gelical treatise, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, 1729, ---a volume that is composed in an enthusiastic and exalted spirit which is almost an anomaly in the prosaic eighteenth century. Law was a High Churchman, and he enjoined upon his readers an unflinching asceticism, denouncing every species of carnal pleasure with the fervour of a Tertullian. Although the Wesleyans in the succeeding generation owed a good deal to his teaching, neither they nor any section of the Church of England could be said to be his disciples. He is, in fact, a solitary philosophic mystic, of very unusual literary gift. Certain of his treatises contain sketches somewhat in the manner of La Bruyère, of typical men and women of the world, drawn with a great deal of wit and fancy. Wesley was at first an admirer of Law, but he broke with him in 1738, and in 1756 Wesley severely and publicly attacked his old friend's mysticism. Yet late on in life Wesley found himself obliged to speak of the Serious Call as a treatise which will hardly be excelled in the English tongue either for beauty of expression or for justice and depth of thought."

The two women who wrote most cleverly during the reign of Anne were unlucky enough to secure a pre-eminence in coarseness of language, a quality which would have enabled them to graduate with success in the school of Charles II. It has never been suggested to question the ability of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), the eldest daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston, though she is now perhaps best remembered by her unseemly squabbles with Pope. Lady Mary was educated under Bishop Burnet, who early instilled into her a passionate love of literature. For him, at the age of twenty, she translated the Enchiridion of Epictetus. At eight years old she was the toast of the Kit-Cat Club, her face already giving promise of the splendid beauty of her maturity. When she was six-and-twenty, her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, was appointed ambassador to the Porte, and Lady Mary had the advantage, for two or three years, of studying Eastern manners under unusually favourable circumstances. From 1739 to 1761 she resided principally in

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Italy. It was her habit, during her long periods of exile from England, to write copiously to friends at home, and when a selection from these letters was published in 1763 Lady Mary was recognised at once as having been one of the wittiest of English letter-writers. She took pains to introduce into this country in 1717 the Turkish practice of inoculation for the smallpox, and it is in a letter to Miss Sarah Chiswell, from Adrianople, on 1st April of that year, that she first mentions this subject, in the following terms :

"I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell; and in this manner opens four or five veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the middle of the forehead, in each arm, and on the breast, to mark the sign of the cross; but this has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those who are not superstitious, who choose to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm that is concealed. . . . Every year thousands undergo this operation, and the French ambassador says, pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries,"

In many respects, though hard and mannish in temper, Lady Mary was eminent for width of view and for a mind open to the whole intellectual horizon. Her Town Eclogues, printed in 1716 in heroic verse, are so rich and sparkling that they almost place Lady Mary among the poets, but they are of astounding freedom of thought and language.

A muse more draggle-tailed than Lady Mary's now claims our attention for a moment. Delarivière Manley (1672-1724) was born

in Guernsey, of which island her father was governor. She was early left an orphan, was seduced and basely abandoned by a relative, and during the remainder of her unhappy life never succeeded in making peace with society. She set herself to write for the stage, and produced two plays in 1696, a tragedy of The Royal Mischief and a comedy of The Lost Lover, both of which enjoyed a considerable success. Her later dramas were less brilliant and less fortunate. She fell into poverty and distress, and revenged herself upon the town in 1709 by publishing the four volumes of that "cornucopia of scandal" The New Atalantis, in which almost every public character of the day had his or her niche. This scurrilous book passed through a great number of editions; it amused Swift, who determined to make use of the author. He described Mrs. Manley to Stella as having "very generous principles for one of her sort, and a great deal of good sense and invention;" although Steele, after she had attacked him, professed to find her " a bubble to his mind." She continued her prolific Secret Memoirs, and presently slipped into journalism. In June 1711 Swift gave up into her hands the editorship of the Examiner. She held it until the beginning of 1713. Mrs. Manley's scandalous pamphlets are now dispersed, in many cases beyond recognition. Mr. Austin Dobson believes that she wrote the famous Toby Character of Richard St-le in 1713. She grew to be very fat and homely, but she found an admirer in Alderman Barber, who lifted her from the drudgery of Grub Street and gave her a home in his house until she died. We would willingly give a page from The New Atalantis, but unfortunately it is precisely where Mrs. Manley is most picturesque that it is least possible to quote from her.

CHAPTER VII

THE DAWN OF NATURALISM IN POETRY

TOWARDS the close of Pope's career, a distinct change began to come over the face of English poetry. When the prestige of Pope was at its height, and the execution of his verse most highly admired, the strongest among the younger poets began to cease to follow him, partly, perhaps, because they despaired of surpassing him in his peculiar excellences-partly, no doubt, in response to an alteration in popular taste. Pope himself, by his Eloisa to Abelard, had hinted at the possibility of reintroducing poetry of a very serious and romantic type, which should deal with questions of moral passion in solemn numbers. group of poets which was then presently to be proved to be pitched mainly in this key, to which Pope never recurred, although he received the productions of the first romantic poets with sympathy, and even, it is said, with the hand and eye of a benignant technical master. The imitation of Pope was revived a generation later, and also, of course, existed widely throughout the period of which we are now speaking; but it is not always clearly enough recognised that the Augustan spirit had remarkably little part in suggesting what was best in the poetry of the second section of the eighteenth century.

The work of the in the ascendant

During the twenty-five years from the publication of Thomson's Spring in 1726 to that of Gray's Elegy in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse which appeared were all

of a new type, sombre, as a rule, certainly stately, romantic in tone. to the extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly indeed, but with respect, to what was "Gothic" in manners, architecture, and language, all showing a more or less vague aspiration towards the study of nature, and not one composed in the heroic couplet hitherto so rigorously imposed on serious verse. The Seasons, Night Thoughts, and The Grave are written in blank verse, The Castle of Indolence and The Schoolmistress in Spenserian stanza, The Spleen and Grongar Hill in octosyllabics (in the latter case very loosely strung), while the early odes of Gray and those of Collins are composed in a great variety of simple but novel lyric measures. The later elaborate odes of Gray, published in 1754, come outside our limit of date, and form in their turn a link with the nineteenth century.

This group of poets, then, containing one great man of letters, Gray, and at least two poets of very high rank, Thomson and Collins, possesses an historical importance out of proportion with its popularity at the present moment. After having enjoyed a reputation considerably in excess of their merits, certain of these romantic moralists of the second quarter of the eighteenth century are now scarcely read at all. Their names, nevertheless, are still familiar to every educated person, and they live in tradition and anecdote. They mark the faint glow of the coming naturalism much more clearly than do the poets of the succeeding age, where the darkness was most solid just before the dawn. In their pomp

of style and crepuscular moral splendour they appeal to a taste which is not of to-day; but a careful and sympathetic study of their writings may be urged upon the student of literature as indispensable to a proper comprehension of one very characteristic side of the intellectual development of the eighteenth century.

The study of nature which is marked in the writings of this group of poets received considerable encouragement from the newly-fostered appetite for ballads and loosely-kilted Scottish songs. Allan Ramsay, in his Scots Songs of 1719, and still more in his Tea-Table Miscellany and Evergreen of 1724, had re