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English is more robust than Swift's, no wit more scathing, no life in private and public more sad and proud, no death more pitiable. He died in 1745 hopelessly insane.

DANIEL DEFOE, 1661-1731, was almost as vigorous a political writer as Swift, but he will live in literature by Robinson Crusoe, 1719. In it he equalled Gulliver's Travels in truthful representation, and excelled it in invention. The story lives and charms from day to day. With his other tales it makes him our first fine writer of fiction. But none of his stories are true novels; that is, they have no plot to the working out of which the characters and the events contribute. They form the transition, however, from the slight tale and the romance of the Elizabethan time to the finished novel of Richardson and Fielding.

Metaphysical Literature was enriched by the work of BISHOP BERKELEY, 1684-1753. His Minute Philosopher and other works questioned the real existence of matter, and founded on the denial of it an answer to the English Deists, round whom in the first half of the eighteenth century centred the struggle between the claims of natural and of revealed religion. Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and Collins, on the Deists' side, were opposed by Clarke, by Bentley, whose name is best known as the founder of the true school of classical criticism, and by Bishop Warburton.

I may mention here a social satire, The Fable of the Bees, by MANDEVILLE, half poem, half prose dialogue, and finished in 1729. It tried to prove that the vices of society are the foundation of civilization, and is the first of a new set of books which marked the rise in England of the bold speculations on the nature and ground of society which the French Revolution afterwards increased.

The Periodical Essay is connected with the names of JOSEPH ADDISON, 1672-1719, and SIR RICHARD STEELE, 1675-1729. This gay, light, and graceful kind of literature, differing from such Essays as Bacon's as good conversation about a subject

differs from a clear analysis of all its points, was begun in France by Montaigne in 1580. Charles Cotton, a wit of Charles II.'s time, re-translated Montaigne's Essays, and they soon found imitators in Cowley and Sir W. Temple. But the periodical Essay was created by Steele and Addison. It was published three times a week, then daily, and it was anonymous, and both these characters necessarily changed its form from that of an Essay of Montaigne.

Steele began it in the Tatler, 1709, and it treated of everything that was going on in the world. He paints as a social humorist the whole age of Queen Anne-the political and literary disputes, the fine gentlemen and ladies, the characters of men, the humors of society, the new book, the new play; we live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of old London. Addison soon joined him, first in the Tatler, afterwards in the Spectator, 1711. His work is more critical, literary, and didactic than his companion's. The characters he introduces, such as Roger de Coverley, are finished studies after nature, and their talk is easy and dramatic. No humor is more fine and tender; and, like Chaucer's, it is never bitter. The style adds to the charm, and it seems to grow out of the subjects treated of.

Addison's work was a great one, lightly done. The Spectator, the Guardian, and the Freeholder, in his hands, gave a better tone to manners, and a gentler one to political and literary criticism. The essays published every Friday were chiefly on literary subjects, the Saturday essays chiefly on religious subjects. The former popularized literature, so that culture spread among the middle classes and crept down to the country; the latter popularized religion. 'I have brought,' he says, 'philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses."

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'Addison, appearing at a time when English literature was at a very low ebb, made an impression which his writings would not now pro

duce, and won a reputation which was then his due, but which has long survived his comparative excellence. Charmed by the gentle flow of his thought, which, neither deep nor strong, neither subtle nor struggling with the obstacles of argument, might well flow easily,—by his lambent humor, his playful fancy (he was very slenderly endowed with imagination), and the healthy tone of his mind, the writers of his own generation and those of the succeeding half century placed him upon a pedestal, in his right to which there has since been almost unquestioning acquiescence. He certainly did much for English literature, and more for English morals and manners, which in his day were sadly in need of elevation and refinement. But, as a writer of English, he is not to be compared, except with great peril to his reputation, to at least a score of men who have flourished in the present century, and some of whom are now living."-R. G. White.

“That which chiefly distinguishes Addison, from almost all the other great masters of ridicule is the grace, the nobleness, the moral purity which we find even in his merriment. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of seraphim and just men made perfect be derived from an exquisite perception of the ludicrous, their mirth must surely be none other than the mirth of Addison; a mirth consistent with tender compassion for all that is frail, and with profound reverence for all that is sublime. Nothing great, nothing amiable, no moral duty, no doctrine of natural or revealed religion has ever been associated by Addison with any degrading idea. His humanity is without a parallel in literary history. It may be confidently affirmed that he has blackened no man's character, nay, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in all the volumes which he has left us a single taunt which can be called ungenerous or unkind.”—Macaulay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. SWIFT.-J. Forster's Life of: Eng. Men. of Let. Series; Jeffrey's Essays; S. Johnson's Lives of Eng. Poets; Thackeray's Eng. Humorists; Minto's Man. Eng. Prose Lit.; Ward's Anthology; Br. Quar. Rev., Oct., 1854; Black. Mag., v. 74, 1853; Fraser's Mag., v. 61, 1860, and v. 76, 1867; N. A. Rev., Jan., 1868; N. Br. Rev., v. 51, 1870; Ecl. Mag., May and Oct., 1849.

DEFOE.-W. Chadwick's Life and Times of; J. Forster's Hist. and Biog. Essays; Minto's Man. Eng. Pr. Lit.; L. Stephen's Hours in a Library; Eng. Men of Let. Series; Br. Quar. Rev., Oct., 1869: Quar. Rev., v. 101, 1857; Cornhill Mag., v. 17, 1868. ADDISON.-Minto's Man. Eng. Pr. Lit.; Eng. Men of Let. Series; Macaulay's Essays; Howitt's Homes and Haunts of Brit. Poets; S. Johnson's Lives of Eng. Poets; Taine's Hist. Eng. Lit.; Thackeray's Eng. Humorists, and in Henry Esmond; N. A. Rev., v. 79, 1854; Ecl. Mag., Sept., 1874, and Apr., 1879.

From Addison's Spectator.

I have now considered Milton's Paradise Lost under those four great heads of the fable, the characters, the sentiments, and the language; and have shown that he excels, in general, under each of these heads. I hope that I have made several discoveries which may appear new even to those who are versed in critical learning. Were I indeed to choose my readers, by whose judgment I would stand or fall, they should not be such as are acquainted only with the French and Italian critics, but also with the ancient and moderns who have written in either of the learned languages. Above all, I would have them well versed in the Greek and Latin poets, without which a man very often fancies that he understands a critic, when in reality he does not comprehend his meaning.

It is in criticism, as in all other sciences and speculations; one who brings with him any implicit notions and observations which he has made in his reading of the poets, will find his own reflections methodized and explained, and perhaps several little hints, that had passed in his mind, perfected and improved in the works of a good critic; whereas one who has not these previous lights is very often an utter stranger to what he reads, and apt to put a wrong interpretation upon it.

Nor is it sufficient that a man who sets up for a judge in criticism should have perused the authors above-mentioned, unless he has also a clear and logical head. Without this talent he is perpetually puzzled and perplexed amidst his own blunders, mistakes the sense of those he would confute, or, if he chances to think right, does not know how to convey his thoughts to another with clearness and perspicuity. Aristotle, who was the best critic, was also one of the best logicians that ever appeared in the world.

Mr. Locke's Essay on The Human Understanding would be thought a very odd book for a man to make himself master of, who would get a reputation by critical writings; though at the same time it is very certain that an author who has not learned the art of distinguishing between words and things, and of ranging his thoughts and setting them in proper lights, whatever notions he may have, will lose himself in confusion and obscurity. I might further observe that there is not a Greek or a Latin critic who has not shown, even in the style of his criticisms, that he was a master of all the elegance and delicacy of his native tongue.

The truth of it is, there is nothing more absurd than for a man to set up for a critic, without a good insight into all the parts of learning; whereas many of those who have endeavored to signalize themselves by

works of this nature among our English writers are not only defective in the above-mentioned particulars but plainly discover by the phrases which they make use of, and by their confused way of thinking, that they are not acquainted with the most common and ordinary systems of arts and sciences. A few general rules extracted out of the French authors, with a certain cant of words, have sometimes set up an illiterate heavy writer for a most judicious and formidable critic.

One great mark by which you may discover a critic who has neither taste nor learning is this, that he seldom ventures to praise any passage in an author which has not been before received and applauded by the public, and that his criticism turns wholly upon little faults and errors. This part of a critic is so very easy to succeed in that we find every ordinary reader, upon the publishing of a new poem, has wit and illnature enough to turn several passages of it into ridicule, and very often in the right place. This Mr. Dryden has very agreeably remarked in those two celebrated lines:

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation. The most exquisite words and finest strokes of an author are those which very often appear the most doubtful and exceptionable to a man who wants a relish for polite learning; and they are these, which a sour, undistinguishing critic generally attacks with the greatest violence. Tully observes that it is very easy to brand or fix a mark upon what he calls verbum ardens, or, as it may be rendered into English, a glowing bold expression, and to turn it into ridicule by a cold, ill-natured criticism. A little wit is equally capable of exposing a beauty and of aggravating a fault; and, though such a treatment of an author naturally produces indignation in the mind of an understanding reader, it has, however, its effect among the generality of those whose hands it falls into, the rabble of mankind being very apt to think that everything which is laughed at with any mixture of wit is ridiculous in itself.

Such a mirth as this is always unseasonable in a critic, as it rather prejudices the reader than convinces him, and is capable of making a beauty, as well as a blemish, the subject of derision. A man who cannot write with wit on a proper subject is dull and stupid, but one who shows it in an improper place is as impertinent and absurd. Besides, a man who has the gift of ridicule is very apt to find fault with

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