are to run; the theology of each Poet as created by his special individuality.

There were two other lines of thought on which I resolved to place these lectures; the theology imported by each poet into the poetry of Man, and the poetry of Nature. For a poetry which had to do with all the questions which belong to man as a whole, and to the growth, origin, and destiny of the individual man :—and a poetry which had to do especially and separately with Nature, with the whole of the outward world and all its parts, with the emotions it stirred and the thoughts that we gave to it, took clear form for the first time towards the close of the eighteenth century, and has never ceased to grow and to add branch to branch, up to the present time. It may be truly said to date from the publication of the "Task" of Cowper in 1785, of the Village of Crabbe in 1783, of the first Poems of Burns in 1786. But nothing is born all in a moment in this world, and the poetry which dealt specially with Man, as well as that which dealt specially with Nature, though they first became clearly defined in Cowper had been slowly growing into form before him. The different stages of the growth of each I must be permitted to sketch with as much conciseness as possible. I will do that for the poetry of Man to-day, in the rest of this Lecture. In the following I shall do the same work for the poetry of Nature, and then take up the Poets themselves, and show how in each the poetry of Man, the poetry of Nature, as well as their personal poetry, became tinged by theology. In each Poet then we shall trace the theology in his human, natural, and personal poetry.

Our object now is to trace the growth of the poetry of Man up to the time of Cowper, when theology distinctly entered into it.

In Dryden, Pope, Swift, Prior, Roscommon and the rest, we find the searching and critical spirit of the eighteenth century looking on man as an intellectual and social being, and their poetry reflects with clearness the leading thoughts about Man of that masculine and vigorous time. They seek from the intellectual point of view for an explanation of the problems which beset us; they go on to ask how such circumstances as riches and poverty, the follies of society and its oddities of taste, bear upon his life; they describe the variety of characters in men and women. Even the new scientific discoveries of the time, its credulity and scepticism are touched on in this poetry, and an attempt is made in the "Essay on Man" to reduce to a system the dim questionings with regard to the spiritual nature which science and scepticism had awakened.

Pope said that the proper study of mankind was Man. But he approached that study from the side of the intellect alone. It was by the criticism of the understanding, not by the emotion of the heart that he worked on his subject. The result was cold speculation and brilliant satire, and in neither of those tempers is any one fit to write fairly or nobly about the whole of Human Nature; though he is fitted to write about that which Man does, or Man has, up to a certain point. The surface of the "study of mankind" is touched it may be in all its points, but the writer does not penetrate into its depths. It is just the difference between Ben Jonson and Shake

:

speare the one not seriously caring for his characters, but only how he may develope them; the other loving, pitying, being personally indignant with his characters: so that in the one we study not men but the humours of men; in the other we study men, nay mankind. The one creates images of men and dresses them and makes them play their part by strings upon his stage: the other creates living men, and bids them act, and sits by watching them with passion. There is the same kind of difference between Pope's study of man and that study of him to which Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron have accustomed us.

Again we find no large study of mankind as a whole in Pope. It is classes of men whom we meet, not the conception of the race. The idea of the Universal Man, of one common mankind, rising above all distinctions of clan, caste, race, and nation, did not exist in Pope's time; we owe it to the Revolution. There were dreams of it, suggestions, hints, but of the clear, concise, world-subduing conception there is little or no trace; no real poetry of Man in the true sense of the word existed. Whereas, since Wordsworth's time, it breathes in every English Poem. In both the particular and universal view the change is immense.

The same kind of study of Man lasted during Pope's life and after his death in 1744. It lives in Johnson's London, 1738, and in his Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, as observant and indignant satire; it lives in that Poem of Akenside's which continued the speculations of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury. It was the spirit of Pope enduring after Pope was gone, and even less than Pope

did Akenside bestow human emotion on his speculations. But even before the death of Pope a change had begun. Pope's study of man did not carry him beyond the city; he has no interest in the rustic, in the uneducated, in the relation of man to Nature apart from society, in the past history of man, even of Englishmen. But, in 1726, Thomson makes us touch the farmhouse and the labourer, the traveller lost in the snow, the far-off lives of men of other nations where Winter rules over half the year. We have got out of England, as we have in Dyer's Ruins of Rome in 1740. In Warton's Poems, though his own personality overshadows everything, we again find ourselves among country people, the milkmaid singing and the woodman at his work. In the exquisitely pencilled "Elegy " of Gray we are brought face to face with the ploughman, the rude forefathers of the hamlet, the village Hampden, the solitary who, far from cities and society

Along the cool sequestered vale of life

Has kept the noiseless tenor of his way.

Again, the speculative study of Man, his origin, duties, and destiny, from the point of view of the inquiring intellect, has now passed away, and there is a tender, but somewhat sentimental treatment of Man, as the subject of the musing moralist, as the victim of the passions and changes and ills of life, and as listening to the soothing or warning voice with which Nature speaks to him in his enjoyment or his pain.

There is also a distinct delight shown in the history of Man in the Past, a thing almost impossible to the previous school in which the Present was so powerful that it

filled all the view. Both the "Bard" and the "Progress of Poesy," illustrate this new element. The poetry of the two Wartons, about the same date, continually goes over the past glories of the English nation, and Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry was but the beginning of that vivid delight in what our fore-fathers did, to which Chatterton afterwards gave a fresher life, and which runs through all the minor Poets of the time. This new interest in the men of the past-though it is necessary to observe that it did not travel beyond the men of our country, so as to become an interest in mankind-was afterwards stimulated by the influence of the elder Pitt, whose whole life and work exalted England in her own eyes.

The interest in Man was defective then in that it did not embrace mankind. It had also lost, in losing Pope's interest in social life, and in the intellectual and speculative side of human questions, and in its transference from the town to the country, elements which were afterwards to be revived. But though it lost something for the time, it gained new elements, and in a few years after the death of Pope we have seen that we are in a new poetic world upon the subject. Still the interest even in Man in the country, in a simpler, kinder, more rugged, human life, was not the living, close, direct thing it afterwards became. It is the distant, rather dainty interest nursed by college life, which scholars, like Warton, or like Gray looking out on the world from the window of Peterhouse, would be likely to take-a quiet contemplative interest such as he describes in lines, which, written in 1742, embody the spirit in which he looked on Man,