nations as if they were their own, and which inspires Cowper's amazing and prophetic denunciation of the Bastille.

Cowper is in indirect succession, not only of Wesley and Chatham, but of the authors of the jeremiads. Though he allows one of the characters in the "Table Talk" to sneer at the "inestimable estimate of Brown," that is only for the other to justify the author. Brown had diagnosed the illness, though he had failed to predict the miraculous recovery. The poet thus addresses his

country:

"Once Chatham saved thee, but who saves thee next?”

and after denouncing her luxury, her venality, and the avarice that starves two or three millions of mankind, he describes her as "A land once Christian, fall'n and lost." The same note is struck in "The Task," wherein he describes how

Sober and good men are sad

At England's glory, seeing it wax pale."

But we have seen that Cowper's moods are not altogether consistent, and his patriotic enthusiasm gets quite the master of his pessimism, at the end of his poem on "Heroism," in which he talks of the

"Heaven-protected isle,

Where Peace and Equity and Freedom smile,
Where no volcano pours his fiery flood,

No crested warrior dips his plume in blood,
Where Pow'r receives what Industry has won,
Where to succeed is not to be undone;

A land that distant tyrants hate in vain,
In Britain isle, beneath a George's reign."

We see him at his very noblest neither when he praises, nor when he denounces, but in that famous passage, which voices the sentiment of a perfect lover:

"England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!

Cowper's spirit comes close to that of a comrade in letters, whose smoothness and Popean polish are in

striking contrast with his own ruggedness. Oliver Goldsmith is a true Romantic in everything but form, and particularly in his touching and sensitive humanity. He and Cowper joined in denouncing the greed of wealth, which was depleting the country, to swell the man-made towns. The existence of a social problem was coming to be recognized, and a return to nature was taking place, similar in many respects to that which was being preached by Rousseau. The honest simplicity of poor and rustic folks was contrasted with the heartless and effeminate depravity of their superiors, and this cult was pushed to an extreme by Thomas Day, who created that insufferably virtuous farmer's son, Harry Sandford, to rebuke and reform the spoilt child of the wealthy planter, and to vanquish, in single combat, the gilded and overweening Master Mash. Yet is Goldsmith's romantic fervour qualified by a tincture of that same solid Toryism that possessed his most unromantic friend, Dr. Johnson. He is both an exponent, and a critic, of a patriotism founded upon liberty. In "The Traveller," which was written. shortly after the end of the Seven Years' War, he thus apostrophizes his countrymen :

"

W Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by,
Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band,

By forms unfashioned, fresh from nature's hand,
Fierce in their native hardiness of soul,

True to imagined right above control,

While e'en the peasant boasts those rights to scan,
And learns to venerate himself as man.

Thine, Freedom, thine the blessings pictured here.

"

But even freedom is not an unmixed blessing. Goldsmith is in agreement with Cowper, in depreciating the churlishness, which so frequently mars the independence, 'Keeps man from man, and breaks the social tie."

"

But even worse consequence than this may flow from liberty. There is a danger of individualism degenerating

into selfishness and avarice, and finally ruining the State. Goldsmith gives a gloomy picture of what may happen, if such tendencies continue unchecked. But he instantly goes on to defend himself against the accusation of servility. He says of freedom, that he only wishes to repress her blooms in order to secure them, and reaches the rather tame conclusion that,

All that freedom's highest aims can reach

Is but to lay proportioned loads on each."

In the "Citizen of the World," he puts into the mouth of his Chinese philosopher a somewhat whimsical disquisition upon the same subject. Neither in popular control of legislation, nor in fewness of laws, nor in exemption from taxation, nor in security of property, are the English much better off than other European States. The palladium of our liberties is the monarchy. Owing to the strength of this element in the Constitution, it is possible for the laws constantly to be relaxed without danger, and thus Englishmen are able to transgress with impunity against all sorts of laws, which it may be equally inadvisable to cancel, or to enforce pedantically. This gives the Constitution of England "the strength of its native oak and the flexibility of the bending tamarisk.” What a contrast is the cautious Liberalism of this Englishman with the fiery enthusiasm of men like Condorcet and Jean Jacques!

If we return for a moment to our Dictionary of Political Phrases," we shall find a free-born Englishman to be "One who is continually bragging of liberty and independence when he has neither will nor property of his own"; and national egotism, "An unpardonable custom among the French of extolling their own merit to the skies, but never practised among the modest natives of this kingdom, though our presses are continually teeming with sons of liberty, roast beef and pudding, noble-minded Britons and free-born English

men.' The blending of the conceptions of liberty and patriotism was tending, sometimes, to produce a less offensively insular attitude than had been common among English patriots. Thus, in "The Traveller," we find the keenest sympathy and appreciation for other nations, though without any question of cosmopolitanism supplanting patriotism, the patriotism of others, as when Goldsmith says of the Swiss :

"

For every good his native wilds impart
Imprints the patriot passion on his heart,"

or of France:

"Gay, sprightly land of mirth and social ease,

Pleased with thyself, whom all the world can please.”

The new spirit had begun to penetrate not only literature, but the world of politics and action. The soldier conquerors of America and India were, each in his way, men of the new spirit; Clive, the high-strung, passionate adventurer, with his splendid dreams and unsteady character; and Wolfe, who declared that he would rather have written Gray's "Elegy" than have taken Quebec. A new generation of statesmen was springing up, the opposite to the type of Sir Robert Walpole. The example of Chatham doubtless went for much, and Burke, though of less unqualified genius, was not less of a Romantic. His earliest pamphlets show the cast of his mind. One of them is an elaborate satire on Bolingbroke, who was generally held to be the supreme representative of infidelity and deism, and its object is to prove that if such principles are pushed to their conclusion, society can have no principle of cohesion. The other is a treatise on the sublime and beautiful. The golden age of English oratory was dawning; Fox and Sheridan and Windham, Erskine and Wilberforce, were coming above the horizon, while Grattan's eloquence cast an undying radiance over the ill-fated Irish Parliament. The new spirit, various yet all-pervading, was breathing new life into the de

liberations, even of placemen. An era was dawning, to which the wrongs of subject races were a theme for eloquence, and to which the slave trade was intolerable.

Fully to understand this renaissance, as it affected England, we must study it in its most characteristic, and perhaps its most sublime product. It is because, in William Blake, the Romantic spirit shines virgin from any alloy of the past, that to understand him is to understand romance as it affected England. He gives us the advantage, perhaps unique in history, of isolating one of the main spiritual forces that affect nations. Hence we make no apology for devoting to his work what may seem a disproportionate amount of our attention.

Blake will never take the throne, that belongs to him of right, as one of the kings of literature. The modern Blake cult is exotic and probably ephemeral, it is rather the fad of a clique than the homage of a nation. Swinburne's monograph is generous and interesting, but then Swinburne's ideals and methods were so directly contrary to those of Blake, as to make a fair estimate almost unthinkable at his hands; Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, voluminous and painstaking as their work undoubtedly is, fail in their task because they never seem able to grasp the fact that Blake was, all his life, a laughing, irresponsible child, whereas they persist in regarding him as a very pedantic and portentously solemn old man, whose plainest statements must be dissected for some esoteric meaning, and whose very jokes are either capable of demonstration, or inexcusable. The academic papacy is really very little affected one way or the other. The “Cambridge Modern History" includes a chapter on the Romantic movement, by an "ex-Professor of Poetry," who seems to consider the names of Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. Cowley and Erasmus Darwin, more worthy of mention than that of the author of Thel" and "Jerusalem."

To understand Blake, we must become as he was, child