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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
"fit to carry twenty-six men," a vessel quite unlaunchable, with the
practicable coracle, the most "home-made" of things in "Treasure
Island". We compare the trial trips of the two crafts (Robinson's
second boat); we see that R. L. Stevenson has produced the less
impossible narrative of the twain, and that both rejoice the heart.
The mass, and the variety, of what must be called the "pot-boilers"
of De Foe are unequalled. In better conditions of authorship he
would have been a rich man, but he died poor, in distress, and under
a cloud, in 1731.
A history of literature is not necessarily a history of philosophical,
metaphysical, and theological speculation. In such speculation the
age was rich that saw the volcanic eruption of sects and heresies
during the religious frenzy of the Civil War, and also beheld the
reaction from all "enthusiasm" to the passion for common sense and
for science as "organized common sense" which came in with the
Restoration. Hobbes's works did not encourage religious
"enthusiasm," or mysticism, or belief in the ineffable spiritual
experiences of devout men, from John Bunyan with his visions, to
Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), an Anglican divine, with his
Neoplatonic hints at Union with the Absolute ("True Intellectual
System of the Universe," "Eternal and Immutable Morality"). The
learned and the unlearned wrote books on either side, sceptical or in
favour of belief.
The Royal Society impartially included Joseph Glanvill (16361680)
with his "Vanity of Dogmatising," and his "Sadducismus
Triumphatus," the pioneer of Psychical Research, with its tales of
Poltergeists, wraiths, and levitations, some of them fairly well
authenticated. The Royal Society also gave a place to the far more
famous philosopher of liberal common sense philosophy, John Locke
(1632-1704). Locke's first eighteen years were passed under the
shadow of the Great Rebellion, and at Christ Church, Oxford, under
a Head who was an Independent divine. He did not like the new
freedom, in which he found the old slavery, but after the Restoration
he found liberty for discussion, in which "enthusiasm" was not
permitted to enter. His attitude towards mental philosophy was not
unlike that of Bacon. He disliked Aristotelianism as then held at
Oxford, thinking that words usurped the place of facts, and in his
"Essay on the Human Understanding" he employed that plain style
which the Royal Society enjoined. The work was written at intervals
during seventeen years, disturbed when as a friend of Shaftesbury,
Dryden's Achitophel, the turbulent patron of Titus Oates, he was
sent into exile. The burden of the essay, which appeared in 1690, is
opposition to the theory of "innate ideas"—the terms need defining
—and insistence that we derive our ideas from the presentations of
our senses. "Average common sense was always kept in his view,"
and "he wrote for the most part in the language of the market-
place". He wanted man to think as a human being very limited in his
faculties, "to distinguish between what is, and what is not
comprehensible by us," and his treatise had the most potent and
enduring effects on continental as well as on English Philosophy. He
was a friend of his junior, Berkeley, whose philosophic fancy took a
wider and more audacious range. His "Treatise on Government" and
"Thoughts on Education" followed rapidly. He obtained a place as
Commissioner of Trade and Plantations (Colonies), and advised
England to anticipate Scotland in founding an emporium at Darien,
in Spanish territory, as the Scots were to discover.
We have not space for much more than the names of other prose
writers of this great age. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), a Scot in
London, was an admirable humorist, a great physician, and the
friend of all the wits; himself a good-humoured Swift in prose satire.
Bishop Atterbury (1662-1732) excited an enthusiastic devotion in
Pope, who proposed to accompany this clerical conspirator into exile,
after his great Jacobite plot was crushed in 1723. Atterbury was an
accomplished general writer, while the great scholar and Master of
Trinity, Richard Bentley (1662-1742), gave to his classical criticism of
the forged "Epistles of Phalaris" the merit of vigorous literature. His
conjectural various readings in Milton's text are now and then
comical, and seem a parody of classical criticism. The Viscount
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678-1751), was a wit among
politicians, the patron, friend, and inspiration of the wits; he had his
fame as an eloquent rhetorician in his life, and as a daring thinker,
but he really wrote best when he wrote simply and humorously, as in
his satire of his Jacobite allies, "The Epistle to Windham" (1716). His
"Ideal of a Patriot King" also preserves his literary reputation (1738).
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was an
elegant philosopher, a thinker of taste; while George Berkeley,
Bishop of Cloyne (born at Kilkenny 1685, died 1753), was an
idealistic philosopher and man of science ("The Theory of Vision")
whose style, in grace and irony, is akin to the manners of Plato and
of Pascal. The best and most delightful of his works is the dialogue
"Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher," directed against the Sceptics,
and deistical writers. Berkeley's character was not less admirable
than his works.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

GEORGIAN POETRY.

I.

Edward Young.
"Is it to the credit or discredit of Young, as a poet, that of his 'Night
Thoughts' the French are particularly fond?" So asks Croft, the
sardonic author of a notice on Young in Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the
Poets". The preference is certainly not to the credit of the French!
Born in Hampshire in 1683, the son of a clergyman, Young lived till
1765: writing much verse, and more prodigal of praises to "the
Great" than any other poet of any age.
Young's father, in 1703, appears to have been poor, for the son, to
save expense, was hospitably entertained in the lodges of the
Warden of New College and the President of Corpus. A Fellowship
was found for him at All Souls', and as he was chosen to make and
speak the Latin oration at the founding of the fine Codrington
Library, it may be supposed that, at All Souls', he was held to be
more than mediocriter doctus (the qualifications for a Fellow were
said to be "well born, well dressed, moderately learned").
Young's earlier poems, and his dedications always, seem bids for
patronage and preferment. In his "Last Day" (1710),
An archangel eminently bright
From off his silver staff of wondrous height
Unfurls the Christian flag, which waving flies
And shuts and opens more than half the skies.
Angels are asked, on the annihilation of the universe, to say where
Britannia is now?
All, all is lost, no monument, no sign,
Where once so proudly blazed the great machine.
In the Dedication, which Young later suppressed, nothing was left
but Queen Anne, whom the poet distinctly saw floating upwards,
and leaving the fixed stars behind her. The clever but eccentric and
unfortunate Jacobite Duke of Wharton was a patron of Young, and
the defender of Atterbury. The Duke died, under arms for the exiled
James III, or Chevalier de St. George, at Lerida; he was then
composing a tragedy on Mary, Queen of Scots. Young suppressed, in
later years, the dedication to Wharton of his successful tragedy, "The
Revenge" (1721).
In 1725-1726 Young published his Satires, "The Universal Passion".
They read like a poor imitation of Pope's satires, but in point of time
they precede the "Dunciad".
Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train,
Nor hears that Virtue, which he loves, complain?
Pope was not slumbering, he was counting every groan of Virtue, to
whom he was so devoted, and was about to lash Vice with the best
of them. The Universal Passion which Young flogs, is the Love of
Fame. Every one is the fool of Fame except this earl or that, at
whom Young dedicates his strings of epigrams which remind us of
Pope, with a difference. Sloane and Ashmole are derided for their
Museums. Young even dedicated a satire to Sir Robert Walpole; he
must smile, "or the Nine inspire in vain". He also adulated the Duke
of Newcastle in 1745, when
a pope-bred princeling crawled ashore,
meaning,
The Prince who did in Moidart land
With seven men at his right hand,
And all to conquer kingdoms three.
Oh, he's the lad to wanton me!
as a poet of the opposite party exclaimed. The inglorious Duke is
Holles! immortal in far more than fame!
In 1727 Young became a clergyman, at the ripe age of 44. His
"Night Thoughts" in blank verse, are of 1741-1742, in Nine Nights
My song the midnight raven has outwinged,
and the midnight owl was outshrieked.
From short (as usual) and disturbed repose
I wake, how happy they who wake no more!
Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.
We remember
In that sleep of death what dreams may come!
A few lines are in the common stock of quotations such as,
An undevout astronomer is mad.
There are good passages, here and there, but long sermons in a
kind of blank verse which "does not overstimulate" are not immortal.
"Young has the trick of joining the turgid with the familiar... but with
all his faults he was a man of genius and a poet." He was not, as
people, misled by the existence of one William Young, foolishly
supposed, the original of Fielding's Parson Adams in "Joseph
Andrews", But Young may be the original of Robert Montgomery,
who added to the piety of Young the ebullitions of an unprecedented
genius for nonsense.

James Thomson.
Romance secured a firm footing in English literature, after the
artificialities of the eighteenth century had sunk into dotage, through
the genius of a Borderer, Sir Walter Scott. But another Borderer, long
before, had seen glimmerings and had heard strains of the fairy
world and the fairy songs. This was James Thomson, son of the
parish minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire. The father was presently
translated to Southdean, in the Cheviots, and on the old line of
Scottish marches: by that way they rode, as Froissart shows, to
Otterbourne fight. Thomson's father died while trying to lay a ghost
in a house near Southdean, when the son was at the University of
Edinburgh. The haunted house was demolished. Thomson studied
divinity, but abandoned the prospective pulpit for poetry, and went
to London to seek his fortune in 1725. He lost his letters of
introduction, and he needed a pair of shoes; his only resource was
the manuscript of his "Winter," in "The Seasons". A dedication
brought to Thomson twenty guineas: the piece was praised by Aaron
Hill and Malloch (or Mallet, Malloch is a Macgregor name); the poem
was liked; "Spring" and "Summer" followed, and Thomson dallied
over "Autumn" till 1730.
In 1730 he Had been successful with the moral tragedy of
"Sophonisba": though in opposition to the Court party, Thomson had
obtained several noble patrons, and they did their best for his
drama. A long poem on Liberty was not a triumph: but the Prince of
Wales gave the author a pension of £100 yearly. His tragedy of
"Tancred and Sigismunda" was popular (1745), and a patent place
brought to the poet £300 a year, which he did not long enjoy, dying
on 27 August, 1748. Thomson was notoriously indolent, and his last,
perhaps his best, work is "The Castle of Indolence" in the Spenserian
stanza.
"The Seasons" are in blank verse, a welcome change from the
eternal rhyming couplets, and prove that Thomson, unlike his
contemporaries, wrote "with his eye on the object". He had been
bred in "the wide places of the shepherds," among the lonely Border
moors and hills; he had not always been a man of towns. In the
sunless winter day
scarce
The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht
To shake the sounding marsh; or from the shore
The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.
This was a new voice. Being a Borderer, Thomson was an angler,
and describes fly-fishing well, though not better than Gay.
In that old theme of the Middle Ages "the symphony of spring," the
songs of birds, he shows knowledge of their ways, and if he makes
the hen nightingale the singer, so does Homer, following the myth.
In "Summer," Thomson describes, with wonderful tact, sultry climes
in which he never breathed, and adds the little idyll of Musidora.
"Autumn" includes a picture of fox-hunting, a sport which James
probably did not indulge in, and celebrates the Argyll of Malplaquet
and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, and the water of Tweed,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed.
Despite his power of rendering nature, the artificiality of his age is
still strong with Thomson, and it cannot be said that "The Seasons"
are very attractive to modern readers.
"The Castle of Indolence," by virtue of the poet's return to the
measure of an author in his day despised, Spenser, yields a welcome
change from the eternal rhymed couplets.
A pleasant land of drowsyhead it was.
like the land of the Lotus-eaters in Tennyson. The stanza beginning
And when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles,
Set far amid the melancholy main
is the voice of reviving poetry, and is immortal. Nobody has the
slightest sympathy with
The Knight of arts and industry,
And his achievements fair;
That by his castle's overthrow
Secur'd and crowned were.
The castle is a very good castle, it is good to be there, where no
cocks disturb the dawn, no dogs murder sleep, "no babes, no wives,
no hammers" make a din,
 But soft-embodied Fays through airy portals stream.

William Collins.
"The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance, were
always desired by Collins, but not always attained," says Dr.
Johnson. After half a century of tame poets, we are happy to meet
with one who did not cultivate the trim parterre, and who sometimes
did attain to being "exquisitely wild".
Collins was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721, was
educated at Winchester, and at Oxford was a "demy," or scholar of
Magdalen, like Addison. About 1744 he came to London with many
literary projects in his mind, and very little money in his pockets.
Johnson met him, while "immured by a bailiff". Collins cleared his
debt with money advanced by a confiding bookseller on the credit of
a contemplated translation of Aristotle's "Poetics," with a
commentary. A legacy of £2000 from an uncle, Colonel Martin, was
"a sum which Collins could scarcely think exhaustible, and which he
did not live to exhaust". His mind weakened: he died in 1759: sane,
but incapable of composition. His Odes (1746-1747) are the firm
base of his renown: the little volume is extremely scarce; Collins is
said to have burned, in disappointment, the greater part of the
edition.
Of his "Persian Eclogues" (1742) Collins said that they were his "Irish
Eclogues," being inadequately Oriental in local colour. The brief
"Ode" (1746) "How Sleep the Brave" (of Fontenoy and Culloden) in
ten lines has the magic of an elder day, and of all time. The "Ode to
Evening," where the poet sees
hamlets brown and dim discovered spires
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil,
has escaped from the manner of the eighteenth century, and
preludes to Keats.
There are fine free passages in "The Ode to the Passions," and the
"Dirge in Cymbeline" is not unworthy of its place. The "Ode on the
Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," was long lost, and did not
receive the poet's final touches. He obtained his knowledge of the
Second Sight from John Home, author of "Douglas," who was a
Hanoverian volunteer in the Forty-five, and inspired in Collins an
unfulfilled desire to visit Tay and Teviotdale and Yarrow. The
conventions of his age sometimes disfigure Collins's poems, but his
face was set towards the City of Romance. Tastes still vary as to the
relative merit of Collins and Gray: Matthew Arnold being the
advocate of Gray; Swinburne of Collins. There is no way of settling
such disputes; each writer, at his best, was truly a poet; neither, at
his best, is staled or dimmed by time; both were almost portentous
exceptions, when really inspired, to the conventional rules of their
age in England.

Thomas Gray.
Nature occasionally brings into the world pairs of men destined to be
distinguished in literature, and, without their own consent, to be
pitted against each other as rivals. We have Scott and Byron,
Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and Collins and
Gray. Gray was the elder, born in 1716 (Collins was born in 1721). If
Collins's father was a hatter, Gray's mother was a bonnet-maker, if
milliners make bonnets. Collins went to Oxford, after being at
Winchester; Gray, before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge, was at
Eton. Both poets wrote little: the health of Collins broke down; Gray,
from his boyhood, was of a gentle morbid melancholy, and had
humour enough to laugh at himself. Collins was neglected; Gray
died, later, at the age of 54, beyond competition or dispute the
foremost of English poets at the moment. Both men had their faces
set to the North as the home of old poetry and poetic beliefs. Collins
wrote his Ode on Highland Superstitions; Gray was delighted (at
first) by Macpherson's "Ossian," he translated ancient Norse poems,
visited Scotland, and appreciated the Highlands, and the lakes that
Wordsworth was to make famous. Both men were scholars: Collins
meant to translate Aristotle's "Poetics"; Gray meant to write a history
of English Poetry. Both broke away from the tyranny of the rhymed
heroic couplet; both especially cultivated the Ode.
There is no doubt as to which of the two is and always has been the
more popular. Eton has made Gray her own. The great General
Wolfe, before falling in the arms of Victory at Quebec, recited the
"Elegy in a Country Churchyard" to one of his officers, saying, "I
would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating
the French to-morrow".
It is not easy to criticize Gray, because so many of his lines are
household words, and have been familiar to us from childhood. It
may perhaps be said that Gray never attains to the magical effect of
Collins's "How Sleep the Brave," and of the "Ode to Evening". But
there are cadences in "The Elegy," and sentiments noble, pure,
pious, and modest in his poems which lend to them an unspeakable
charm, while the ideas are such as come home to men's bosoms. It
is true that his habit of personifying abstract ideas is an unfortunate
survival of the weary allegorical company of the "Romance of the
Rose," and no more than Collins does he escape from the
mannerisms of his age. But like Collins, and indeed like his friend
Horace Walpole, he was passing towards the kingdom of Romance.
At Eton he acquired Walpole's friendship; and if, after leaving
Cambridge, he and Walpole quarrelled in Italy, Walpole confessed
that he was to blame, made the first steps to reconciliation, and
cherished, admired, and at last regretted Gray with all the ardour of
a heart devoted and constant in friendship.
For the rest, Gray's life was passed quietly, and in a melancholy way,
at Cambridge, which he reckoned a bear garden, and a home of
Indolence; and, with his mother and aunt at Stoke Pogis, where he
wrote the Elegy. His poems distilled very slowly from his genius: the
Eton Ode appeared, and was unnoticed, in 1747. In the same year
were written, to Horace Walpole, the rather hard-hearted lines on
Walpole's handsome cat,
 'Twas on a lofty vase's side.
The Eton Ode was composed, with a beautiful sonnet
commemorating a private sorrow, in 1742:—
In vain to me the smiling mornings shine.
Earlier in the same year the "Ode to Spring," marked "to be sent to
Fav,"—to West, his friend commemorated in the sonnet,—had been
written, "not knowing he was then dead". Again, in October, 1742,
another death prompted "The Elegy," which lay unfinished for about
eight years. Grief had shaken Gray out of causeless melancholy, and
1742 was his great poetic year. In 1750 he wrote the light and bright
"Long Story," on an unexpected visit from some poet-hunting ladies.
In 1753, Walpole had Gray's "Six Poems" published, in twenty-one
pages, with illustrations by Bentley. In 1754 he began the "Pindaric
Odes," of which "The Progress of Poesy" is the noblest, and displays
most of
the pride and ample pinion
That the Theban eagle bear
Sailing with supreme dominion
Thro' the azure deep of air.
To compose "The Bard" (the Welsh Bard) took two years and a half,
and neither the style nor the ideas of the Odes were thought
pleasing, or comprehensible, by the public and Dr. Johnson. In his
demure way the little poet was a rebel, and Dr. Johnson knew it.
Gray never practised the adulation of "the great" that was
customary; he asked for no places, he refused the Laureateship.
Late in life a sinecure Professorship at Cambridge was given to him.
The professor never lectured: not to lecture was the convention, and
against this happy convention Gray did not rebel. He studied, made
notes, learned Norse, translated, visited haunted Glamis, with the
chamber where Malcolm II was murdered, visited the Lakes, wrote
the most delightful letters, and died at 54 in 1771, the year of the
birth of Sir Walter Scott, the year of Burns's twelfth birthday.
Gray had genius—not a great, but a new genius, and had many
accomplishments. His satires were surprisingly sharp and fierce. He
had the light French touch of the day in verses of society. There is
something of the noble pensiveness and mysteriously appealing
music of Virgil in his best poems: if he be "a second-rate poet" (an
unkind way of saying that he is not a Shakespeare or Homer), he
shares with first-rate poets the power of moving all readers; he is
not the poet of a set of refined amateurs. He who moved and
soothed the heart of James Wolfe in the crisis of his fortunes, and
who has charmed every generation of the English race since Wolfe
and Montcalm gloriously fell, has done more than enough for fame.

The Wartons.
Gray's taste for ancient Scandinavian poetry, itself a symptom of the
tendency to study all poetry, however old, exotic, and unconscious of
the rules of the eighteenth century, was not a new thing. We are apt
to think of Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, as an example of mere
gentlemanly and conventional ideas, though happy in the gift of a
pure and sometimes exquisite style in prose. But Temple in his essay
"Of Heroic Virtue" shows that he was capable of taking sincere
pleasure in old Norse poetry, though he knew it only through the
Latin translations "by Olaus Wormius in his 'Literatura Runica' (who
has very much deserved from the commonwealth of learning, and is
very well worth reading by any that love poetry); and to consider the
several stamps of that coin, according to several ages and climates".
Temple speaks of "The Death Song" of Ragnar Lodbrog as a
"sonnet" and applauds "An Ode of Scallogrim" (Skalagrim); but his
remarks, "I am deceived if in this sonnet and ode there be not a vein
truly poetical, and in its kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance of
the different climates, fashions, opinions, and languages of such
different countries," though well meant, show a curious idea of the
nature of the sonnet.
Here we have, before the end of the seventeenth century, the
essence of historical comparative criticism of literature; and
admiration for a kind of poetry as remote as possible from the
standards of the eighteenth century. Temple handed on the torch to
the elder Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford in his day,
who himself translated from the Latin, as "a Runic ode," two stanzas
of the Death Song of Regnar Lodbrog.[1]
One of Warton's sons, Thomas (born 1728), was Professor of Poetry,
at Oxford (1757-1767), and, from 1774 onwards (he died in 1790),
published a History of English Poetry, which may be unsystematic,
but is both interesting and erudite. Warton had to read the earlier
and later mediaeval poets, French and English, in the manuscripts,
and he quoted profusely from sources then scarcely known. "Partly
through the store of new matter that is provided for 'the reading
public,' partly through the zest and enthusiasm of its students—the
spirit of adventure which is the same in Warton as in Scott"—his
book "did more than any theory to correct the narrow culture, the
starved elegance, of the preceding age". The elder brother of
Thomas, Joseph Warton, born 1722, was a schoolfellow of Collins,
and published "Odes" in the same year as he (1746). In his preface
he boldly said that "the fashion of moralizing in verse has been
carried too far," and "he looks upon invention and imagination to be
the chief faculties of a poet". He preached what Collins practised; he
wrote good criticism in Dr. Johnson's paper, "The Adventurer"; in his
essay on Pope he tried "to impress on the reader that a clear head
and acute understanding are not sufficient alone to make a Poet,"
"that it is a creative and glowing imagination... and that alone, that
can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon
character...." These were to be the watchwords of the Romantic
movement, into which Warton, dying in 1800, did not live to enter.

John Dyer.
Of John Dyer we know from his most famous poem, "Grongar Hill,"
that, on a certain occasion, he
 Sate upon a flowery bed
With my hand beneath my head.
If he had lain upon a flowery bed the posture would have been more
poetical. In blank verse, deserting Grongar Hill, he found
Lo, the resistless theme, imperial Rome.
His "Ruins of Rome" are less impressive than Spenser's sonnets
translated from Du Bellay. His "Fleece," an instructive epic of the
wool trade, though praised by the illustrious Akenside, proved no
golden fleece to its publisher. The prose summaries are pleasing.
"Disputes between France and England on the coast of Coromandel,
censured".
Dyer, at his best, is less successful than Thomson. He was born in
1700, son of an eminent solicitor of Carmarthen, was educated at
Westminster, attempted the painter's art, visited Italy, took holy
orders, published "The Fleece," in 1757, and died in 1758.
Briefer notes must suffice for the Rev. Mr. Blair of Athelstaneford
(1699-1746) who wrote "The Grave," later recommended to
amateurs by Blake's illustrations; and Matthew Green, who wrote
"The Spleen" (1696-1737), a somewhat lively subsatirical effort.

William Shenstone.
Shenstone was one of the many poets who owe their reputation to
their luck in being contemporaries of their biographer, Dr. Johnson.
No Johnson could keep records of all the versifiers of the nineteenth
century who have occasionally written good things. William
Shenstone was born in November, 1714, at the Leasowes, in
Halesowen. His life was much devoted to landscape gardening; and
his harmless taste made him a noted character in his day. "He
learned to read of an old dame," and pleasantly described her, or
some other old dame, in "The School Mistress," an agreeable idyll in
the Spenserian measure.
In 1732 Shenstone went to Johnson's college, his "nest of singing
birds," Pembroke, in Oxford. He took no degree, he rhymed, printed
his rhymes, and "The School Mistress" appeared in 1742.
Thenceforth he landscape-gardened, being so little of an angler that
he was indignant, says Johnson, when asked if there were any trout
in his purely ornamental water. His expenses in gardening brought
the haunting forms of bailiffs into his groves, but Johnson informs us
gravely that "his life was unstained by any crime". He died in
February, 1763. Several of his innocent poems, such as
I have found out a gift for my fair,
I have found where the wood pigeons breed,
are still familiar to many memories: they are from the "Pastoral
Ballad". He perceived the demerits of the rhyming heroic couplet (as
it was then written), as "apt to render the expression either scanty
or constrained," and preferred the verse of four lines with alternate
rhymes. Thus, on the death of Pope
Now sadly lorn, from Twit'nam's widow'd bow'r
The drooping muses take their casual way,
And where they stop a flood of tears they pour,
And where they weep, no more the fields are gay.
Of such matter are Shenstone's Elegies composed: his ballad on
Jemmy Dawson, a martyr of the Jacobite cause, was celebrated and
popular; poor Jemmy's lady-love died of grief and horror at his
execution.

[1] Posthumously published in 1748. See Mr. W. P. Ker's "Warton

Lecture on English Poetry," "Proceedings of the British Academy,"
Vol. IV.

CHAPTER XXIX.

GEORGIAN POETRY.
 II.

Thomas Chatterton.
The name of Thomas Chatterton, the youngest and most short-lived
of English poets, is curiously connected with that of Horace Walpole.
Born, at Bristol, on 20 November, 1752, under the shadow of the
beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Chatterton from infancy
became, as it were, possessed by the charm of the edifice and of the
Middle Ages. Members of Chatterton's family had for more than a
century been associated with the church as sextons; probably they
had never given a thought to its beauty and historical associations,
but these haunted their descendant, and the story of his childhood
reads like a fantasy by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Among the clergy and
people of Bristol the spirit of the eighteenth century, indeed the
natural, usual contempt for things old, beautiful, and not
understood, was complacently active. The chests which contained
the archives of the church had been broken into by the Vestry, and
quantities of old parchment documents, some of them illuminated,
had been thrown about. Chatterton's father (died 1752), a
schoolmaster, had taken as much of the stuff as he chose, and
manuscripts in the house of the boy's mother were used for
domestic purposes. The little boy, till the age of 6, had been
curiously lethargic (and far from truthful); the sight of the
illuminated parchments awakened his intellect; he stored all that he
could find in a den of his own, and became a voracious reader. In
1760 he was sent to Colston's Hospital, a school resembling Christ's
Hospital in London. He was soon, at the age of 10, a versifier, his
Muse was first the sacred, then the satiric; but already, by the age of
11, he had made for himself, as some children do, a society of
"invisible playmates," notably "T. Rowlie, a secular priest," of the age
of Henry VI and Edward IV, and already he was writing, in a kind of
old English made up out of glossaries, poems which he passed off as
Rowlie's, found by himself in the derelict archives of the church.
In short, Chatterton might have seemed to be a victim of "split
personality," and to be now Rowlie, and a number of other
secondary selves, now the actual Chatterton, apprentice to an
attorney. His conduct was almost as abnormal as his genius was
precocious, and his passion for fame or notoriety was not quite sane.
But, in fact, he knew very well what he was about, and, in
December, 1768, attempted to dispose of "Rowley's ancient poems,"
including "The Tragedy of Aella," to Dodsley, the publisher. The
success of Percy's ballads from the Old Folio (1765) may have
suggested his scheme to the boy, but Dodsley was not tempted.
Horace Walpole had published the first edition of "The Castle of
Otranto" at the end of 1764. He used the conventional device
(already familiar to the Greek romancers in the third century a.d.) of
pretending to have found the tale in an ancient manuscript.
Chatterton had proclaimed his discoveries in manuscripts in the
summer of 1764, when he was 12 years old; in Horace Walpole he
recognized, in 1769, a kindred spirit, and offered to show Walpole
not only poems by Rowlie, but a history of English painters by the
same learned divine. Walpole replied very courteously and gratefully,
but "I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon
language". In a reply Chatterton explained his circumstances; his
youth and position; and Gray had assured Walpole that the
manuscripts sent were forgeries. Walpole therefore advised
Chatterton to adhere to his profession, adding that experts were not
convinced of the genuineness of the papers. He took no notice of
several letters from Chatterton, and, after receiving a curt and angry
note (24 July, 1769), sent back the manuscripts without further
comment, and thought no more of the matter till he heard from
Goldsmith, at a dinner of the Royal Academy, that Chatterton had
committed suicide in London. After an attempt to support himself by
hackwork, political and other, the poor boy, whose pride could not
stoop to soliciting charity, had poisoned himself on the night of 24
August, 1770. Six weeks earlier he had been buying and sending
presents of porcelain, fans, and snuff, to his mother and sister;
twelve days before his death he had written that he intended to go
abroad as a surgeon's mate.
Even when he wrote in ordinary English, Chatterton showed rare
precocity. When he wrote in "Rowleian," in an invented dialect as
remote from real English of any day as the language of the planet
Mars, evolved by Mlle. Hélène Smith, is remote from French,
Chatterton often produced lyrics of great charm as in "The Tragedy
of Aella," and he invented a curious form of the Spenserian stanza.
His touches in descriptions of Nature are sometimes charming. But
he never quite escapes, as is natural, from the conventions of the
eighteenth century; and his best inspiration is derived from Percy's
"Reliques". What he might have been and might have done, in
happier circumstances, it is impossible to conjecture. Genius he had,
with more than the wonted abnormality of genius.

William Cowper.
The overlapping of styles in poetry and of tastes in poetry is
pleasantly illustrated in the case of Cowper. He was born in 1731,
Scott was born in 1771, and in Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility"
we find the sensible Marianne Dashwood hesitating between the
rival charms of Cowper and Scott; Byron, it appears, had not yet
reached her fair hands. Cowper is a bridge between Thomson and
Wordsworth. He was averse to the Popeian couplet; in his translation
of Homer he preferred a blank verse which, at best, is not rapid. In
writing of Nature he "had his eye on the object". His exit from the
triumphant common sense of the eighteenth century was by way of
spiritual religion, the Evangelical Revival promoted by Wesley,
Whitefield, and their followers. They made appeal to the souls, not
to the passions, of the populace; and Cowper's own sympathy with
their bodies, with their poverty, like his love of retirement, and of
newspapers, makes him akin to Wordsworth.
Born of the powerful Whig family of Cowper, the poet was the son of
the rector of Great Berkhampstead; his mother, whom he lost when
he was 6 years of age, yet ever remembered daily with intense
affection, was of the name and lineage of Donne. He was cruelly
bullied in childhood at a preparatory school. The innate savagery of
boys of fifteen sometimes wreaks itself on a single small child, and
we might think that his sufferings had their share in depressing the
spirits of Cowper, did he not tell us that, at his public school,
Westminster, he was eminent in cricket, which Horace Walpole and
Gray despised at Eton. His master, "Vinny" Bourne, a Latin poet, was
dear to him; he made many clever and lively friends, and, despite
his attack on public schools in "Tirocinium" (1784), he seems to have
been reasonably happy at Westminster, though he learned no more
in one way than to write "lady's Greek without the accents
"Tirocinium" is a vigorous satire in Pope's metre. But Cowper, despite
the vices and brutalities of school life, confesses his affection for the
old place. The clergy at large come under Cowper's birch,
The parson knows enough who knows a Duke!
Behold your Bishop I well he plays his part,
Christian in name and infidel in heart.
In denouncing emulation for prizes, Cowper hit a blot that seems to
have vanished, for anything like ungenerous emulation of this kind
appears to be a lost vice. No boy studies
Less for improvement than to tickle spite.
Macaulay's victims, Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey, were at
school with Cowper. He went to no University, but was articled to a
solicitor; and idly "giggled and made giggle" with his cousins,
Theodora and Harriet. He was in love with Theodora, but was
disappointed, Harriet (Lady Hesketh) was one of his best friends. At
the age of 32 (1763) hypochondria or hysteria shattered' his life; in a
private asylum he was suddenly converted, and recovered, and
religion was henceforth, now his joy and happiness, now, when the
black cloud came over him, the cause of his despair. At Huntingdon,
and later, at the uninviting village of Olney, he lived retired, the
friend of Mrs. Unwin ("My Mary") and of a clerical ex-slave-trader,
the Rev. John Newton. With Newton, Cowper wrote hymns, the
ladies encouraged him to occupy himself with moral poems, "Table
Talk," "Truth," "The Progress of Error," "Retirement," "Charity,"
"Hope," all in the metre of Pope; and all more or less satirical. Kings,
in "Table Talk," are the first to suffer: one of the speakers in the
dialogue is rather revolutionary. Indeed the mild tea-drinking
Cowper, with his denunciations of "the great," the clergy, and the
unthinking squires, preludes to the French Revolution, which he took
very calmly. After politics comes talk of poetry: and the well-known
lines on Pope occur; he
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.
Of poets in his own age Cowper prefers the reckless satirist,
Churchill; of Gray and Collins nothing is said. In "The Progress of
Error" the much-enduring Nimrod is attacked, in company with the
well-graced popular preacher; and novelists are assailed as "flesh-
flies of the land," while men who study art in Italy come home worse
dunces than they went, and finally the deist and atheist are publicly
birched.
It is not for his satires that Cowper is remembered: they were
suggested to him, in the interests of religion and morals, by Mrs.
Unwin, while Lady Austen, a lively person of quality, appointed to
Cowper "The Task," or rather gave him the subject of "The Sofa,"
out of which grew "The Task". The poet ambles, in an essay in blank
verse, as much at his ease and as fond of digressions as Montaigne,
from the days when man squatted on the ground, to his invention of
a three-legged stool, the addition of a fourth leg, cushions, arm-
chairs, the settee, finally the sofa. The sofa pleases the gouty; never
may the poet have gout; he has done nothing to deserve it; in
boyhood he
Has fed on scarlet and strong haws,
The bramble, black as jet, and sloes austere.
This introduces a rural digression.
Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er,
 Conducts the eye along his sinuous course,
Delighted.
We think of
a river winding slow
By cattle, on an endless plain;
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low
With shadow streaks of rain.
How different are the methods of the two painters in words! The
poet, finding geologists in the course of his wanderings, pities them,
truth disclaiming them. Like Wordsworth he praises "retirement,"
welcomes the newspaper, and welcomes tea. In the charming lines,
"The Retired Cat," temporarily shut up in a drawer lined "with linen
of the softest kind," he seems to smile at his own cosy retirement;
the teacups, the happy listening ladies. He is full of human kindness,
of love for children, cats, and his own tame hares; he sets out to
gather flowers, he says, and comes home laden with moral fruits,
and religious reflections, and with his sketch book full of landscapes
like Gainsborough's, and studies of cattle like Morland's. "The Task"
won for the poet countless friends who never saw his face; and,
though we have become attuned to blank verse of many beautiful
modulations which he never dreamed of (though now and then they
were attained by Thomson), "The Task" may still be read with
sympathy and pleasure.
Many of Cowper's shorter poems, grave or gay, are in all memories:
"The Wreck of the Royal George," as spirited and sad as a ballad;
the ringing notes of "Boadicea"; the idyllic sweetness of
The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;
the lines, "Addressed to a Young Lady," brief and beautiful as the
most tender epigrams of "The Greek Anthology," from which
Cowper's translating hand gathered a little garland. Of these "The
Swallow," "Attic Maid with Honey Fed," are worthy of the original, as
is "The Grass-hopper". Cowper shone in occasional verses on trifling
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