that which is almost incompatible with the constant exercise of wit, feeling: whilst, as in the former the poets of the earlier school were greatly deficient, so in the latter they had emphatically the advantage. This destitution of feeling, observable in nearly all the productions of this second school, may be traced in their insensibility to the beauty and grandeur of natural scenery, in their want of pathos, and in their unenthusiastic and sceptical spirit. Nature is the source whence the true poet drinks inspiration; he turns from the world, and its pleasures and vexations, to those scenes of majesty and loveliness, which the illimitable ocean or the bright and varied landscape presents, and, surrounded by all that can elevate and inspire, forms to himself those images of unearthly beauty, and uncreated grandeur, which are the pledge and foretaste of a higher state of being. And thus the poets of the earlier school looked abroad into the world of nature, and pronounced every thing good, and they revelled in all the loveliness, and grandeur, and glory, of the material creation with intoxicated delight. They did not write hymns to nature, but they felt and described her glories; they made no formal compliments to the "mighty mother," but they sung of "her in her works," in "the moonlight sleeping on the bank," in the "brave o'erhanging firmament, studded with golden fires," in the "jocund day" that "stood tiptoe on the misty mountain's top," and in the

which

"gray-headed even,"

"Like a sad votarist clad in amice gray,

Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phoebus' wain."

Nor were the lesser works of nature unsung-every plant, from "the cedar of Lebanon, to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,"

"Every herb that sips the dew," every flower "that opes her sweet breast to the sun," was in turn the object of their passionate addresses.

Far different were the feelings of the gentlemen poets of Queen Anne's days. Themes which called forth the sweetest numbers and most glowing descriptions of Marlowe, Herrick, Lily, and the despised Crashaw,-scenes on which the mighty minds of Shakspeare and Milton could dwell with intensest delight,-were passed over with indifference by poets who were inspired with the blaze of wax

candles, and the splendour of Turkey carpets; who ruralized in St. James's and Spring-gardens, and who had the smiles of court ladies and the plaudits of ministers to encourage and reward their labours.

But it would be unjust to pass over their only efforts at rural description, when, inspired by the "mighty mother," not the inspirer of the older poets, but

"she who brings

The Smithfield muses to the ear of kings,"

they poured forth their tender souls in pastoral. If the essence of poetry be (as some have said) the describing of "things as they are not," their pastorals were pre-eminently poetry. Arcadia was transported to 524 degrees N. L. and her shivering swains were required, in the changeable climate and foggy atmosphere of England, to sing of cloudless skies and fields, blushing with native roses.

"Oh skilled in nature, see the hearts of swains,
Their artless passions, and their tender pains,"

sang one capable of far higher efforts; and he exhibits his Berkshire Arcadian promising white bulls to Phœbus, that he may be inspired

"With Waller's strains, and Granville's moving lays;"

and pathetically entreating his mistress to "rival Orpheus' strain," by setting Windsor Forest dancing. This may be sufficiently "artless;" but the gentle Arcadians of Queen Anne's times could scarcely lay claim to merely "tender pains," since they are remarkably fond of "king Cambyses'

vein :"

"Fade every blossom, wither every tree,"
"Die every flower, and perish all but she,”

is but a moderate specimen of their violence. One threatens the world with an endless night, another with a second deluge, while nothing less than chaos can satisfy the furious disposition of the third; and their tender swains seem determined, that although the world may not sympathize in their sorrows, it shall at least partake their sufferings. What taste for rural beauty, what feeling for the charms of nature, could possibly exist, when such unnatural trash was sought after and eulogized,-when gentlemen copied them out, and ladies learnt them by heart, and all the principal wits of that day praised in "melodious voice," or well-sounded periods, productions, which, with a noble

contempt of nature, gave to ploughboys and milkmaids the language and manners of Greece, and set the sober church-going peasantry of England to pour libations to Jupiter, and sing hymns to Diana. It is true that the earlier English poets occasionally wrote pastorals, but they never introduced "the harmless villager" in the dress of Arcadia. Milton's "Lycidas" has been censured on this account, but with some injustice. That the piece is allegorical, is evident from the personages introduced; and the describing a young man intended for the church under the figure of a shepherd can scarcely appear incongruous, when we consider that it is by this very term that ministers are described by inspiration itself.

Intimately connected with this insensibility to the beauty and grandeur of the "visible world," was their want of pathos. Those before whose sight the glories of nature had passed unregarded, were not likely to infuse much of natural feeling into their numbers; they refused to drink of the "living waters" of nature, and she denied to them the "golden key,"

"Which oped the sacred source of sympathetic tears."

In the poems of Addison, Swift, Pope, or Prior, this defect is less perceivable, as, though aware of their inability to excite strong or tender feeling, they adopted gay or humorous subjects; and the wit in which they were so abundant had fairer scope for display, in describing "London streets during a shower," the do-nothing life of

"Sauntering Jack, and idle Joan,"

or the rage of Belinda for her "ravished hair," than in painting the widowed desolation of Constance, the heart-broken though silent sorrows of Calantha, or the unprotected loneliness of Una, before whose gentle beauty the lion forgets his savage nature.

It is in the dramatists, Hughes, Phillips, Rowe, that the want of pathos is most apparent: there cant is substituted for passion, and cold conceits for feeling; the frigid declamations of the French tragedy are undeviatingly imitated, and the writers seem to have imagined that a plentiful supply of interjections, and notes of admiration in abundance, would amply compensate for that want of nature, and affectation of feeling, which disgusts us in the tragedies of the "golden age of literature." It well became these tragedy writers to affect a contempt of the popular opinion, and to censure and ridicule, in verse and prose," the many-headed monster of VOL. VII.-No. 13.

C

the pit," the "senseless, worthless, and unhonor'd crowd," whose only blame was, that they preferred the nature and pathos of Shakspeare, and the older dramatists, to the maudlin sorrows of Jane Shore, or the cant of Orestes. We can feel no surprise that

"Quin's high plume, and Oldfield's petticoat,"

received that applause, which their laboured declamations so little merited, and entirely sympathize with the "universal peal," that

at

"Shook the stage, and made the people stare,"

"Cato's long wig, flower'd gown, and lacker'd chair." The same general want of feeling, which characterized the poets of this school, may be observed in their comparatively low estimate of poetry; it is an "art," and to be attained like other arts, by practice, and by following given rules; thus we never find in their works, those passionate invocations to the muse, which abound in the poems of our earlier writers. The poets of Queen Anne's days seem sometimes to have doubted whether a poetic genius were a blessing or a curse; not so our earlier writers.

sung George Withers, unfriended and in prison; and greater than he, Shakspeare could body forth with enthusiasm,

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling;"

and Milton could tell us, it was the object of his most ardent wishes to be author of some work "that the world might not willingly let die." They felt that genius was the gift of heaven, and they exulted in its possession. This enthusiastic devotion to the muse, and noble consciousness of their powers, gives an air of independence to their poetry, which we may vainly attempt to find in the compositions of the poets of Queen Anne's days; patronized, or unpatronized, they felt that they conferred honour, and they never invoked a lordly patron to inspire, though he might reward their labours. They never petitioned the great and the

powerful to confer immortality-for they possessed that gift in themselves.

66

'O, while along the stream of time thy name
Expanded flies, and gathers all its fame:
Say, shall my little bark attendant sail,

Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale?"

sung the poet of Queen Anne's day, in sweetest numbers, to a secretary of state.

"He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
That call fame on such gentle acts as these,

And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas,
Whatever clime the sun's bright circlet warm,"

sung the poet of an unpatronizing age.* The same general want of feeling rendered most of these poets willing disciples of that system of cold and heathenish scepticism, then so generally fashionable, and most probably influenced their adoption of that celebrated principle, "ridicule the test of truth." To men possessing so much wit, and (generally speaking,) so little reverence for solemn things,† this principle was admirably adapted; and they placed the most mean and the most lofty, the most touching and the most ridiculous, the most elevating and the most degrading subjects, in ludicrous contrast. Every thing was a subject of sport; and to this habit of associating things the most discordant, and placing the highest and noblest feelings of humanity in ludicrous points of view, may be attributed the very accommodating spirit of their morality, and that irreverence for religion, which is the most striking defect of this school.

The poet who considered,

"All that the muse and all the priest has taught,"

as deserving of equal respect; and who condescendingly stooped to truth," could not be suspected of much respect for religion; nor could the club of wits, with the Dean at their head, who discovered that the "Beggar's Opera" would subserve the interests of morality, be charged with being "righteous overmuch;" nor could he, who left for his epitaph,

"Life's a jest, and all things shew it,"

have considered it as a state of probation, or had much sense of its importance. But they were men of wit, men of *Milton: Addison must be excepted.