INTRODUCTION.

THE period with which we are to deal in the present volume ranges from 1748 to 1798, thus including almost two generations, and more great names in our literature than any other Age' included in this series. In some of its aspects, as an age in which continental travel was still a mark of distinction, or as the period of Waverley and Redgauntlet, it seems singularly remote; while in others it is strangely near to us, and, indeed, it is far from easy to realize that the present gracious occupant of the English throne is the granddaughter of George III., whose reign, commencing in 1760, covers nearly the whole of our epoch. Two generations pass across the scene, yet there must have been not a few old men who, having witnessed the fall of Sir Robert Walpole, the great military successes of 1759, and the disasters and humiliations of 1781, lived on to see the signal triumph of British Conservatism in the Peninsular War, the overthrow of Napoleon, and the rise in the heavens of that brilliant literary constellation of which Scott and Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley, were luminaries. Horace Walpole himself, who had an interview as a child with George I., lived down to 1797, and his Letters and Memoirs are a chronicle in brief of his time.

In literary development, as in all the essential factors of civilization, the age was one of rapid and vigorous growth. It is, however, a noteworthy fact that from the time of Coleridge and the great Romantic Renaissance there have

been a number of critical writers of no mean order, who have carried out a kind of literary boycott of the eighteenth century, or who, having made a rapid incursion to deliver Blake and Chatterton, and possibly Gray, from the bonds of a century into which (they protest) they must have got by mistake, have denounced the age unsparingly as dull and unprincipled, ugly and brutal. As the fourteenth century with the thirteenth, so, entirely to its disadvantage, the eighteenth century has been contrasted with the seventeenth, and its general tone held up for public reprobation.

Like other periods, the eighteenth century has its ugly and depressing sides; its distaste for the unknown, the mysterious, the transcendental is a feature especially repugnant to enthusiastic Romanticists, by whom a dislike for prosaic common sense, however great the prose may be, is genuinely and sincerely felt; it is a recognized tendency, moreover, in a generation to underrate or to despise the achievements of its great-grandfathers. Some such considerations as these may serve to explain a portion of the critical reaction against the tendencies of the eighteenth century, but they by no means explain the whole of it. Many of the imputations against the century are intelligible enough, but when we come to the reiterated charge of dullness we are driven to account for the phenomenon as another illustration of the human weakness for depreciating things of the qualities of which we are ignorant, of describing a terra incognita as an arid desert, as the outcome, in brief, less of prejudice than of ignorance.

Up to the time of Swift the great scholars of Western Europe were prone to assume a complete and exhaustive knowledge of all extant literature, and, indeed, many of their treatises read as if they were designed to show how many authorities the learned writer could cite upon any given topic. At a time when a library of about a thousand

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folio volumes might be held to comprise the whole of learned and polite literature worthy of the name, the claim was not so preposterous as it might now appear. Yet the pedantry of this kind of pretension was so mercilessly lashed by Swift and his disciples that it has never again reared its head; and since his day the press has been so prolific, and the over-population of our libraries has advanced to such a pitch, that a reader, however omnivorous, has perforce to neglect huge tracts of literary territory. How is he to arrange his itinerary with the least possible loss of pleasure and instruction to himself? It is for an answer to this question that the man of books turns as to a guidebook to the literary critic. England has produced some great literary guides from the time of Addison to that of "Matthew Arnold; but can it be said that our criticism has progressed pari passu with our enormous book-production, or that the ability manifested has been anything like in proportion to the increasing importance of the critic's function? When in a great library one asks to be conducted to the presses devoted to English critical literature, one can hardly fail to be struck by the extreme paucity of the achievements of our critics as a whole; regarding the vague and irregular tracks which they have left over the vast region of English literature, can one fail to cast an eye of admiration, not unmixed with envy, upon the wellbeaten sentier of French literary criticism? Bewildered, then, as he often is by a lack of adequate direction, or even more probably misled by the extreme importance attached by his journal to the Books of the Week,' it is scarcely to be wondered at that the reader of to-day adopts the ingenious method of elimination to which we have already adverted, and stigmatizes as dull a period with which his opportunities of acquaintance have hitherto been strictly limited. He is, in truth, arriving at the conclusion that

the eighteenth century is dull, by the same process that many Englishmen pronounce German literature to be stupid, and by which George III. doubtless decided that much of Shakespeare was sad stuff.' There was an old superstition that the application of a dead hand was a sure remedy for swellings, and when one is vexed by the tumidity with which so much work of a purely ephemeral order is acclaimed, one is irresistibly tempted to prescribe a severe application of the great literature of the dead past-to be well rubbed in. How much better, indeed, if in the wise words of Froude, each age studied its own faults, and endeavoured to mend them, instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage'!

It would be interesting, and not perhaps unamusing, if we had space to deal here with the various attempts that have been made by well-meaning critics to juggle with the chronology of the eighteenth century. One demonstrates convincingly that it begins in 1660, while another would retard its commencement until 1714. Nor is opinion less divided as to when it should close; one authority says 1748, another 1760, another 1782, and yet again, 1798. In French eyes, it is needless to state, not merely a century but a whole era came to an end in 1789. The consensus that Johnson and Chatterton were of different centuries is almost overwhelming. Such vagaries are laughable enough, and it would certainly be convenient if we could palm Martin Tupper off upon the twentieth century, or ignore the fact that no English poet in the nineteenth had so wide a circulation during his lifetime.

Assuming, as a mere working hypothesis, that the eighteenth century commenced on January 1st, 1701 (12 William III.), and concluded on December 31st, 1800 (41 George III.), we shall now endeavour within the briefest limits of space to consider, first, how far the specific charges

brought by the Romantic school of critics against the age (and especially the period 1748-1798) are well founded, and then, while fully admitting the faults and the failures with which humanity in the eighteenth century is especially chargeable, to appeal to some of its more distinctive achievements in justification of its claim, as one of the greatest creative periods in our national annals, to a somewhat larger share of the regard and veneration of English readers than it has of late been the fashion to accord to it.

In regard to the sweeping but reiterated charge of dullness, in addition to what we have already said, we can only claim that the great names in any one of our chapters constitute a sufficient refutation. If the first chapter, with Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gray, prove inconclusive, take the second, with Boswell, Chesterfield, and Walpole; here surely we have no less than three several refutations, for the state of mind of the man who can describe Boswell's biography or Walpole's Letters as dull is to the ordinary literary imagination unthinkable. People of the critical calibre of George III. may perhaps yet be found to call Fielding dull, and Cowper brutal, and Uncle Toby unprincipled; but if Sheridan and dullness are convertible terms, we may reasonably expect to hear that Shakespeare is shallow, Milton no scholar, Hume obtuse, Tennyson coarse, or George Meredith stupid.

In the foregoing incomplete enumeration, the reader will perceive that the names of two men of genius, the most conspicuous of our period-those of Edmund Burke and Robert Burns-are omitted. The contrast between these two men is a singular one-Burke perhaps the loftiest and Burns the homeliest, in the best sense of homely—that our literature has to show. The man who enunciated in memorable words the fundamental principle that 'magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a