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of the gate of St. Romanus. The victorious Turks rushed through the breaches of the inner wall, and, as they advanced into the streets, they were soon joined by their brethren, who had forced the gate Phenar on the side of the harbor. In the first heat of their pursuit, about two thousand Christians were put to the sword; but avarice soon prevailed over cruelty, and the victors acknowledged that they should immediately have given quarter, if the valor of the emperor and his chosen bands had not prepared them for a similar opposition in every part of the capital. It was thus, after a siege of fifty-three days, that Constantinople was irretrievably subdued by the arms of Mahomet II. Her empire only had been subverted by the Latins; her religion was trampled in the dust by the Moslem conquerors.

LESSON 44.

"These were

PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL LITERATURE.both stimulated by the great movement of thought on all subjects pertaining to the natural rights of man which was led by Voltaire and Rousseau. In philosophy the historian David Hume led the way, and the transparent clearness of his style gave full force to opinions which made utility the only measure of virtue, and the knowledge of our ignorance the only certain knowledge.

In Political Literature, EDMUND BURKE, born 1731, is our greatest, almost our only, writer of this time. From 1756 to 1797, when he died, his treatises and speeches proved their right to the title of literature by their extraordinary influence on the country. Philosophical reasoning and poetic passion were wedded together in them on the side of conservatism, and every art of eloquence was used with the mastery that imagination gives. His Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1773, was perhaps the best of his works in point of style.

All Burke's work is more literature than oratory. Many of his speeches enthralled their hearers, but many more put them to sleep. The very men, however, who slept under him in the House read over and over again the same speech, when

published, with renewed delight.

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Goldsmith's praise of him, that he wound himself into his subject like a serpent,' gives the reason why he sometimes failed as an orator, why he always succeeded as a writer."

"The varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method are very strik ing. It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative amplification of the description of Hyder Ali's descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned Address to the King, 1777, where each sentence falls on the ear with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. His stride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles to the learning, positiveness, and cool, judicial mastery of the Report on the Lords' Journals, 1794. Even in the coolest and dryest of his pieces, there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment. Burke had the style of his subjects, the amplitude, the weightiness, the laboriousness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a man dealing with imperial themesthe freedom of nations, the justice of rulers, the fortunes of great societies, the sacredness of law.

Burke will always be read with delight and edification, because, in the midst of discussions on the local and the accidental, he scatters apothegms that take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. In the midst of the torrent of his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and in all tranquility reminds us of some permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life or society. We do not hear the organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom had other notes in the seventeenth century. There is none of the complacent and wise-browed sagacity of Bacon, for Burke's were days of eager, personal strife and party fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by the cheerfulness, the polish, the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke had an anxious conscience, and was earnest and intent that the good should triumph. And yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought marvels in the prose of our English tongue."-John Morley.

POLITICAL ECONOMY." Before Burke, a new class of political writings had arisen which concerned themselves with social and economical reform. The immense increase of the

industry, wealth, and commerce of the country, from 1720 to 1770, aroused inquiry into the laws that regulate wealth, and ADAM SMITH, 1723-1790, a professor at Glasgow, who had in 1759 written his book on the Moral Sentiments, published in 1776 the Wealth of Nations. By its theory, that labor is the source of wealth, and that to give the laborer absolute freedom to pursue his own interest in his own way is the best means of increasing the wealth of the country; by its proof that all laws made to restrain or to shape or to promote commerce were stumbling-blocks in the way of the wealth of any state, he created the Science of Political Economy, and started the theory and practice of Free Trade. All the questions of labor and capital were now placed on a scientific basis, and since that time the literature of the whole of the subject has engaged great thinkers. Connected with this were all the writings on the subjects of the poor and education and reform.

MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE.-During the whole of the time from the days of Addison onwards, the finer literature of prose had flourished. With SAMUEL JOHNSON, born 1709, began the literary man such as we know him in modern times, who, independent of patronage or party, lives by his pen, and finds in the public his only paymaster. The Essay was continued by him in his Rambler, 1750-2, and Idler, but, in these papers, lightness, the essence of Addison's and Steele's Essays in the Spectator and Tatler, is not found.

His celebrated letter to Lord Chesterfield gave the deathblow to patronage. The great Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, at which he worked unhelped, and which he published without support, was the first book that appealed solely to the public. He represents thus a new class. But he was also the last representative of the literary king who, like Dryden and Pope, held a kind of court in London. When he died, 1784, London was no longer the only literary centre, and poetry and prose were produced from all parts of the country."

"Johnson's sentences seem to be contorted, as his gigantic limbs used to twitch, by a kind of mechanical, spasmodic action. The most obvious peculiarity is the tendency, which he noticed himself, to use too big words and too many of them. It was not, however, the mere bigness of the words that distinguished his style, but a peculiar love of putting the abstract for the concrete, of using awkward inversions, and of balancing his sentences in a monotonous rhythm, which give the appearance, as they sometimes correspond to the reality, of elaborate, logical discrimination.

With all its faults the style has the merits of masculine directness. The inversions are not such as to complicate the construction. As Boswell remarks, he never uses a parenthesis; and his style, though ponderous and wearisome, is as transparent as the smarter snip-snap of Macaulay. This singular mannerism appears in his earliest writings; it is most marked at the time of the Rambler; whilst, in the Lives of the Poets, although I think that the trick of inversion has become commoner, the other peculiarities have been so far softened as to be inoffensive."-Leslie Stephen.

"GOLDSMITH'S Citizen of the World, a series of letters supposed to be written by a Chinese traveller in England, and collected in 1762, satirizes the manners and fashionable follies of the time. Several other series followed, but they are now unreadable. One man alone in our own century caught the old inspiration, and with a humor less easy, but more subtile, than Addison's. It was Charles Lamb, in the Essays of Elia, and the fineness of perception he showed in these was equally displayed in his criticisms on the old dramatists.

The miscellaneous literature of the latter half of the eighteenth century includes, also, the admirable Letters of GRAY, the poet; THOMAS WARTON'S History of English Poetry, which founded a new school of poetic criticism; the many collections of periodical essays, all of which ceased in 1787; Burke's Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; and the Letters of Junius, political invectives, written in a style which has preserved them to this day."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. BURKE.-T. Macknight's Life and Times of; Eng. Men of Let. Series; J. Timbs' Anecdote Biog.; Brougham's Sketches of Statesmen; F. D. Mau

rice's Friendship of Books; S. Rogers' Recollections; Minto's Man. of Eng. Pr. Lit.; G. Croly's Hist. Sketches; Ecl. Mag., Jan. and Feb., 1852, and Feb. and March, 1862; N. A. Rev., v. 88, 1859.

JOHNSON.-Boswell's Life of; Hawthorne's Our Old Home; Macaulay's Essays; Eng. Men of Let. Series: A. Murphy's Essay on Life and Genius of; N. Drake's Essays; T. Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship; Ed. Rev., Oct., 1859; Quar. Rev., v. 103, 1858, and v. 105, 1859; Allibone's Crit. Dictionary.

JUNIUS.-C. Chabot's The Hand-Writing of Junius professionally investigated; J. Jaques' Hist. of Junius and His Works: De Quincey's Lit. Reminiscences; J. Forster's Crit. Essays; West. Rev., Oct., 1871; Quar. Rev., Apr., 1871; Temple Bar, Oct., 1873.

LESSON 45.

POETRY. THE ELEMENTS AND FORMS OF THE NEW POETRY. "The period we are now studying may not improperly be called a time of transition in poetry. The influence of the poetry of the past lasted; new elements were added to poetry, and new forms of it took shape. There was a change also in the style and in the subject of poetry. Under these heads I shall bring together the various poetical works of this period.

1. The study of the Greek and Latin classics revived, and with it a more artistic poetry. Not only correct form, for which Pope sought, but beautiful form was sought after. Men like Thomas Gray and William Collins strove to pour into their work that simplicity of beauty which the Greek poets and Italians like Petrarca had reached as the last result of genius restrained by art. Their poems, published between 1746 and 1757, remain apart as a unique type of poetry. The refined workmanship of these poets, their manner of blending together natural feeling and natural scenery, their studious care in the choice of words are worthy of special study.

2. The study of the Elizabethan and of the earlier poets like Chaucer and of the whole course of poetry in England was taken up with great interest. Shakespeare and Chaucer had engaged both Dryden and Pope; but the whole subject was now enlarged. Gray, like Pope, projected a history of English poetry, and his Ode on the Progress of Poesy illustrates this new interest. Thomas Warton wrote his History of English

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