English Literature

characteristic is more noteworthy than his humility. A single incident will illustrate this. A member of his congregation once complimented him on a sermon he had preached, calling it a "sweet" sermon. The great man, to whose imagination the forces of evil were very real and always present, replied: "You need not tell me that, for the devil whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit."

A Noteworthy Pamphlet. — This chapter should not end without mention of a publication that had a great effect on the drama of this period, and incidentally upon the moral tone of the literature as a whole. This was a pamphlet entitled, Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, by Jeremy Collier, a dissenting clergyman. It appeared in 1698, two years, that is, before Dryden's death; and it was very specific as to names of both authors and plays, Dryden receiving a due share of condemnation. He differed from other offenders in admitting the justice of the charges, and making a feeble apology.

That such a spectacle as the comedy of the Restoration must have come to an end in time is doubtless true; but it is also true that the reform was hastened by the clergyman's blast. While the pamphlet is an absolutely uncritical performance, it appeared at a moment when merely a vigorous statement of the situation would contribute much toward a removal of the evil.

Fielding, Smollett, Sterne; and to one poet - Pope- who, as we shall presently see, treated in metrical form just the sort of subjects treated by the others in prose and in a not dissimilar fashion.

An Age of Reason. It was an age of reason in that the appeal of its writers was largely to the intellect and slightly to the imagination or to the emotions. This assertion may be disputed by one who recalls that Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Sir Roger de Coverley belong to the first half of the century. But the De Coverley Papers were popular because readers found in them so much of the life of their own day; and Robinson Crusoe was read not as a creation of the imagination, but as sober narrative of real experiences. Swift's object in Gulliver's Travels was not to entertain, but to satirize politics, religion, learning, and well nigh every phase of life. Even the titles of Pope's poems show lack of imagination and feeling, qualities inseparably connected in most minds with any poetry worthy the name. He wrote an Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man, Moral Essays, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (his closest friend), Epistle on Taste, Satires (imitations of Horace), The Dunciad (a long series of spiteful, personal attacks on contemporaries).

Although some characteristics run through the literature of the entire century, certain differences between the first half of the century and the second half make a subdivision desirable. It is convenient to name these subdivisions from the men whose influence dominated each: the age of Pope (to his death in 1744), and the age of Johnson.