satirically praised as being worthy of some of the financiers and statesmen of Fielding's times. But his masterpiece is Tom Jones, with the admirable portraits of the benevolent Squire Allworthy, the rough, swearing, harddrinking Squire Western, the gentle and beautiful, but dignified Sophia, the amusing philosopher Square and his pompous antagonist Thwackum, the hypocritical Blifil, and the impulsive, heedless, impressionable, but right-hearted Tom Jones. In Amelia, the hero, Captain Booth, is little better than a married rake, but in his wife he has a good angel, who comes to his relief in every difficulty and danger. Fielding drew the character of Amelia from his own wife, whom he tenderly loved, and even gave his heroine a peculiarly shaped scar on the nose, that the portrait might be instantly recognised. It has been objected, that Fielding occasionally uses. coarse language, but he has often to portray coarse individuals, and he never presents his heroes to us as models for imitation. One indisputable service he has rendered his countrymen by directing public attention to the harshness and injustice of many legislative enactments, and particularly to the cruelty and absurdity of imprisoning

debtors for life. The man who reads Fielding merely to pass an idle hour, and without finding instruction in his pages, in spite of his alleged coarseness, must be a man incapable of reflexion. His leading maxim is, that no man can afford to defy public opinion, and that we must both be good, and appear to be good. Byron calls him 'the prose Homer of human nature.'

Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768), the humorist, has left us two principal works, Tristram Shandy, and his unfinished Sentimental Journey. The first is a sort of

autobiographical novel, but it comprehends a great number of digressions, sketches and episodes, and the writer seldom keeps long to his story at a time. In Tristram Shandy, the principal personages are, the father of Tristram, Mr. Walter Shandy, a fretful, eccentric philosopher, Uncle Toby, a retired officer, who had served under Marlborough, Corporal Trim, his servant, Dr. Slop, and the Widow Wadman. It is very probable, that the character of Walter Shandy was suggested by the Cornelius Scriblerus of Dr. Arbuth not, the humorous author of the History of John Bull, and it has been discovered that Sterne also borrowed largely from the old work, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Some of the episodes in Tristram Shandy are pathetic, like the Story of Le Fever; others humorous, like the long-nosed Stranger of Strasburg. The Sentimental Journey is almost as unconnected and discursive as Tristram Shandy, but what reader would eliminate the beautiful episodes of Maria, the Starling, and the dead Ass?

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) is a most amusing writer, of the school of Fielding, but he wants Fielding's depth. It is true he aims at nothing higher than to amuse, and so far his success leaves nothing to be desired. In 1748 his career as a novelist began with the publication of Roderick Random, which was at first attributed to Fielding himself. Roderick is a sort of Scotch Gil Blas, who sets out for London accompanied by his friend Strap, just as Gil Blas takes the way to Madrid, with the young barber Diego. Peregrine Pickle, his second work, is, like the first, a series of loosely connected comic adventures, the earlier of which are extremely droll and laughable, but towards the end the book becomes tedious. It was, besides, to say the least, a great mistake in Smollett to admit the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality (most probably by another hand) into work which was already only too long.

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