The extraordinary popularity of those periodicals, especially the Spectator, was creditable to the reading persons of the community, then very much fewer than now. But it was a tribute to extraordinary merit, and to a soundness of judgment which appreciated correctly, how far, and by what means, the attempt to elevate and purify the public taste and sentiment could safely be ventured on. The idea of the projectors was that of adopting the form of those flying sheets, which had hitherto been hardly ever anything better than indifferent little newspapers; of discarding from their pages all that could nourish party-spirit, or provoke party-prejudice; of making them the vehicle of judicious teaching in morals, manners, and literary criticism; and of paying homage, now and then, to truths yet more sacred..

If the design was not quite that of founding a literature for the people, it combined at least the two aims, of widening the circle of persons who might be made to take an interest in literary affairs, and of raising the standard both of thinking and of taste for those who had already acquired the habit of reading. To the mere literary lounger, their comic sketches of society, their whimsical autobiographies, their exposures of social weaknesses and follies, in petitions, letters, or skilful allegories, offered themselves as supplying the place of the worn-out comic stage, and as supplying that place not only purely but instructively. It might indeed be said, with yet greater aptness, that the Spectator offered itself also to the novel-reader. It is full of little novels, or of fragments of such if we take consecutively the scattered sketches, telling the history of Sir Roger De Coverley, we shall find them to constitute a novel as properly as any work openly bearing the name. For those who were something more than idlers, there were held out objects much higher; objects of contemplation which lead us to think better of the age, than we could if we had only Pope and Swift to look to as its expositors. Of this more ambitious and serious character are many single b. 1672. papers of Addison's, and several groups of papers in d. 1719. each of which he carried out a systematic train of thought. We might find such, especially, throughout the last volume of the Spectator. But it is enough to cite, of his religious meditations, the essays on the Immortality of the Soul; and to point out a few where he expatiates in another walk of reflection. His papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination are highly meritorious, as sinking a shaft in unbroken ground; and

his criticisms on Milton, if not very abstruse, are full of taste and sensibility, and were the earliest public recognition of the greatness of that great poet.*

*JOSEPH ADDISON.

I. A Ghost Story: from the Spectator; No. 110.

At a little distance from Sir Roger's house, among the ruins of an old abbey, there is a long walk of aged elms; which are shot up so very high, that, when one passes under them, the rooks and crows that rest on the tops of them seem to be cawing in another region. I am very much delighted with this sort of noise; which I consider as a kind of natural prayer to that Being who supplies the wants of his whole creation, and who, in the beautiful language of the Psalms, feedeth the young ravens that call upon him.

I like this retirement the better, because of an ill report it lies under of being haunted; for which reason (as I have been told in the family) no living creature ever walks in it besides the chaplain. My good friend the butler desired me, with a very grave face, not to venture myself in it after sunset; for that one of the footmen had been almost frighted out of his wits, by a spirit that appeared to him in the shape of a black horse without a head to which he added, that about a month ago one of the maids, coming home late that way with a pail of milk upon her head, heard such a rustling among the bushes that she let it fall.

I was taking a walk in this place last night between the hours of nine and ten; and could not but fancy it one of the most proper scenes in the world for a ghost to appear in. The ruins of the abbey are scattered up and down on every side, and half covered with ivy and elder-bushes, the harbours of several solitary birds which seldom make their appearance till the dusk of the evening. The place was formerly a churchyard, and has still several marks in it of graves and burying-places. There is such an echo among the old ruins and vaults, that, if you stamp but a little louder than ordinary, you hear the sound repeated. At the same time the walk of elms, with the croaking of the ravens which from time to time are heard from the tops of them, looks exceedingly solemn and venerable. These objects naturally raise seriousness and attention; and, when night heightens the awfulness of the place, and pours out her supernumerary horrors upon everything in it, I do not at all wonder that weak minds fill it with spectres and apparitions.

In this solitude, where the dusk of the evening conspired with so many other occasions of terror, I observed a cow grazing not far from me, which an imagination that was apt to startle might easily have construed into a black horse without a head; and I daresay the poor footman lost his wits upon some such trivial occasion.

II. Reflections: from the Essays "On the Pleasures of the Imagination;" Spectator, Nos. 411-431.

The Supreme Author of our being has made everything that is beautiful in all objects pleasant, or rather has made so many objects appear beautiful, that He might render the whole creation more gay and delightful. He has given almost everything about us the power of raising an agreeable idea in the imagination; so that it is impossible for us to behold His works with coldness or indifference, and to survey so many beauties without a secret satisfaction and complacency.

We are everywhere entertained with pleasing shows and apparitions; we discover imaginary glories in the heavens and on the earth, and see some of this visionary beauty poured out upon the whole creation; but what a rough unsightly sketch of Nature should we be entertained with, did all her colouring disappear, and the several distinctions of light and shade vanish! In short, our souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing delusion: and we walk about like the enchanted hero in a romance, who sees beautiful castles, woods, and meadows, and at the same time hears the warbling of birds and the purling of streams; but, upon the finishing of some secret spell, the fantastic scene breaks up, and the disconsolate knight finds himself on a barren heath or in a solitary desert. It is not improbable that something like this may be the state of the soul after its first separation, in respect of the images it will receive from matter.

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As the writers in poetry and fiction borrow their several materials from outward objects, and join them together at their own pleasure, there are others who are obliged to follow nature more closely, and to take entire scenes out of her. Such are historians, natural philosophers, travellers, geographers; and, in a word, all who describe visible objects of a real existence.

Among this set of writers, there are none who more gratify and enlarge the imagination than the authors of the new philosophy; whether we consider their theories of the earth or heavens, the discoveries they have made by glasses or any other of their contemplations on nature. We are not a little pleased to find every green leaf swarm with millions of animals, that at their largest growth are not visible to the naked eye. There is something very engaging to the fancy, as well as to our reason, in the treatises of metals, minerals, plants, and meteors. But, when we survey the whole earth at once, and the several planets that lie within its neighbourhood, we are filled with a pleasing astonishment, to see so many worlds hanging one above another, and sliding round their axles in such an amazing pomp and solemnity. If, after this, we contemplate those wild fields of ether, that reach in height as far as from Saturn to the fixed stars, and run abroad almost to an infinitude, our imagination finds its capacity filled with so immense a prospect, and puts itself upon the stretch to comprehend it. But, if we yet rise higher, and consider the fixed stars as so many vast oceans of flame, that are each of them attended with a different set of planets; and still discover new firmaments and new lights that are sunk farther in those unfathomable depths of ether, so as not to be seen by the strongest of our telescopes; we are lost in such a labyrinth of suns and worlds, and confounded with the immensity and magnificence of nature.

CHAPTER XI.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

SECTION THIRD: THE LITERATURE OF THE SECOND GENERATION.

PROSE. 1. Theology-Warburton-Bishop Butler's Analogy-Watts and Doddridge— Philosophy-Butler's Ethical System-The Metaphysics of David Hume-Jonathan Edwards-Franklin.-2. Miscellaneous Prose-Minor Writers-New Series of Periodical Essays-Magazines and Reviews.-3. Samuel Johnson-His Life-His Literary Character-4. Johnson's Works. 5. The Novelists-Their Moral Faultiness. -POETRY. 6. The Drama-Non-Dramatic Poetry-Rise in Poetical Tone Didactic Poems-Johnson-Young-Akenside-Narrative and Descriptive Poems -Thomson's Seasons.-7. Poetical Taste of the Public-Lyrical Poems of Gray and Collins.

PROSE LITERATURE.

1. AMONG the Theological Writers who may be assigned to the reign of George the Second, the most widely famous in his day, though by no means the most meritorious, was the arrogant and pugnacious Bishop Warburton. His best known work, "The Divine Legation of Moses," is admitted to be, notwithstanding its curious variety of illustration, worthless in regard to its main design. Greater value is attributed to his defence of church establishments, and his vindications of the Christian faith against infidelity. The latter task, however, was performed with incomb. 1692.parably greater ability in Bishop Butler's "Analogy of d. 1752. Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature." This admirable treatise, one of the most exact pieces of reasoning in any language, is intended to show, that all objections which can be urged, either against the Religion of Nature or against that of Christianity, are equally valid in disproof of truths which are universally believed, and which regulate the whole tenor of human action. No writer can be further than Butler from being either eloquent or elegant and his incessant tide of close reasoning calls for very severe exertion, on the part of those who would be borne along on the stream with intelligent attention. His bareness and clumsiness of style

are proofs of that sterling and extraordinary force of thought, which impresses us so deeply without any extraneous assistance.

The works in Practical Theology were increasingly numerous; and some of them, such as the eloquent sermons of Sherlock, retain a place in literary history. Hervey's writings do not deserve that honour for any thing except their goodness of intention. But there is much literary merit in those of the gently pious Watts, and still more in those of the fervidly devout Doddridge. Nor were these two the only men who supported the reputation of the Nonconformists. Leland did good service by his dissections of deistical writers; and Lardner's works are still of very high worth, as stores both of learning and of thought.

In the Church of England, and out of it, there was a waxing zeal, and a more cordial recognition of the importance of religion: and much good was done, through seeming separation, by the increased prosperity of the Dissenters, and the formation of the two bodies of Methodists. These were things which gradually leavened much of the literature of the times.

Meanwhile Philosophy had distinguished votaries, with Butler at their head. The high-toned Ethical System of this excellent thinker has received full justice from most of our recent speculators on the theory of morals. Much inferior in power as well as clearness, but still useful in the same field, was Hutcheson, an Irishman, who taught in Glasgow, and has sometimes been called the founder of the Scottish school of mental science. He contributed also to the Theory of Art; in which, and in that of Language, much ingenuity was shown by Harris. To that generation belongs Hartley's attempt to resolve all mental phenomena into the association of ideas; a view which, though almost always resisted in Scotland, has found in England many distinguished supporters.

d. 1776.

b. 1711. In that earlier portion of his life, too, David Hume published his Philosophical Works; works which must. be allowed, even by those who dissent most strenuously from their results, to have constituted an epoch and turning point in the history of metaphysics. We must not be alarmed, by the religious infidelity of this celebrated man, into a forgetfulness of the value which belongs to his metaphysical speculations, wrong as his opinions here also will be admitted to have been. In accepting the principles of philosophy, which had been received by the metaphysicians of our country, and showing that these led to no conclusion but universal doubt, he served philosophy as the architect serves the owner of a house when he lays bare a flaw in its foundations. The exposure could not have been more thoroughly