Satan: Paradise Lost

Satan as the Hero of John Milton's "Paradise Lost"

By Niyati Pathak

The very descriptions of Satan’s physical dimensions and the size of the tools he carries mark him out as a kind of hero. His limbs are long and large; his bulk is as huge as that of the Titan who fought against Jove or that of Leviathan which God of all His works created hugest that swim the ocean stream. He has a mighty stature so that, when he rises, the flames on both sides of him are driven backward and roll in billows. He carries a ponderous, massy, and large shield on his shoulder. This shield is compared to the moon as seen through a telescope. His spear is so big that the tallest pine tree would be but a wand by comparison, etc. This description may be valid if we consider the epic as showing Satan as a character who "materializes hope, basing his hopes to gain power on the acquisition of land" (Fenton, 2003: n.p.).Combined to these great qualities, Satan was the first of created beings who, for endeavoring to be equal with the highest and to divide the empire of Heaven with the Almighty, was hurled down to Hell. His aim was no less than the throne of the universe. His ambition was the greatest, and his punishment was the greatest, but not so his despair, for his fortitude was as great as his sufferings. Slotkin (2004, as cited in Smilie, 2013) is also of the view that "God's punishments turn their victims into allegories of their own crimes" (114), a notion confirmed by Satan's famous assertion "Myself am Hell" (IV. 75). His strength of mind was matchless as his strength of body. His power of action and of suffering was equal. He was the greatest power that was ever overthrown, with the strongest will left to resist or to endure. He was baffled, not confounded. He still stood like a tower, proudly eminent in shape and gesture. An outcast from Heaven, Hell trembles beneath his feet; Sin and Death are at his heels, and mankind are his easy prey. Milton’s has rightly said in Book I:

All is not lost; the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield,

And what else is not to be overcome. (106-109).

The above words indicate that the sense of Satan’s punishment seems lost in the magnitude of it; the loss of infinite happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil, but of the abstract love of power, or pride, of self-will personified. His love of power and contempt for suffering is never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity (…) After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat in order to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he does more than this-he found a new empire in Hell, and from it conquers this new world, wither he bends his undaunted flight. The poet has not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the magnitude of the conception.

Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic, irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed- but dazzling in its faded splendor, the clouded ruins of a god. The deformity of Satan is only in the depravity of his will; he has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust. Milton was too magnanimous and opens an antagonist to support his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven feet. He relied on the justice of his cause, and did not scruple to give the devil his due. Some persons may think that he has carried his liberality too far, and injured the cause he professed to espouse by making him the chief person in his poem. Considering the nature of his subject, he would be equally in danger of running into this fault, from his faith in religion, and his love of rebellion; and perhaps each of these motives had its full share in determining the choice of his subject.

The Romantic view has persisted since Blake and Shelley emphatically expressed it. The argument is, in brief, that, since God is so unpleasant and Satan is a being of such magnificent vitality. According to Prince (1962), Milton must have "put his heart and soul into the projection of Satan" in spite of his consciously different purpose (3). Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid offers a partial parallel. In the ancient epic the nominal hero seems to be greatly overshadowed by a character with whom we were not intended to sympathize. For many readers, Virgil’s most vital and central figure is Dido. She alone is humanly and tragically real, while Aeneas, the embodiment of Roman virtue, and Jupiter are, like Milton’s Adam and God, pallid, self-righteous, and irritating. To persons of this way of thinking, there seems to be a central discord in both poems, a conflict between the poet’s intention and the result. Both Dido and Satan, it appears, are much too great and attractive for their functional role as villains. It would seem, therefore, that Virgil, and Milton wanted to set forth certain orthodox principles but were carried away unconsciously by their hearts and imaginations (Williamson, 1965). No doubt, artists have sometimes produced effects different from what they intended. But both Virgil and Milton have clearly given us the impression of knowing what they were about. It would for this reason be impossible to believe that these poets should in their major works reveal a fundamental religious and moral contradiction.

Those who glorify Satan regard Milton’s God as an almighty King Charles, a tyrant against whom it was glorious to rebel. In King’s (2000) opinion, this is a wild notion in view of the fact that "Milton conceived of God as the supreme source and symbol of love, mercy, justice, reason, and order" (18). The fact is simply that the modern world has moved quite away from the old assumptions and doctrines of religious, ethical, social, and cosmic order and right reason. Among the general reading public, three out of four persons instinctively sympathize with any character who suffers and rebels, and pay little heed to the moral values and responsibilities involved, because in such cases, the sinner is always right, and authority and rectitude are always wrong. This instinctive response has grown the stronger as religion and morality have been increasingly undermined by romantic naturalism and sentimentalism.

The common fallacy begins with a basic misunderstanding of the beginning of Paradise Lost, namely, Satan’s first speech delivered as he surveys his followers rolling in the fiery gulf, confounded through immortal. "Our response to this speech is prepared for through the picture of the archangel torn by wholly evil passions" claimed Murray (1967: 50). But even if there were no such preparation, the speech itself in every line should arouse horror and repulsion. It is a dramatic revelation of nothing but egoistic pride and passion, of complete spiritual blindness. The "potent victor in his rage" is blind and blasphemous description of God. Nothing that the "victor" can inflict will make Satan "repent or change." This phrase is a rejection of all Christian teaching. Satan’s "injured merit" is a figment of his own egoism, quite the opposite of the real and selfless merit of Christ. "What though the field be lost? / All is not lost…" (I. 99). These famous lines embody, not the spirit of the Puritan armies, but the spirit of Hitler. Satan sees only a conflict between himself, the world conqueror, and a temporarily superior force; he cannot see that it is a conflict between evil and good. "The unconquerable will" is not the religious and naturalistic will to power. "Sturdy of revenge" and "immortal hate" brand themselves. "Courage never to submit or yield" is not true courage; it is the courage of a wolf at bay; it is desperate perseverance in evil. In short, if we think that defiance is splendid regardless of what is defied and, if we read this speech with a thrill of sympathy in reading the speeches of such Shakespearean villains as Iago, Edmund, and Macbeth. According to King (2000), even Walter Landor, a romantic revolutionary, could say: "There is neither truth nor wit is saying that Satan is the hero of the piece unless, as is usually the case in human life, he is the greatest hero who gives the wildest sway to the worst passions" (20).

There is no conflict here (in this first speech of Satan) between Milton’s intention and the result, and there is none later, even when Milton leaves dramatic speech to create its own effect. Those who admire the rebel of the first speech also admire him when he declares:

… Here at least

We shall be free …

To reign is worth ambition though in hell:

Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. (I. 258-263)

But to those who understand and realize Milton’s principles, which are everywhere made clear, such words show how far Satan is from understanding true liberty. The tyrant of Milton’s poem, as some have seen, is not God but Satan.

Of course, Satan has heroic qualities. He is brave, strong, generous, loyal, prudent, temperate, and self-sacrificing. And if Satan has heroic virtues, so has Macbeth; both characters possess the emotional advantage of fighting against odds, while the representatives of goodness and right have irresistible power (Williamson, 1965). The situation in fact is essentially the same. Satan is overthrown when Christ is armed with the might of God; Macbeth, who has leagued himself with the powers of Satan, is overthrown by the English army which is, says Malcolm, the instrument of the powers above. Both poets, though imaginatively capable of creating a great villain, are constrained by their traditional faith in Providence and the ultimate triumph of good to bring divine power to the defeat of evil and, compared with the dauntless archangel and the bloody tyrant at bay, Christ and Malcolm may not win much of our sympathy. In a critical essay, Anderson (2010) states that, for the purpose of allowing readers to uphold or reject divine law, Milton includes elements in the poem contrary to the will of God. These elements add to the paradoxical nature of Satan’s portrayal, and "these conflicting aims ultimately lend contrary thematic values to the poem" (198).

It has been the practice of all epic poets to select someone personage, whom they distinguish above all the rest, and make the hero of the tale. This is considered essential to epic composition, and is attended with several advantages. It renders the unity of the subject more sensible, when there is one principal figure, to which as to a center, all the rest refer. In the words of Fuller (1944), "it tends to interest us more in which enterprise which is carried on; and it gives the poet an opportunity of exerting his talents for adorning and displaying one character with peculiar splendor" (15). It has been asked, who then is the hero of Paradise Lost? The Devil, it has been answered by some critics; and, in consequence of this idea, "much ridicule and censure have been thrown upon Milton" (Rudrun, 1966: 25). But they have mistaken that author’s intention, by proceeding upon a supposition that, in the conclusion of the poem, the hero must need be triumphant, whereas Milton followed a different plan and has given a tragic conclusion to a poem otherwise epic in its form. For Adam is undoubtedly his hero; that is, the capital and most interesting figure in his poem.

The figure of Satan has always fascinated readers of Paradise Lost. Some have claimed him as the secret hero of the story. But that is a misunderstanding. An adversary of God had to be massive dramatic stature, and it was a triumph that Milton succeeded in drawing him to such a scale. The misinterpretation springs from the tendency in human nature to romanticize the rebel and the fighter against odds. To understand Satan we must not lose sight of the treachery of his rebellion, or against whom it was directed, and how his frustrated rage expresses itself in a cruel effort to destroy creatures that have not harmed him. His speeches are impressively high-sounding but when examined they prove to be boasts and lies (Broadbent, 1972). Milton has exposed all those false romantic notions of heroism as egotistical magnificence, the idea that heroic energy in a bad cause is admirable.

As stated by Dunbar (1980), Blake made the following observation regarding Paradise Lost: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and at liberty when of devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the devil’s party without knowing it" (16). In Blake’s opinion, Satan was a symbol of desire, energy, and the vital creative force which enable man to live most fully. God represented old, life-denying reason and passivity which are only the shadow of desire. Certainly the conventional Heaven and rationalizing God of Paradise Lost are pale and unconvincing when compared to the descriptions of Hell and the tremendous energy and courage of Satan. Satan has been imagined and described in this poem with a wealth of vivid detail which no other character in it can equal. Satan is, by any standards, a character of epic stature.

The reason why Satan is so fully imagined and so fascinating is partly that Milton felt inspired by him and partly that it is always much easier to create evil people that ideally good ones. (Adam is a "mixed" character because though created good, he falls, but though mixed, he too has been imagined with the greatest sensitivity and fullness). Milton wanted to show that evil fascinated our first parents. Eve fell when Satan made disobedience seen attractive to her. Evil can be interesting, can inspire us, and can even have its own perverse beauty. Milton strongly condemned evil but he could yet show it at work in Satan’s temptations, and he found a splendid symbol for it in Pandemonium.

In Books I and II of Paradise Lost, Satan is depicted as heroic, but his is false heroism as it is based on false beliefs and unworthy aims and aspirations. It was Shawcross (1972) who considered Satan’s heroism as "false heroism that has its dramatic side and a certain interest" (34). Satan may be perverse, but his desire for revenge gives him energy, and his energy makes him exciting and interesting. He has all the attributes of an epic hero and all the attraction. At the beginning of the poem he is placed in a dramatic situation. His reactions to this situation have a thrilling effect on us. His speeches are full of stirring, highly emotive words such as "liberty," "oppression," and "freedom." It was partly their deep love of liberty that caused the Romantics like Blake and Shelley to respond so warmly to the character of Satan. Satan is markedly like a romantic hero (such as the characters in Byron’s Oriental tales). But Milton was not a romantic poet, and his treatment of Satan shows the weaknesses of the romantic position. Milton relentlessly exposes the willful, self-centered revengefulness of Satan, though on the surface this attitude of Satan looks like heroism.

Satan, as portrayed by Milton, was a new kind of character in epic poetry. In medieval and Renaissance literature, the devil was usually presented in a monstrous form. Tasso, for example, depicted Satan with blood-shot eyes, blood-dripping jaws, a mouth as high as a whirlpool. A devil of this kind is grotesque, and is intended to frighten the reader. Such a devil cannot convey to the reader the nature of sin or temptation. Sin and temptation are parts of human or almost human form. Milton’s devil is superhuman, but he also shows the full range of human characteristics. In depicting him, Milton departed from the crude tradition of earlier religious epics and seems to have adopted ideas from the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. As has been stated by Daiches (1976), most of the villains in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama have enough human characteristics to save them from becoming mere monsters. Milton too humanizes his Satan. Satan’s character has depth. It shows changes of mood: the fluctuations of revengefulness, pride, and despair. It is realistic and near-heroic, whereas earlier devils were merely monsters.

Satan is proud, of course. But beneath this pride lies a tormenting sense of despair. This despair overwhelms him until at last only the desire for revenge reigns supreme in his nature. In Book IV, he experiences "troubled thoughts" for:

Within him Hell

He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell

One step, no more than from himself, can fly

By change of place. Now conscience wakes despair

That slumbered; wakes the bitter memory

Of what he was, what is, and what must be. (20-25).

Satan embodies the powerful idea that Marlowe’s devil Mephistopheles expresses when he speaks to Faustus in the latter’s study: "Myself am Hell, nor am I out of it." Tillyard (1938) commented on this by saying that Satan’s words regarding the change of place, which will never change his mind, suggest his heroic stature and a mind that will not relent, but will follow the plan of revenge till the end, no matter what the results are.

Satan’s outward appearance shows his spiritual decline. In Book IV he has degenerated to such an extent that, when he is discovered tempting Eve, his former companion in Heaven, Gabriel, does not immediately recognize him. In Book XI he returns to Hell after successfully destroying the innocence of Adam and Eve, and is turned into the serpent whose form he had adopted when concealed in Paradise. The passages describing Satan’s appearance are like a chart indicating his moral decline from the imaginative picture of an "Archangel ruined" which exactly describes him at first. These passages emphasize the reality behind Satan’s evasions and pretence. They increase our awareness of the hollowness of Satan’s heroic postures. They also keep before our eyes the deceptiveness which is a great part of the experience and pleasure of sin.

The first two books of Paradise Lost show that Satan mainly as seen through his eyes. Milton’s brief comments on Satan seem out of tune with the stirring quality of Satan’s speeches. These comments seem harsh and unsympathetic but they serve to remind us of the extent to which we are being carried away by Satan’s glamour and rhetoric. We are struck by the splendors of the heroic setting and we are made to experience the pleasurable excitement of coming into contact with sin. In both books I and II we almost forget the distinction between goodness and self-centered energy. Satan makes high-sounding speeches. He dramatizes his situation. He makes himself an epic hero. He deceives his followers by thrilling their imaginations. But, if we analyze his speeches, we find that there are several evasions on Satan’s part and that he makes certain assertions which are unsupported by evidence.

A passage from Book I will serve as an illustration of what has been said above. In his first speech to Beelzebub, Satan gives us an account of the reasons for their failure to win the war in Heaven. In the main part of the speech (Lines 94-124), Satan makes a series of high-sounding assertions and rhetorical gestures. But these assertions have no real basis according to Lewis (2005). He speaks of his "fixed mind" and "high disdain from sense of injured merit" which made him rebellious when God placed the Son in the position which Satan believed should have been assigned to him. This is merely an expression of jealousy, selfishness, and failure to love God. In describing his rebellion he represents God as a tyrannical overlord:

And to the fierce contention brought along

Innumerable force of Spirits armed,

That durst dislike his reign, and, me preferring,

His utmost power with adverse power opposed

In dubious battle on the plains of Heaven,

And shook his throne. (I. 100-105).

These words show not only manipulations of the truth but also self-deception. Book VI makes clear that the battle was never dubious. The idea of God’s throne being shaken shows merely wishful thinking. The lines that follow betray further unsupported assertions:

All is lost-the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield,

And what is else not to be overcome?

That glory never shall his wrath or might

Extort from me. (I. 106-111)

Milton here exposes the emptiness of heroic postures. The word "glory" used by Satan is, for example, utterly meaningless. For God to exact obedience from his own servant could hardly be any significant triumph. Satan’s language would be appropriate only if the struggle had been between equals. His manipulations and abuses of language in Paradise Lost threaten can be viewed, as an attempt on Satan’s part to "take over the power of God’s words" (Forsyth, 2003, as cited in Morrison, 2009. 175), and that he challenges God for control and dominance of the serpent image.

There is in Milton’s Satan a unique combination of epic grandeur and falseness. We become aware of this through Milton’s direct comments on Satan, through his description of Satan, and through the epic similes he employs. Often, of course the description of Satan can be taken at their face value. Also, such similes as those pertaining to his spear and shield are intended merely to produce a sense of size and wonder. But other descriptions and similes serve to build up an implicit sense of danger and menace which is to become explicit afterwards. For instance, there is the comparison of Satan with a sea-monster when he is "prone on the flood" (I. 200-2008). In this comparison, size is the dominant impression. But once the impression of hugeness has been created, the simile extends itself into the picturesque story of the small skiff and the sailor’s delight at finding shelter on a darkened sea. The story here is one of deception. The reader experiences the same feeling as the benighted sailor must have experienced, namely, a feeling of having been deceived. The sailor was not safe but only thought that he was. Similarly, Milton means to say, man is deceived into a sense of security and then ruined by sin. Nicolson (1963) has commented on this point, saying that "the epic simile of Leviathan is a miniature version of Eve’s experience in sinning" (37).

Critics have often refused to pay attention to Milton’s plain words about the character and conduct and moral situation of Satan. They have often preferred to concentrate on Satan’s heroic and romantic aspects, thus missing the truth of Milton’s portraiture of the Devil. Satan is the enemy of God and man. That is his role in the story, and he must be equal to his role as the adversary of the Almighty. He must be shown as possessing the virtues and the powers which are necessary for him to play his part as the Arch-fiend. He must be shown as a towering genius. But we must never be allowed to forget that his genius is devilish. All his virtues are in fact corrupted by his situation and by the uses to which he puts his powers.

The original sin of Satan is the same as man’s-disobedience to God. The motive from which he acted was pride. Many think that Satan’s pride is a reflection of Milton’s own, that Milton unconsciously sympathizes with him, and that Satan therefore is the real hero of the epic. But this is a mistaken approach. Satan’s pride makes him claim equality with God. It is this excessive sense of his own importance that governs all his conduct, and it makes him irretrievably evil. This fact (namely, that Satan is evil) determines his whole situation, his actions, and his words at every stage. He is incapable of repentance. He is a lost soul to "whom hope never comes that comes to all." This fact is summed up at the end of Satan’s opening soliloquy in Book IV: "Evil be thou my good." It is a human instinct to admire the courage of despair and chivalrous devotion to a lost cause. Such courage Satan has, and such chivalry he does possess, and these have always aroused the admiration of readers. To simple-minded moderns, unversed in theological speculations, this admiration seems only right and proper. But Milton knew and repeatedly tells us that all Satan’s words and deeds were perverse and vain. Many insist on regarding Satan as a Byronic hero, or give him all the credit for courage and endurance and leadership which they give to all worthy epic heroes. If we are to understand Milton’s Satan, we must stop regarding him as a great unfortunate. This of course he is, like Macbeth, but like Macbeth he is wicked and unrepentant to the end. This makes him a great tragic figure but not an epic hero. To regard him as the hero of Milton’s epic is to stultify the poet’s whole intention.

Is Satan the hero of Paradise Lost? We might think so had we not read beyond the first book. But to trace his story in the poem to its inglorious close is to dispel the impression. Milton can scarcely intend that we should regard him as ‘hero’-as worthy of sustained admiration-one who passes from the splendor of archangelic being to the state of loathsome reptile. Because Satan’s character is round, it changes significantly from Book I though Book X, in which he makes his final appearance as a miserable creature, suffering from hell, but unable to repent. In Book I he is courageous and heroic with so many grand qualities, but as we see him in Book X, a complete degeneration has taken place in his character, which is illustrated by the different shapes he takes; from a determined hero into a cursed serpent. (www.sparkenotes.com).The hideous metamorphosis in Book X (504-532) is the necessary contrast to those scenes at the beginning of the epic in which the great rebel does appear in heroic grandeur: and we must look on both pictures. If Paradise Lost narrates the fall of man, it narrates too-and no less clearly-the fall of man’s temper. The self-degradation of Satan is complete: outward and inward: of the form and of the spirit: a change-ever for the worse-of shape and mind and emotion.

There is the outward sign. Before his expulsion he is pre-eminently a lustrous being, clothed with ethereal radiance and glory. And afterwards he retains something of this original brightness: howbeit much has passed from him. But gradually what was left decreases in proportion as the evil in him prevails: so that Uriel perceives the foul passions that dim his face (IV. 124-130); while Gabriel marks his "faded splendor wan" (IV. 870). And the Cherub Zephon taunts him therewith (IV. 835-840). Equal is his loss of physical force. On the fields of Heaven he does not fear to meet Michael in combat (VI. 246-260); in the Garden of Eden he doubts himself a match for Adam. In fact he is glad that he has to deal with the woman, not the man (IX. 480-488).

Nor is this because of lost strength alone. He shuns the "higher intellect" of Adam (IX. 483), who would be better able than Eve to see through his arguments and so resist temptation. He is conscious of his own decline in intellect. The strong intelligence which inspires his speeches in the first two books has degenerated, by perverse use, into mere sophistical slyness, a base cunning. He is no more the mighty-minded archangel: he is naught but the serpent-"subtlest beast of all the field" (IX. 86) Lastly, every impulse in him towards good has died out. The element of nobility that redeemed his character at the outset from absolute baseness has been killed. In evil he moves and has his being so that he confesses "all food to me becomes bane"; and in destroying lies his sole delight (IX. 118-119).

Conclusion

In conclusion, we, therefore agree that there has been any conflict here, as is often alleged, between Milton’s intention and the result. Satan is not only a rebel but a tyrant. His words show how far he is from understanding true liberty. He has heroic qualities, as we have already seen. He is brave, strong, generous, loyal, prudent, temperate, and self-sacrificing. But if he has heroic virtues, so has Macbeth; and Macbeth is a villain. The reason why Milton has endowed Satan with these qualities is that an adversary to God had to be of massive dramatic stature and that the power that was to seduce Eve must have an impressive personality and character. The misinterpretation arises from the tendency in human nature to romanticize the rebel and the fighter against odds. Satan’s heroism is false heroism because it is based on false beliefs and unworthy aims. False heroism has its dramatic side, and a certain interest. There is no doubt that Milton has used his poetic and dramatic powers to the full in portraying Satan. But that was natural. Milton felt inspired by Satan, and it is always much easier to create evil characters than ideally good ones. Hardly therefore shall we believe that Milton meant us to see in the fallen and ever falling archangel the hero of Paradise Lost. That position surely belongs to Adam.Who is the real hero of the paradise lost .... ?

Though Satan is described by some as the hero of Paradise Lost, two things argue against Satan as hero, though Milton does make him sympathetic by endowing him with feelings of remorsefulness with pity and compassion for his rebel angels (he is, after all, still an angel). However, though sympathetic, Satan always dispels these higher, selfless qualities with determination to do harm and eventually avenge himself. The two things that argue against Satan as hero are: (1) Milton's description of him in Book I, since the description shows that, although he has brilliant qualities, his spirit and heart are set on intentionally doing harm and leading others (angels who also still have their angelic qualities and callings) to continually do harm. (2) Though only hinted at in early books, The Son of God enters the story later on and is Milton's true hero. This early focus on the antagonist and delayed entrance of the protagonist hero may be confusing to modern readers because, in our experience, the hero normally enters the story on or near page one.

Restoration Age

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From the Restoration to the Death of Pope 1660-1744

The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose, from passion and imagination to wit and the understanding. The serious, exalted mood of the civil war and Commonwealth had spent itself and issued in disillusion. There followed a generation of wits, logical, skeptical, and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle. The characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire, and burlesque, and such, indeed, continued to be the course of English literary history for a century after the return of the Stuarts. The age was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry. The Royal Society, for the cultivation of the natural sciences, was founded in 1662. There were able divines in the pulpit and at the universities—Barrow, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, South, and others: scholars, like Bentley; historians, like Clarendon and Burnet; scientists, like Boyle and Newton; philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke. But of poetry, in any high sense of the word, there was little between the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and Gray.

The English writers of this period were strongly influenced by the contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Molière, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the satires, epistles, and versified essays of Boileau. Many of the Restoration writers—Waller, Cowley, Davenant, Wycherley, Villiers, and others—had been in France during the exile, and brought back with them French tastes. John Dryden (1631-1700), who is the great literary figure of his generation, has been called the first of the moderns. From the reign of Charles II., indeed, we may date the beginnings of modern English life. What we call "society" was forming, the town, the London world. "Coffee, which makes the politician wise," had just been introduced, and the ordinaries of Ben Jonson's time gave way to coffee-houses, like Will's and Button's, which became the head-quarters of literary and political gossip. The two great English parties, as we know them to-day, were organized: the words Whig and Tory date from this reign. French etiquette and fashions came in, and French phrases of convenience—such as coup de grace, bel esprit, etc.—began to appear in English prose. Literature became intensely urban and partisan. It reflected city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of authors. The politics of the great rebellion had been of heroic proportions, and found fitting expression in song. But in the Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in question rather than principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion Bills and Acts of Settlement.

Court and society, in the reign of Charles II. and James II., were shockingly dissolute, and in literature, as in life, the reaction against Puritanism went to great extremes. The social life of the time is faithfully reflected in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. He was a simple-minded man, the son of a London tailor, and became, himself, secretary to the admiralty. His diary was kept in cipher, and published only in 1825. Being written for his own eye, it is singularly outspoken; and itsnaïve, gossipy, confidential tone makes it a most diverting book, as it is, historically, a most valuable one.

Perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler's Hudibras(1663-1664), a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans. The king carried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepys testifies that it was quoted and praised on all sides. Ridicule of the Puritans was nothing new. Zeal-of-the-land Busy, in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, is an early instance of the kind. There was nothing laughable about the earnestness of men like Cromwell, Milton, Algernon Sidney, and Sir Henry Vane. But even the French Revolution had its humors; and as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the extremer sectaries pressed to the front—Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters, etc.,—its grotesque sides came uppermost. Butler's hero is a Presbyterian justice of the peace who sallies forth with his secretary, Ralpho—an Independent and Anabaptist-like Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings. (Macaulay, it will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.) The humor of Hudibras is not of the finest. The knight and the squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly removed from the rough physical drolleries of a pantomime or circus. The deep heart-laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler. But he had wit of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of verbal antics. He is almost as great a phrase-master as Pope, though in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has furnished many stock sayings, as for example,

'Tis strange what difference there can be

'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.

Hudibras has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire, M'Fingal, some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler's, as, for example,

No man e'er felt the halter draw

With good opinion of the law.

The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of the Restoration, and the stage now took vengeance for its enforced silence under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened under the patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the Duke of York. The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant—who had fought on the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two years—had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as 1656, by presenting his Siege of Rhodes as an "opera," with instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly sprung up in Italy. This he brought out again in 1661, with the dialogue recast into riming couplets in the French fashion. Movable painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the female parts formerly played by boys. This last innovation was said to be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell Gwynne, was the favorite actress at the King's Theater.

Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called "classical" rules of the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV. writers were not purely creative, like Shakespeare or his contemporaries in England, but critical and self-conscious. The Academy had been formed in 1636 for the preservation of the purity of the French language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of literary art. Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on tragedy, and one in particular on the Three Unities. Dryden followed his example in his Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1667), in which he treated of the unities, and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in preference to blank verse. His own practice varied. Most of his tragedies were written in rime, but in the best of them, All for Love, founded on Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, he returned to blank verse. One of the principles of the classical school was to keep comedy and tragedy distinct. The tragic dramatists of the Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and others, composed what they called "heroic plays," such as the Indian Emperor, the Conquest of Granada, the Duke of Lerma, theEmpress of Morocco, the Destruction of Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakespeare, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare hisPhedre, or Iphigenie, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of Tyrannic Love. These bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, the Rehearsal, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 at the King's Theater. The indebtedness of the English stage to the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation. Dryden's comedy, An Evening's Love, was adapted from Thomas Corneille's Le Feint Astrologue, and his Sir Martin Mar-all, from Molière's L'Etourdi. Shadwell borrowed his Miser from Molière, and Otway made versions of Racine's Bèrènice and Molière's Fourberies de Scapin. Wycherley's Country Wife and Plain Dealer although not translations, were based, in a sense, upon Molière's Ecole des Femmes and Le Misanthrope. The only one of the tragic dramatists of the Restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elizabethan stage was Otway, whose Venice Preserved, written in blank verse, still keeps the boards. There are fine passages in Dryden's heroic plays, passages weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language. There is one great scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in hisAll for Love. And one, at least, of his comedies, the Spanish Friar, is skillfully constructed. But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he "forced his genius."

In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van Brugh, Congreve, and others; plays like theCountry Wife, the Parson's Wedding, She Would if She Could, the Beaux' Stratagem, theRelapse, and the Way of the World. These were in prose, and represented the gay world and the surface of fashionable life. Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring theme. Some of them were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the Committee of Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of which is a distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the sequestration of the estates of royalists. Such were also the Roundheads and theBanished Cavaliers of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a female spy in the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was bourgeois----reserved for London trades-people. A man must be either a rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were hypocrites. Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentlemen, and it was the proper thing to seduce them, and to borrow their husbands' money. For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh turned against the dishonored husband and the honest man. (Contrast this with Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor.) The women were represented as worse than the men—scheming, ignorant, and corrupt. The dialogue in the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty the situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin varnish of good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal. The loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's theater retain a fineness of feeling and that politesse de cæur which marks the gentleman. They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion. But the Manlys and Horners of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts.

Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no application. But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life. The theater of Wycherley and Etherege was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in Pepys's Diary, and in the Memoirs of the Chevalier de Grammont. This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed, "artificial" at all, in the sense in which the contemporary tragedy—the "heroic play"—was artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and, intellectually, of much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published hisShort View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which did much toward reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal characteristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, 1772, and Sheridan's Rivals, School for Scandal, and Critic, 1775-9; our last strictly "classical" comedies. None of this school of English comedians approached their model, Molière. He excelled his imitators not only in his French urbanity—the polished wit and delicate grace of his style—but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom and truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character. It is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakespeare's plays were rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of Macbeth and Julius Cæsar, substituting rime for blank verse. In conjunction with Dryden, he altered the Tempest, complicating the intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda—a youth who had never seen a woman. Shadwell "improved" Timon of Athens, and Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to King Lear, which turned the play into a comedy! In the prologue to his doctored version of Troilus and Cressida, Dryden made the ghost of Shakespeare speak of himself as

Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age.

Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe upon Shakespeare in his Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age; and in his Short View of Tragedy, 1693, he said, "In the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than, many times, in the tragical flights of Shakespeare." "To Deptford by water," writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, "reading Othello, Moor of Venice; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but, having so lately read the Adventures of Five Hours, it seems a mean thing."

In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France, took its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of the Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by Donne and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice, insisted upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good sense. Boileau's L'Art Poétique, 1673, inspired by Horace's Ars Poetica, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not only in France, but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in riming couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two "poems" of this kind, an Essay on Satire, and an Essay on Poetry. The Earl of Roscommon—who, said Addison, "makes even rules a noble poetry"—made a metrical version of Horace's Ars Poetica, and wrote an original Essay on Translated Verse. Of the same kind were Addison's epistle to Sacheverel, entitled An Account of the Greatest English Poets, and Pope's Essay on Criticism, 1711, which was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's usual point and brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin rather than Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius.

The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had, of course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer. The greater part of the Canterbury Tales was written in heroic couplets. But now a new strength and precision were given to the familiar measure by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the couplet, and by treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles I. He, said Dryden, "first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it." Sir John Denham, also, in his Cooper's Hill, 1643, had written such verse as this:

O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example as it is my theme!

Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,

Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.

Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of each line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope.

Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join

The varying verse, the full resounding line,

The long resounding march and energy divine.

Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a greater neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to such monotonous perfection that he "made poetry a mere mechanic art."

The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless. The dissolute wits of Charles the Second's court, Sedley, Rochester, Sackville, and the "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease," threw off a few amatory trifles; but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough for genuine song. Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly artificial form of the lyric, in which the language was tortured into a kind of spurious grandeur, and the meter teased into a sound and fury, signifying nothing. Cowley's Pindarics were filled with something which passed for fire, but has now utterly gone out. Nevertheless, the fashion spread, and "he who could do nothing else," said Dr. Johnson, "could write like Pindar." The best of these odes was Dryden's famous Alexander's Feast, written for a celebration of St. Cecilia's day by a musical club. To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray's two fine odes, the Progress of Poesyand the Bard. written a half-century later.

Dryden was not so much a great poet as a solid thinker, with a splendid mastery of expression, who used his energetic verse as a vehicle for political argument and satire. His first noteworthy poem, Annus Mirabilis, 1667, was a narrative of the public events of the year 1666; namely, the Dutch war and the great fire of London. The subject of Absalom and Ahitophel—the first part of which appeared in 1681—was the alleged plot of the Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to defeat the succession of the Duke of York, afterward James II., by securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II. The parallel afforded by the story of Absalom's revolt against David was wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity and keeping. He was at his best in satirical character-sketches, such as the brilliant portraits in this poem of Shaftesbury, as the false counselor Ahitophel, and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zimri. The latter was Dryden's reply to the Rehearsal.. Absalom and Ahitophel was followed by the Medal, a continuation of the same subject, and Mac Flecknoe, a personal onslaught on the "true blue Protestant poet" Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden. Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell, whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense....

The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull

With this prophetic blessing—Be thou dull.

Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written in the reign of Elizabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell, and others; but all of these failed through an over violence of language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. They had no lightness of touch, no irony and mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption of imperial Rome. They denounced, instructed, preached, did every thing but satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. Donne and Hall abused men in classes; priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers obsequious, etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm, infinitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the power to reason in verse. His Religio Laici, 1682, was a poem in defense of the English Church. But when James II came to the throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the Hind and Panther, 1687, to vindicate his new belief. Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage. He sold his pen to the court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin which he afterward acknowledged and regretted. Milton's "soul was like a star and dwelt apart," but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude. He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was not malignant in his satire, being of a large, careless, and forgetting nature. He had that masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from motion, and grows better with age. His Fables—modernizations from Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio, written the year before he died—are among his best works.

Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays. But his Essay of Dramatic Poesie, which Dr. Johnson called our "first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing," was in the shape of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of the gallicised Restoration age—Cowley, Sir William Temple, and above all, Dryden—who gave modern English prose that simplicity, directness, and colloquial air which marks it off from the more artificial diction of Milton, Taylor and Browne.

A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and, in 1678, published his Pilgrim's Progress, the greatest of religious allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories. Unlike the Faerie Queene, the story of Pilgrim's Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or Aladdin's palace.

It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of Paradise Lost. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet it may admit of a doubt whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out quietly and made little noise at first. But the Pilgrim's Progress got at once into circulation, and hardly a single copy of the first edition remains. Milton, too—who received ten pounds for the copyright of Paradise Lost—seemingly found that "fit audience though few" for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay," said Milton, good humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the State of Innocence. In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutshell: the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.

The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders. Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the Public Spirit of the Whigs and theConduct of the Allies, were rewarded with the deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin. Addison became secretary of state under a Whig government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, 1719, was a prolific political writer, conducted his Review in the interest of the Whigs, and was imprisoned and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps, and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament. After the Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II. But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in the Spectator. The women were mostly frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast. They are spoken of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time, except Steele. "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at heart a rake." The reading public had now become large enough to make letters a profession. Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose case the book-seller took the place of the patron. Pope's translation of Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine thousand pounds and made him independent. But the activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners, who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order. Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope'sDunciad, or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time were sordid, and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office. The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold, and given to political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there was little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous Essay on Man was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and human nature. Said Swift:

As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew

From nature, I believe them true.

They argue no corrupted mind

In him; the fault is in mankind.

The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden—sickly, deformed, morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than his great forerunner, and in his Moral Essays and Satires he brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his Dunciad, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown. But, although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to see what execution it must have done at the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing. In the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, the satirical sketch of Addison—who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of Homer—is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in Dryden. Pope's very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's. He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give the most pain most cleverly.

Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem, a "dwarf Iliad" recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel, which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his Lutrin, had treated with the same epic dignity a dispute over the placing of the reading-desk in a parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir, the tea-urn, the ombre-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever poetry was possible in those

Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,

And when the patch was worn,

with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackery said of Gay's pastorals: "It is to poetry what charming little Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic, with a certain beauty always accompanying them." The Rape of the Lock, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and prettiness in a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses in the Iliad, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these little filagree creatures with Shakespeare's elves, whose occupation it was

To tread the ooze of the salt deep,

Or run upon the sharp wind of the north,...

Or on the beached margent of the sea

To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind.

Very different are the offices of Pope's fays:

Our humble province is to tend the fair;

Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care;

To save the powder from too rude a gale,

Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale....

Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow

To change a flounce or add a furbelow.

Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of passion, he was altogether impotent. His Windsor Forest and hisPastorals are artificial and false, not written with "the eye upon the object." His epistle ofEloisa to Abelard is declamatory and academic, and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. But he was a great literary artist. Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with great skill. His example dominated English poetry for nearly a century, and even now, when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind, he turns instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope. He was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his thought than about the pointedness of its expression. His language was closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art was the art of putting things. He is more quoted than any other English poet but Shakespeare. He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no longer needed to "vent its observation in mangled terms," but could pour itself out compactly, artistically in little ready-made molds. But this high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue. His poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a hit or an effect.

From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the civil war; at first irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature of permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele started theTatler, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph Addison; and in its successor, the Spectator, the first number of which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison's contributions outnumbered Steele's. The Tatler was published on three, the Spectator on six, days of the week. The Tatler gave political news, but each number of the Spectator consisted of a single essay. The object of these periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of the time, and to satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the town. "I shall endeavor," wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the Spectator, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.... It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." Addison's satire was never personal. He was a moderate man, and did what he could to restrain Steele's intemperate party zeal. His character was dignified and pure, and his strongest emotion seems to have been his religious feeling. One of his contemporaries called him "a parson in a tie wig," and he wrote several excellent hymns. His mission was that of censor of the public taste. Sometimes he lectured and sometimes he preached, and in his Saturday papers he brought his wide reading and nice scholarship into service for the instruction of his readers. Such was the series of essays in which he gave an elaborate review of Paradise Lost. Such also was his famous paper, the Vision of Mirza, an oriental allegory of human life. The adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the age. But the lighter portions of the Spectator are those which have worn the best. Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, a sly observer of manners, and, above all, a delightful talker, that Addison is best known to posterity. In the personal sketches of the members of the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of the modern prose fiction of character. Addison's humor is always a trifle grave. There is no whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. "He thinks justly," said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks faintly." The Spectatorhad a host of followers, from the somewhat heavy Rambler and Idler of Johnson, down to theSalmagundi papers of our own Irving, who was, perhaps, Addison's latest and best literary descendant. In his own age Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist. HisCampaign, celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one much admired couplet, in which Marlborough was likened to the angel of tempest, who,

Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,

Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.

His stately, classical tragedy, Cato, which was acted at Drury Lane Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson "unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius." Is is, notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine declamatory passages—in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth act—

It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well, etc.

The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him, "The stage dark-ended," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription,Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy publication was his Tale of a Tub, 1704, a satire on religious differences. But his great work was Gulliver's Travels, 1726, the book in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the long rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression. Children read the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read Robinson Crusoe, as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of De Foe's realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details. But underneath its fairy tales Gulliver's Travels is a satire, far more radical than any of Dryden's or Pope's, because directed, not against particular parties or persons, but against human nature. In his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show that human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a little. If men were six inches high instead of six feet, their wars, governments, science, religion—all their institutions, in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and virtue by which these have been built up, would appear laughable. On the other hand, if they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would become disgusting. The complexion of the finest ladies would show blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would breathe from the pores of the skin. Finally, in his loathsome caricature of mankind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them, to their shame, with the beasts, and sets instinct above reason.

The method of Swift's satire was grave irony. Among his minor writings in this kind are his Argument against Abolishing Christianity, his Modest Proposal for utilizing the surplus population of Ireland by eating the babies of the poor, and his Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff. In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an almanac maker, at a certain day and hour. When the time set was past, he published a minute account of Partridge's last moments; and when the subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his own death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead and remonstrating with him on the violence of his language. "To call a man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very improper style for a person of his education." Swift wrote verses as well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical. His gross and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched. He leaves us no illusions, and not only strips his subject, but flays it and shows the raw muscles beneath the skin. He delighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions of human nature. "He saw blood-shot," said Thackeray.

1. History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1660-1780). Edmund Gosse. London: Macmillan & Co., 1889.

2. Macaulay's Essay, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.

3. The Poetical Works of John Dry den. Macmillan & Co., 1873. (Globe Edition.)

4. Thackeray's English Humorists of the last Century.

5. Sir Roger de Coverley. New York: Harpers, 1878.

6. Swift's Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, Directions to Servants, Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated, Verses on the Death of Dean Swift.

7. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. London: Macmillan & Co., 1869. (Globe Edition.)