that Pindar's Odes were constructed on a regular musical principle. He had also a keen appreciation of Horace's terse felicity; and in his Ode to Caleb Hardinge, M.D., he strives to reproduce this, with a success which anticipates the work of Tennyson in some of his earlier lyrics :With sordid floods the wintry urn

Hath stained fair Richmond's level green;
Her naked hills the Dryads mourn,

No longer a poetic scene.

No longer there thy raptured eye
The beauteous forms of earth and sky
Surveys, as in their author's mind;
And London shelters from the year
Those whom thy social hours to share
The Attic Muse designed.

From Hampstead's airy summit we,
Her guests, the city shall behold,
What day the people's stern decree
To unbelieving kings is told;

When common men (the dread of fame)
Adjudged, as one of evil name,
Before the sun th' anointed head.
Then seek thou too the pious town,
With no unworthy cares to crown
That evening's awful shade.

Deem not I call thee to deplore
The sacred martyr of the day,
By fast and penitential lore
To purge our ancient guilt away.
For this on humble faith I rest,
That still our advocate, the priest,

From heavenly wrath will save the land:
Nor ask what rites our pardon gain,

Nor how his potent sounds restrain
The thunderer's lifted hand.

No, Hardinge peace to Church and State!
That evening let the Muse give law,
While I anew the theme relate
Which my first youth enamoured saw.
Then will I oft explore thy thought,

What to reject which Locke hath taught,
What to pursue in Virgil's lay:

Till hope ascends to loftiest things,
Nor envies demagogues or kings

Their frail and vulgar sway.

O versed in all the human frame,

Lead thou where'er my labour lies,
And English fancy's eager flame

To Grecian purity chastise:

While hand in hand at Wisdom's shrine
Beauty with truth I strive to join,

And grave assent with glad applause
To paint the story of the soul,

And Plato's visions to control
With Verulamian laws.

With these four men of original genius the philosophicopolitical impulse which inspired the didactic school of English poetry in the first half of the eighteenth century seems to have exhausted itself. Others studied the metrical forms and the popular taste which the art of these poets had created, but did not succeed in giving to their own compositions the imprint of individual character. John Armstrong (1709-1779), author of The Art of Preserving Health, combines in his poem-which is written in blank verse-some of the descriptive fancy of his friend Thomson with the purer diction of Akenside. David Mallet (1700?-1765), best known as the pretended author of the well-known ballad William and Margaret, and as the editor of Bolingbroke's works, imitated the didactic style of Pope in his essay on Verbal Criticism; and the style of Thomson in his Excursion. In his Amyntor and Theodora, after telling a tale of apparently ancient times, in blank verse, which is a unique example of "the nauseous affectation "to use Warton's phrase-" of expressing everything pompously," he suddenly brings the reader into the previous century by celebrating the landing in Torbay of the "great Nassau

:-

They fly! he cried, they melt in air away

The clouds that long fair Albion's heaven o'ercast!
With tempest deluged, or with flame devoured

Her drooping plains: while dawning rosy round

A purer morning lights up all her skies!

He comes, behold! the great deliverer comes,
Immortal William, borne triumphant on
From yonder orient o'er propitious seas,
White with the sails of his unnumbered fleet,

A floating forest, stretched from shore to shore etc. etc.

John Dyer (1700-1758) reproduced in his Fleece (1757) the style of John Philips' Cider, and in his Ruins of Rome (1740) the style of Thomson's Liberty. He exhibits, however, very little of Thomson's political spirit; and on the whole what is most characteristic of his verse is the tendency, visible in all the descriptive poetry of this period, to borrow ideas and terms from the art of painting. Pope's Epistle to Jervas, Thomson's allusions to the great painters of the classical school in his Castle of Indolence, Walter Harte's Essay on Painting, all bear witness in different ways to the strength of this movement, which may indeed be traced back as far as Dryden's translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting. Dyer himself early embraced the profession of a painter, and formed the design of his Ruins of Rome while studying the monuments of ancient art in Italy. The poem is inspired by the picturesque rather than by the historic aspect of the imperial city :

Enough of Grongar, and the shady dales
Of winding Towy, Merlin's fabled haunts,
I sing inglorious. Now the love of arts,
And what in metal or in stone remains
Of proud antiquity, through various realms
And various languages and ages famed,
Bears me remote, o'er Gallia's woody bounds,
O'er the cloud-piercing Alps remote; beyond
The vale of Arno, purpled with the vine,
Beyond the Umbrian and Etruscan hills,
To Latium's wide champaign, forlorn and waste,
Where yellow Tiber his neglected wave
Mournfully rolls. Yet once again, my muse,
Yet once again, and soar a loftier flight:

Lo, the resistless theme, imperial Rome!

Amid the ruins the poet moralises easily on the fate of luxury and the vanity of all human things; but he shows none of the active enthusiasm for English liberty which characterises the poems of Addison and Thomson on the same subject. Time was reducing the English imagination to a mood of æsthetic quietism. The House, of Brunswick was every year establishing itself more firmly on the throne. Wealth and refinement constantly increased, and ecstasies over the Whig triumphs of the

two previous generations were felt to be tedious, if not insincere. Nor was there much more to be said in didactic verse on the subject of Natural, as distinct from Revealed, Religion; for the minds of those who had once been fascinated with the speculations of Shaftesbury were now more inclined to travel along the roads opened to them by Voltaire, Rousseau, and the French Encyclopædists.

RELIGIOUS

CHAPTER XI

LYRICAL POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: INFLUENCE OF THE METHODIST MOVEMENT

ISAAC WATTS; JOHN AND CHARLES WESLEY; WILLIAM COWPER

THE disturbing effect of the Deistic philosophy on the political, social, and literary settlement of 1688 was small. Not only did the works of the so-called "freethinkers" offer an easy mark to the irony of Swift and the light satire of Young, but, on their own ground of reason, the Deists (with the exception of Hume) were feeble controversialists, and unworthy of such antagonists as Butler and Berkeley. Though it was but a step from the latitudinarian Churchmanship of men like Bishop Hoadly to the Deism of men like Tindal, the arguments offered on behalf of Natural, as opposed to Revealed Religion, while they gave, as I have shown, a certain stimulus to the imagination of the poet, were not qualified to move the heart of the people.

There were, however, numerous constituent elements in English society which found no satisfaction in the religious compromise of the Revolution. From the days of Wycliffe to those of Bunyan, thousands of Englishmen had sought a more directly personal outlet for religious emotion than was provided for them in the external order of the Established Church. Religion appealed to them on the mystical side of their nature, through the heart rather than through the head. Those who were influenced

by it, whether Nonconformists or Nonjurors, seekers of