times jewelled and enamelled as well, has much superficial likeness to the strong uncoloured prose of Dryden. In the class of declamatory writers Burke stands easily first; his tracts and orations do not speak reflectively, with the still small voice which the cloistered student loves, but in resonant accents, so that even in the study their effect is completed to the imagination by cries of defiance or rounds of applause from an unseen audience. It may be questioned whether books conceived and executed in this spirit can ever be held among the most precious possessions of the true lover of pure literature. But as illustrations of a wonderful public career, and as specimens of oratory at its loftiest pinnacle of success, they outshine all rivalry; and although it is probable that Burke, as a writer, has enjoyed his fullest panegyrics in the immediate past, the future can never be entirely disloyal to a publicist so chivalrous, so fervid, and so logical.

CHAPTER XII

CONCLUSION

WHEN we approach the close of the seventeenth century in English literature, we begin to be confronted by a practical difficulty. A door must be open or shut, and the chamber of our studies will hold but a limited number of forms or ideas at a single time. What is to be excluded, and what retained, becomes a burning question. In the early stages of civilisation, everything written takes its place as literature, but with the widening of the habit of penmanship there springs up an ever-increasing mass of script which is by no means to be treated as literary art. Even in the Elizabethan age there were two branches of written and published work which mainly passed outside the conception of literature, namely, theology and law. But still, throughout the seventeenth century, poetry remained the normal class of expression, while prose retained its conscious character as something which had to compete with poetry and share its graces. It is at the point where these graces of language are entirely subordinated (in the discussion of practical subjects) to exact statement of fact, that there arises a class of books which cannot be treated as literature, in spite of their importance as contributions to thought and knowledge. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century a spirited effort was made to chronicle the new observations of science in the best literary form of the age, but it could not be sustained. The reader has but to compare the Acetaria

of Evelyn and the Anti-Elixir of Boyle with any authoritative modern treatise on the cookery of cucumbers or the composition of alloys, to see how very much the absence of all literary elegance is of advantage in obtaining exact information upon practical subjects. Accordingly, the graces were tacitly and gradually excluded from all treatment of purely utilitarian problems and exact observations, and this exclusion divided the vast body of what was written into literature and non-literary matter.

We must, therefore, prepare ourselves, on approaching the year 1700, to find the history of English literature no longer identical with the history of English thought. There has recently been developed a tendency to go in the opposite direction, and instead of narrowing the field of study to enlarge it. It has been proposed to combine with an examination of English literature a survey of contemporary history and politics, science and learning, theology and speculation. Such a curriculum is fit only for an archangel, dowered with eyes "that run thro' all the heavens," and with a memory and a comprehension beyond a mortal span. No doubt a direct benefit in the exact study of any one province of knowledge is gained by a correct superficial acquaintance with all that is contiguous to it; but common sense and experience unite to show that with the increase of facts, and the minute subdivision of science, the field of any one particular study, to remain exact, must be rigidly narrowed. It is, therefore, I think, useful for the student of English literature, on reaching the eighteenth century, to make up his mind to the acceptance of a formula less extended than he has hitherto brought with him down from the Renaissance. He will so contract his field of study as to embrace only what may be contained within the denomination of belles-lettres in its widest sense, to the exclusion of whatever is purely technical or occasional.

In a

It is difficult, no doubt, in practice, to draw any hard and fast line between what is and is not literature in this sense. rough kind of way we may see that while The Public Spirit of the Whigs and the Letter to a Noble Lord are inside, the Behaviour

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of the Queen's Ministry and the Duration of Parliaments are outside the frontier of literature; yet, on the whole, it will be convenient to give everything of such masters as Swift and Burke the benefit of the doubt. It is when we descend to less accomplished forces than these that it becomes obvious that the epoch-making work of the Methodist and the Deist, the politician and the savant, the jurist and the economist, although so important in the history of society, of thought, and of the state, must, from the point of view of the mere student of literature, be, for the future, left unexamined, or very briefly and inadequately touched. We must restrict ourselves severely to what remains in some degree linked with the art of poetry, to what aims at giving delight by its form, to what appeals to the sentiments and the pleasure-receiving instincts, and is not merely a vehicle for instruction or edification.

If, however, it becomes necessary in approaching the Augustan age to confine our study of English literature within closer limits, we are encouraged in so doing by the tendency of that age itself. The seventeenth century had been a period of extraordinary literary adventure. Every species of intellectual stimulus had stirred the educated classes throughout the reign of the last of the Tudors, and one amazing achievement had followed on the heels of another. Greece, Italy, Rome, and Spain had been laid under contribution for the enrichment and enlargement of the genius of this country, and a magnificent literature was borne, like a triumphal procession, heavy with the spoils of Europe, in front of the throne of Elizabeth. But this glowing triumph had tailed off, by the time the Commonwealth was reached, into a grotesque and anarchical body of camp-followers, with here and there a majestic Milton or Taylor to recall the greatness of the past. When the Restoration was complete, and the babel of voices had died away, the new generation had no desire to recall the deafening chorus of Jacobean decadence, but rather proposed to reduce its own manifestations to the most decent and prosaic forms. The tradition of eighteenthcentury reserve was formed in the intellectual fatigue that succeeded the decline of Elizabethan greatness, and the last thing

which the contemporaries of Dryden proposed to themselves was a new crusade of literary adventure.

Where there is life, however, there must be experiment, and in spite of its studied quiescence, eighteenth-century literature is full of new departures. To detect these, and to analyse them correctly, is one of the first tasks which the student must set himself to undertake, when once he has mastered the chart of the period. At first sight there seems to be an absence of general tendency; the forces appear to be wielded by certain master-spirits at their individual pleasure, without much relation to contemporary feeling. We have no longer, certainly, those well-defined schools, or, to change the image, those prominent ranges, culminating in peaks, which diversify the map of seventeenth-century literature, and make its general aspect so rich and full. We find movements less absorbing and men more prominent. In the development of literary society, the personage of letters emerges from the obscurity of professional life, and poses as an important single figure. Literary history in the eighteenth century, however, is far from being the chronicle of a series of brilliant units. Perhaps because of that very meagreness of outside influence which has been alluded to, the transmission of forces from generation to generation was never more marked than between 1660 and 1780. The continuity of metaphysical speculation from Locke onward, the long-resisted and slowly-adopted new literary profession of journalism, the evolution of the modern novel from the expiring schools of comedy, the gradual resumption of an observant interest in the phenomena of society and of landscape, the dawning of a taste for Gothic romance,-these are but the most salient of a number of experimental movements, rising from the dead surface of the century, and pursued across wide sections of its extent.

These experiments, these feats of literary adventure, are not hurried forward during the eighteenth century as they were at the close of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth. Then it took but a year or two to create, introduce, and make fashionable a whole new form of literature. Any match, whatever wind