England since the restoration continued. The worst feature of the time was the immorality of political parties. No sooner was the immediate end attained and the Stuart king expelled, than the hostility between the two great parties of the state broke out with increased bitterness. Either party was ready at any moment to sacrifice the interest and the honour of the state to its own advantage. William, who wished to reconcile the opponents for the struggle with the common foe of England and of European independence, was hated and betrayed by both in turn. He died worn out by the factious opposition that met him everywhere, and left the kingdom to a successor who had the double advantage of being a woman and a native of England.

And Queen Anne found in the Duke of Marlborough the minister who, master of intrigue as he was, could beat the rival factions with their own weapons. He succeeded in uniting them for a time in the great national contest with France; until the smouldering fire of party strife blazed forth again more fiercely than ever, and the Tories overthrew the great Whig minister to be in their turn a few years later at the death of the queen ignominiously driven from power and trampled under foot. During these dissensions and intrigues of an utterly unprincipled, ambitious, and unscrupulously selfish aristocracy, in this desperate struggle and scramble for political power and social influence and patronage, literature was destined to play an extraordinary part. Never has mere literary talent enjoyed such influence and reaped such rewards in wealth and worldly distinction, as in the reign of Queen Anne; when for the first time the press put forth its enormous power. The aristocracy of birth bowed to the aristocracy of genius. The greatest noblemen of the time, Halifax, Godolphin, Somers, Harley, Bolingbroke lived on terms of equality with Pope and Arbuthnot; Swift's pamphlet on the Conduct of the Allies overthrew the Whig government; Addison was made a secretary of state and married a countess, Prior became English ambassador at Paris, Steele was knighted and sat in Parliament, Congreve became secretary for Jamaica with 1200 pounds a year, was almost idolised by the daughter of the Duke of Marlborough and carried to his grave in Westminster Abbey on the shoulders of four great lords.

But this proud position of literature had its drawbacks. The spoiled pet child of an aristocratic society, of the world of fashion had to speak the language of its patrons. The age of Queen Anne has been justly called the Augustan aera of English literature. As the Roman poets lived near the court and breathed the tainted air of a rich and fashionable capital, of a worldly and jaded society, incapable of enthusiasm or true and deep emotions, but eager to be amused by the play of wit and the glitter of fancy, so the English poet of this age found his audience among the powdered and painted ladies of London, who in their gilt saloons, adorned with china monsters, sipped tea, played with their fan or their lapdog and listened over their shoulder to the fashionable talk, the amusing scandal, the polite sneer of fine lords in their flowing perriwig, ribbons and lace. To such an audience how could he outpour the passionate emotions of a deeply moved and overflowing heart, or the eloquent description of the wonders of nature? No flights of genius, no excentricity or obscurity of thought or of diction could be allowed him; clear common sense, the plausible, the respectable common place are his domain. The success of the author does not depend upon what he says, but how he says it. Composition now becomes an art and a science; perfection of form and of execution is the study of the poet, correctness his ideal. The great authors of the time attain a marvellous smoothness

and elegance of style; their verses present a glittering and dazzling succession of witty sayings, of striking antitheses; every couplet contains some happy thought in the most perfect form which easily commits itself to memory. French influence is still apparent. It is the time when English society bears a striking likeness to that of Paris. The Englishman of the period seems to be estranged from his real nature. He is passionately fond of „Town", of his club and his coffee house, lives only for society; the country, the fields and woods have lost their charm for him. To shine in the drawing room by sparkling conversation, brilliant repartee, flashing wit, is his ideal, he poses, he calculates and prepares an effect, as if he were a Parisian and to the manner born. No wonder that he has a strong predilection for French manners and French literature and forms his style and his composition on Boileau. Horace, especially in his satires, and with him Boileau are no doubt the great models of the English poets of the time.

The true type of the authors of the period, the most brilliant of the wits and poets of Queen Anne is Pope, the most successful poet of elegant society and of conventional life.

Alexander Pope was born in the year 1688, the son of a rich tradesman of London, who retired from business in the year in which his famous son was born and settled in the country near Windsor. The child grew up in the sylvan solitude of Windsor forest. Being sickly and deformed from his birth he was cut off from the healthy exercise and the manly sports of English boyhood. Shrinking from the society of other children, he grew up a dreamy brooding, oversensitive, precocious lad. The taste for poetry was awakened in him by the beauty of the scenery in which he lived and was fed by reading in the poets of all countries and ages. The father, who loved the boy with the affection, generally bestowed on delicate children, let him do as he pleased, nay encouraged him in his poetical compositions. At the age of fourteen the boy had read in the original all the poets of Greece, Rome, Italy, France, and England, and possessed full mastery over his own language.

,,As yet a child, and all unknown to fame,

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

poem he is still under the spell of the a spell which was unfortunately broken whirl of fashionable life. It is the only The lonely forest with its shady thickets,

At the age of sixteen he wrote some Pastorals and the beginning of a poem on Windsor Forest, completed in 1713, in which description is blended with historical and moral associations, called up by the scenes he describes. In this beautiful scenery in the midst of which he grew up, when he moved to London and plunged into the poem in which he shows a strong feeling for nature its green lawns and glades and its herds of deer live in the poem as they had caught his youthful fancy. In this poem he strikes for the first time that chord which is to sound again and again in the poetry of the 18th century, the beauty of nature, a chord which rang with the most perfect tone in Thomson's Seasons, and awakened an echo in Germany in Haller's Alpen and Kleist's Frühling. This rage for description was at last carried to excess until it was mercilessly condemned in Lessing's Laocoon. Of the truth and beauty of Pope's descriptions his account of the dying pheasant is a good example:

See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings:

L. S. 1883.

2

Short is his joy, he feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.
Ah! what avail his glossy varying dyes,

His purple crest and scarlet-circled eyes;

The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,

His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?

In 1711 appeared Pope's Essay on Criticism showing a perfection of form, a ripeness of judgment attained by other poets only at the end of a long career as the result of much labour and lifelong experience. Already in this poem, which he wrote at the age of 21 he showed that exquisite skill of literary composition which places him in the first rank of English classics. This essay like his later poems is composed in the rhymed couplet of verses of five accents. Pope though an admirer and diligent reader of Boileau showed his good taste and judgment by stopping short of the rigorism of the French heroic verse of six accents, which invariably exacts the caesura in the middle; it is this caesura which imparts so artificial and mechanical a character to French versification. It is a characteristic advantage of the English verse that it allows the pause to be varied through four different syllables in the line. The pause may fall after the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh syllable; and according as it is placed after the one or the other, the melody of the verse is changed, and its air and cadence are diversified. Since that time the rythm of the heroic couplet as settled by Pope has remained the classical model of English versification.

The Rape of the Lock which appeared soon after the Essay on Criticism shows the peculiar genius of Pope at his best, whilst, at the same time, it is the most characteristic poem of the period. The rich and airy fancy, the glittering wit of the poet throws the charm of poetry over the frivolities of fashionable life. Poetry appears here as the jeu d'esprit, the play of wit dazzling and amusing the reader, skipping lightly over the surface of existence. Lord Petre, a fashionable beau of the period, had stolen a lock of hair from his lady love, a famous beauty, Miss Arabella Fermor. The lady had taken offence at this, an estrangement was the result. The avowed purpose of Pope's poem was to laugh the lovers together again, in which however it failed. The poem presents to us in the happiest traits a charming picture of fashionable life in the drawing room, and in the boudoir of the time of Queen Anne. Into this society the poet introduces a host of airy spirits, sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders inhabiting the elements. Invisible they wait on the fair one and have a share in bringing about the final catastrophe. The airy shape of the Ariel of Shakespeare's Tempest and the elfs and fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream have inspired the poet to this charming conception. The following lines describe the severing of the lock:

But when to mischief mortals bend their will,
How soon they find fit instruments of ill!
Just then Clarissa drew with tempting grace
A two-edg'd weapon from her shining case:
So ladies in romance assist their knight,
Present the spear and arm him for the fight.
He takes the gift with reverence. and extends
The little engine on his fingers ends;
This just behind Belinda's neck he spread,

As o'er the fragrant steams she bends her head.
Swift to the Lock a thousand sprites repair,

A thousand wings, by turns, blow back the hair.
And thrice they twitched the diamond in her ear;
Thrice she drew back and thrice the foe drew near.

The peer now spreads the glittering forceps wide,
T'inclose the lock; now joins it, to divide,
Ev'n then, before the fatal engine closed,

A wretched sylph too fondly interposed;

Fate urged the shears, and cut the sylph in twain,

(But airy substance soon unites again;)

The meeting points the sacred hair dissever

From the fair head, for ever and for ever!

In the year 1715 Pope began his translation of Homer, which raised him in the ey of his contemporaries to the highest pinnacle of poetic fame whilst at the same time it broug him a fortune 8 thousand pounds. No translator has ever been less fit for his work th Pope. He, the brilliant and cold poet of conventional life, of an artificial, and sceptical socie to reproduce the simple grandeur, the unaffected truth, the naïv belief of the Greek poet! T result was what was to be expected, a splendid piece of composition of exquisite workmansh

but as little Greek as those actors who played Racine's Achilles and Agamemnon in t flowing wigs and high heels of the French court. Pope's Homer is the most brilliant traves that has ever been written.

Pope was now at the height of his fame. He lived in affluent circumstances in villa at Twickenham on the Thames not far from London, the centre of an admiring circle poets and statesmen. As a Roman catholic he felt naturally a stronger attraction to the Tori who favoured the restoration of the Stuarts than to the whigs and the partisans of the protesta succession of the house of Hanover. With Harley, Earl of Oxford and St. John, Viscount Bolin broke, the heads of the Tory party, he lived on terms of closest intimacy. But in spite honour and prosperity he was an unhappy man. The morbid sensitivenes due to his deformi and weakness soured his disposition. Cut off from all active share in the affairs of life, witho a profession, without wife and children, thrown back upon the resources of his mind, he h but one interest in life, that of literary distinction. Conscious of his extraordinary talent a exaggerating the importance of literary work, his vanity was only surpassed by his irritabili envy, and jealousy. Debarred from manly activity, he lacked the manly qualities of sincerity a candour, and though he highly appreciated moral excellence, he was constantly drawn down meanness and duplicity, stratagem and artifice. Implacacle in his resentments, with the keen intellect, the sharpest wit, with a wonderful sense of the ludicrous he was irresistibly attracted satire. The Dunciad in which he wreaked his vengeance on a number of insignificant autho who had ventured to attack him, and who owe their immortality only to the poet who pillori them, remains as a monument of his wit and his cruelty. The peculiarity of his genius com out strongest in his Imitations of Horace, which appeared between 1735 and 1739 in which far surpasses his two great models, Boileau and Horace, in the keenness of his satire. But did not attack vice as the champion of virtue and from a true love of mankind, but from me personal motives, spite, envy, revenge. The portraits he draws are as many virulent and abusi

lampoons. In his savage assaults on some of his adversaries he passes the bounds of the rules of decorum recognised in good society. His verses on Addison, in which he attacked his great rival when he could no longer defend himself, violate truth and good feeling alike. I will give the famous passage in full, not so much to expose the sad spectacle of mean jealousy in a great man, but to give an example of the marvellous skill with which Pope handed the keen, glittering steel of his satire, of the pointedness of his antitheses, and his unrivalled felicity of diction.

,,Peace to all such! but were there one whose fires

True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires;
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease:
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise;
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend;
Dreading even fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged;
Like Cato, give his little senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause;
While wits and Templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of phrase;
Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?"

Between 1732 and 1734 the Essay on Man appeared, the poem which was no doubt that effort of the poet which was most popular both at home and abroad. It consists of four epistles addressed to Lord Bolingbroke. The Essay is a vindication of Providence, an elegant version of the Théodicée. The appearances of evil in the world arise from our seeing only a part of the whole. Excesses and contrary qualities are means by which the harmony of the system is established. The ends of Providence are answered even by our errors and imperfections. God designs happiness to be equal, but realises it through general laws. Virtue only constitutes a happiness which is universally attainable. This happiness through virtue is reached only in society, or social order, which is again only a part of the general order. The perfection of virtue is a conformity to the order of Providence here, crowned by the hope of full satisfaction hereafter.

In the way in which Pope treats his subject he is a child of his age. The age had no sense for transcendental ideas in religion, in metaphysics, or in poetry. It was an age of common sense, and the experience of life as it is. To this common sense he appeals throughout. We saw that since the Revolution literature had been in close alliance with politics. The inevitable result was that the former was lowered to the level of debate; as the politician addressed his arguments to a general audience who had no more special information than himself, the philosopher spoke to the ignorant mass, became popular in method and language, and lost in depth exactly in proportion as he gained in width. Poetry caught the infection, and dealt in preference with