The Fleece, in blank verse, is not an English pastoral Georgic on sheep and the shepherd's cares and joys, but sees the fleece through the shearing, washing, dyeing, carding, spinning, and weaving, and even follows English woollens on their last journey by land and sea to France, Russia, Siberia, India, China, the United States, South America, and all the world; it is a patriotic poem on the woollen manufacture and the seaborne trade of the nation of shopkeepers. Description of the land suitable for rearing sheep leads quite naturally to pictures of life in Lapland and Arabia, which are not good for sheep-breeding; the voyages of Jason and the argonauts of the golden fleece presented inevitable attractions; and the Miltonic and sonorous lists of places to which English manufactures find their way leave room for references to Vasco da Gama, Columbus, and Anson. Not content with the processes of woollen manufacture, this poet of the woollen interest in its widest sense bursts into an enthusiastic excursus on the forging and sharpening of sheep-shears and cutlery at Leeds. Dyer had a warm affection for his native Wales, and Welsh sheep, Demetia, Siluria, the banks of the Wye and Severn, occupy disproportionate space in a survey of British sheep-farming. And repeated returns to the magnificence of Plynlimmon, Cader Idris, and other Welsh hills show that Dyer and his contemporaries were by no means so dead to the glories of mountain scenery as is often assumed. Amid the comically prosaic details and tedious didacticism there are fine passages and admirable lines in The Fleece, to which Mr Leslie Stephen is unjust in dismissing it as simply unreadable. The combination of true simplicity and eighteenth-century artificiality is curiously entertaining. Dyer's frank enthusiasm for the English climate, its refreshing fogs and rains, and the perennial verdure and purling brooks thereby nourished, is unconventional, frank, and infectious: Those slow-descending showers, : Rich queen of mists and vapours ! These thy sons See, the sun gleams; the living pastures rise, So sleek, so vast; such spacious flocks of sheep, This English 'Cotter's Saturday Night' is no without a charming and truthful realism : Only a slender tuft of useful ash, This is part of the shepherd's duties: O guard his meek sweet innocence from all Colin, on the top of Craig-y-Breiddyn in Montgomeryshire, laments like a modern philanthropic economist the rush to the towns : What various views unnumbered spread beneath! Our snowy flocks, and wind the sleeky fleece. Dyer rejoiced in the present and prospective well-being of the American colonies: Happy the voyage, o'er the Atlantic brine, And arts and sciences: thrice happy clime, Who views those shores in every culture dressed; The comforts taught, and various new desires, And spread Britannia's flocks o'er every dale. But he quite foresees American rivalry in raw Of foreign swains. While Time shakes down his sands, Of fertile Arica, like camels formed, Which bear huge burdens to the sea-beat shore, The country of the Apache Indians-parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona-was even farther away in the Wild West than Kansas. The sheep of Arica are, of course, llamas. Isaac Hawkins Browne (1705-60), son of the vicar of Burton-on-Trent, was educated at Oxford, and in 1736 published a clever series of six imitations of then living authors, which obtained great popularity. They naturally suggest a comparison with the parodies in the Rejected Addresses. Browne, who was called to the Bar, resided mainly on his family estate, but sat in Parliament for some time as member for Wenlock in Shropshire. He wrote a Latin poem, De Animi Immortalitate, which was much praised and repeatedly translated (as by Soame Jenyns), and an English poem on the subject of Design and Beauty. Johnson said that of all conversers he was the most delightful with whom I ever was in company,' and gave the sympathetic Boswell food for comfort when he told him that Browne 'drank freely for thirty years.' His imitations are his happiest work, the subject of the whole being A Pipe of Tobacco. The first of the series, A New Year's Ode, appropriately parodies the manner of Colley Cibber, then poetlaureate, in recitativo and airs, and begins: Old battle-array, big with horror, is fled, Air. When summer suns grow red with heat, Tobacco tempers Phoebus' ire; Yellow autumn, youthful spring, In thy praises jointly sing. Like Neptune, Cæsar guards Virginian fleets, Cibber's laureate effusions are here happily traves- And the sweetest bliss of blisses Thomson is the subject of the third imitation: O thou, matured by glad Hesperian suns, That looks the very soul; whence pouring thought, And at each puff imagination burns; Many of the lines and phrases are from Thomson's poem of Liberty (1732), which also explains Gibsonian lore. Patotheke is a pedantic coinage for a tobacco-box. Such a smart parody of Thomson's magniloquent style and diction being inevitably ludicrous, the usually good-natured poet was offended, and indited some angry lines in reply. The fourth imitation is in the style of Young's Satires, which are less strongly marked by mannerism than the Night Thoughts, not then written. The parody begins : Criticks avaunt; Tobacco is my theme; It is Pope of course who is thus imitated: In the last, beginning: Boy! bring an ounce of Freeman's best, Browne not merely caught the manner of Swift, but successfully reproduced his coarseness. Matthew Green (1696-1737), author of The Spleen, praised by Pope and Gray, left the austere Dissenting communion of his parents, had a post as clerk in the London Custom-House, performed his duties faithfully, and from time to time wrote and published verses. He was a witty and entertaining companion, but seems to have had personal experience of the spleen,' to judge by the aptness with which he discusses its various forms and their appropriate remedies, in comic verse like that of Hudibras and of some of Swift's poems. The poem was first published by Glover, the author of Leonidas, after Green's death. Gray thought that even the wood-notes of Green often break out into strains of real poetry and music ;' and the fourth line of the first of the following extracts from The Spleen (alluding to David and Goliath, and not unlike Shakespeare's Man but a rush against Othello's breast, soon attained to the dignity of a stock quotation. Cures for Melancholy. To cure the mind's wrong bias, spleen, Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been If spleen-fogs rise at break of day, The company, the shine of lights, In rainy days keep double guard, I dress my face with studious looks, ... I never game, and rarely bet, Am loath to lend or run in debt. No Compter-writs me agitate, Who moralising pass the gate, And there mine eyes on spendthrifts turn, Who vainly o'er their bondage mourn. Wisdom, before beneath their care, Pays her upbraiding visits there, And forces Folly through the grate Her panegyric to repeat. Experience, joined with common sense, To mortals is a providence. . Happy the man who, innocent, Grieves not at ills he can't prevent ; His skiff does with the current glide, Not puffing pulled against the tide. He, paddling by the scuffling crowd, Sees unconcerned life's wager rowed, And when he can't prevent foul play, Enjoys the folly of the fray. ... The gate is the gate of the Compter or debtor's prison; me is the antecedent to the who that follows. Contentment-A Wish. May Heaven-it's all I wish for-send Where decent cupboard, little plate, Display benevolence, not state. And may my humble dwelling stand A pond before full to the brim, Where cows may cool, and geese may swim; Soft to the eye, and to the feet; With opening views of hill and dale, From hills through plains in dusk array, Here stillness, height, and solemn shade And dreams, beneath the spreading beech, Fresh pastures speckled o'er with sheep, Lord Hervey (1696-1743), the son of a Suffolk knight, is well known as the Sporus of Pope and as husband of the much-besung and beautiful Mary Lepell. A supple politician and a good parliamentary debater, he was successively ViceChamberlain and Lord Privy Seal, and a great favourite with Queen Caroline. His history, called Memoirs of the Reign of George II. from his Accession till the Death of Queen Caroline, edited in 1848 by John Wilson Croker, is very valuable in its It abounds in minute details drawn way. from personal observation; the characters are cleverly drawn; and he has described at length all the vices, coarseness, and dullness of the court, in a style concise and pointed. His portraits are often spiteful, and he rarely does justice to the good qualities of those-and they were manywhom he disliked. Besides his Memoirs, Lord Hervey published many pamphlets, wrote occasional verses, and joined with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in endeavouring vainly to repel the envenomed shafts of Pope. He was of talent and energy, though contending with wretched health, drinking asses' milk, and rouging his countenance to conceal his ghastly appearance; of moral principle or public honour he appears to have been destitute. A few weeks before his death we find him writing thus characteristically to Lady Mary: The last stages of an infirm life are filthy roads, and, like all other roads, I find the further one goes from the capital, the more tedious the miles grow, and the more rough and disagreeable the way. I know of no a man turnpikes to mend them; medicine pretends to be such, but doctors who have the management of it, like the commissioners for most other turnpikes, seldom execute what they undertake; they only put the toll of the poor cheated passenger in their pockets, and leave every jolt at least as bad as they found it, if not worse.' The extracts that follow are from the Memoirs. Traits of George II. and Queen Caroline. The Duke of Richmond asked the king immediately to succeed Lord Scarborough, and the king was not averse to granting his request any further than he was always averse to giving anything to anybody. Many ingredients concurred to form this reluctance in his majesty to bestowing. One was that, taking all his notions from a German measure, he thought every man who served him in England overpaid; another was, that while employments were vacant he saved the salary; but the most prevalent of all was his never having the least inclination to oblige. I do not believe there ever lived a man to whose temper benevolence was so absolutely a stranger. It was a sensation that, I dare say, never accompanied any one act of his power; so that whatever good he did was either extorted from him, or was the adventitious effect of some self-interested act of policy consequently, if any seeming favour he conferred ever obliged the receiver, it must have been because the man on whom it fell was ignorant of the motives from which the giver bestowed. I remember Sir Robert Walpole saying once, in speaking to me of the king, that to talk with him of compassion, consideration of past services, charity, and bounty, was making use of words that with him had no meaning. . . . The queen, by long studying and long experience of his temper, knew how to instil her own sentiments-whilst she affected to receive his majesty's; she could appear convinced whilst she was controverting, and obedient whilst she was ruling; and by this means her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade him what was truly his case-that whilst she was seemingly on every occasion giving up her opinion and her will to his, she was always in reality turning his opinion and bending his will to hers. She managed this deified image as the heathen priests used to do the oracles of old, when, kneeling and prostrate before the altars of a pageant god, they received with the greatest devotion and reverence those directions in public which they had before instilled and regulated in private. And as these idols consequently were only propitious to the favourites of the augurers, so nobody who had not tampered with our chief priestess ever received a favourable answer from our god storms and thunder greeted every votary that entered the temple without her protection-calms and sunshine those who obtained it. The king himself was so little sensible of this being his case, that one day, enumerating the people who had governed this country in other reigns, he said Charles I. was governed by his wife, Charles II. by his mistresses, King James by his priests, King William by his men, and Queen Anne by her women-favourites. His father, he added, had been governed by anybody that could get at him. And at the end of this compendious history of our great and wise monarchs, with a significant, satisfied, triumphant air, he turned about, smiling, to one of his auditors, and asked him: And who do they say governs now?' Whether : this is a true or a false story of the king I know not, but it was currently reported and generally believed. (From Chap. iv.) : Her predominant passion was pride, and the darling pleasure of her soul was power; but she was forced to gratify one to gain the other, as some people do health, by a strict and painful régime, which few besides herself could have had patience to support or resolution to adhere to. She was at least seven or eight hours tête-àtête with the king every day, during which time she was generally saying what she did not think, assenting to what she did not believe, and praising what she did not approve; for they were seldom of the same opinion, and he too fond of his own for her ever at first to dare to controvert it ('Consilii quamvis egregii quod ipse non afferret inimicus'--' An enemy to any counsel, however excellent, which he himself had not suggested.'-Tacitus). She used to give him her opinion as jugglers do a card, by changing it imperceptibly, and making him believe he held the same with that he first pitched upon. But that which made these tête-à-têtes seem heaviest was that he neither liked reading nor being read to (unless it was to sleep) she was forced, like a spider, to spin out of her own bowels all the conversation with which the fly was taken. However, to all this she submitted, for the sake of power, and for the reputation of having it; for the vanity of being thought to possess what she desired was equal to the pleasure of the possession itself. But, either for the appearance or the reality, she knew it was absolutely necessary to have interest in her husband, as she was sensible that interest was the measure by which people would always judge of her power. Her every thought, word, and act therefore tended and was calculated to preserve her influence there; to him she sacrificed her time, for him she mortified her inclination; she looked, spake, and breathed but for him, like a weathercock to every capricious blast of his uncertain temper, and governed him (if such influence so gained can bear the name of government) by being as great a slave to him thus ruled as any other wife could be to a man who ruled her. For all the tedious hours she spent then in watching him whilst he slept, or the heavier task of entertaining him whilst he was awake, her single consolation was in reflecting she had power, and that people in coffee-houses and ruelles were saying she governed this country, without knowing how dear the government of it cost her. (From Chap. xiii.) Barton Booth (1681-1733), son of a Lancashire squire of good family, was educated at Westminster, and, spite of opposition, carried out his wish to become an actor and a famous one, his Cato in Addison's play being his greatest part. He wrote a masque on the death of Dido, and a number of poems, many of them to his wife and some of them sprightly. From one of his songs come the lines (based on Hudibras, III., ii. 175): True as the needle to the pole Or as the dial to the sun. Thomas Cooke (1703-1756), the son of an innkeeper at Braintree, studied the classics at Filstead School and privately, and became a Whig journalist. He was the author of dramatic pieces, poems, and translations; his translation of Hesiod secured him the nickname of 'Hesiod Cooke.' An assault on Pope, Swift, and others in his Battle of the Poets began a lifelong feud. He was editor of the Craftsman. By Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was the son of a Presbyterian minister at Armagh, himself the son of a minister of good Ayrshire stock who had settled in Ireland. Francis studied for the ministry at the University of Glasgow, and was tutor to the young Earl of Kilmarnock who was executed for his share in the rebellion of 1745. As a licentiate he was thought to incline too much to a modified or new light' Calvinism; and shortly after the completion of his theological course he was invited to open a private academy in Dublin, which proved highly successful. In 1720 he published his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, and so became known to many influential personages, such as Lord Granville, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Archbishop King, and others. This work was followed in 1728 by his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions; and in the year after he was called to be professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. In his lifetime he published various minor books, including a small treatise on Logic; his largest work, A System of Moral Philosophy, was published by his son after his death (with a Life, 1755). classical and literary sympathies, largely learnt from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson rescued philosophy from aridity, and conciliated a new interest in speculative thought. He may in some respects be considered a pioneer of the so-called 'Scotch school' and of the common-sense philosophy, although he was an eclectic, and was largely influenced by Locke; from his professorial work Dugald Stewart dated the metaphysical philosophy of Scotland. But it is as a moral philosopher, rather than as a metaphysician, that Hutcheson was conspicuous. His system is to a large extent that of Shaftesbury, but it is more complete, coherent, and clearly illustrated. He took over the term 'moral sense' (rarely used by his predecessor) and greatly developed the doctrine. He was a strong opponent of the theory that benevolence has a selfish origin; he was practically an early utilitarian. For insisting that 'we have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God,' and like unwonted teaching, he was (unavailingly) prosecuted for heresy by the Presbytery; and his influence powerfully promoted a liberal theology in Scotland. Hume consulted Hutcheson; Adam Smith studied under him, and was much influenced by him. Reid, too, was first stirred by his works to philosophical interests; but Hutcheson's greatest strength lay in his spoken utterances and not in his printed books. See Professor Fowler's Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (1882), and the admirable monograph by W. R. Scott, which sheds new light both on his life and his teaching. |