not great and heroical? But come, you'll understand it better when you hear it; and pray be as severe as you can; I'gad, I defy all criticks. Thus it begins: "A milk-white mouse, immortal and unchang'd, Fed on soft cheese, and o'er the dairy rang'd ; So fear'd no danger, for she knew no ginn.'" This new jest upon Dryden was by two young men who became afterwards famous, Charles Montague and Matthew Prior. Charles Montague, born in April, 1661, was the fourth son of the Hon. George Montague, a younger son of the first Earl of Manchester. He was sent at fourteen to Westminster School, where he formed so intimate a friendship with George Stepney (§ 52) that he avoided a scholarship at Oxford, and got leave from his friends to join Stepney at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the death of Charles II., Montague contributed to the volume of condolences and congratulations for the new king that was put together according to custom. His poem, "On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles II.," pleased Lord Dorset and Sir Charles Sedley so well that they invited Montague to town. The piece was a clever but unmeasured panegyric, opening with this bold couplet: "Farewell, great Charles, monarch of blest renown, The best good man that ever fill'd a throne." Dorset and Sedley were on the popular side, in opposition to the king's designs, made more alarming by his setting up of a standing army for aid in suppressing possible resistance to them. At their suggestion, Montague joined Prior in reply to Dryden's "Hind and Panther." Matthew Prior, born in 1664, lost his father when young, and came into the care of his uncle, Samuel Prior, who kept the "Rummer" Tavern, near Charing Cross. It was a house frequented by nobility and gentry; so it chanced that the Earl of Dorset found in it young Prior, who had been taught at Westminster School, reading Horace for his amusement. He talked to him, saw him to be clever, and paid the cost of sending him to St. John's College, Cambridge. Prior was then eighteen. He took his B.A. degree in 1686, returned to London, and took his place among the young wits of the Whig party by the brightness of the satire upon Dryden's "Hind and Panther." He made friends also by the good TO A.D. 1688.] CHARLES MONTAGUE. PRIOR. KEN. 733 quality of a poem on the Deity, written according to a practice of his college to send every year some poems upon sacred subjects to the Earl of Exeter in return for a benefaction by one of his ancestors. 59. On the 27th of April, 1688, James issued a repetition of his Declaration of Indulgence. By an Order in Council, on the 4th of May, he ordered it to be read in churches and chapels throughout the kingdom on two successive Sundays by ministers of all persuasions, the first reading to be in London on the 20th of May, and in the country on the 3rd of June. On the 18th of May a protest was signed on behalf of a great body of the clergy, by William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, and six bishops-Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells; Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely; Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough; John Lake, Bishop of Chichester; William Lloyd, Bishop of St. Asaph; and Sir Jonathan Trelawny, Bishop of Bristol-who declared their loyalty, but pointed out that the Declaration was "founded upon such a dispensing power as hath been often declared illegal in Parliament." Of these "seven lamps of the Church," Thomas Ken has a place in literature. He was born in 1637, the son of an attorney. His mother died when he was four years old, and his home was then at the haberdasher's shop in Fleet Street kept by Izaak Walton; for his eldest sister, who took charge of him, was Izaak Walton's second wife. Ken was seven when Izaak Walton retired from business; and his home was then in Walton's cottage by the banks of the Dove, in Staffordshire. George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, was Izaak Walton's son-in-law; and Thomas Ken was sent, at thirteen, to Winchester College. In 1656 he went to Oxford, and joined a musical society formed there, for, like his sister, Mrs. Walton, Ken had a delightful voice, and he played on the lute, viol, and organ. As a student also, Ken began an epic poem on Edmund, the East Anglian king martyred by the Danes. He became M.A. in 1663, and chaplain to Lord Maynard, with the rectory of Easton Parva, just outside Lord Maynard's park, in Essex. Then he became domestic chaplain to George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, in whose household. Izaak Walton and his family were already domesticated. Then he obtained a fellowship of Winchester College, and lived in the Wykehamist house. The Bishop of Winchester gave him, in 1667, the living of Brightstone, in the Isle of Wight; and it was in the Isle of Wight, as Rector of Brightstone, that Ken wrote his Morning and Evening Hymns, using them himself, and singing them to his lute when he rose and when he went to rest. In 1669 the Bishop of Winchester gave Ken other promotion, and he left the Isle of Wight. In 1675 he visited Rome with his nephew, young Izaak Walton. In 1681 he published his Manual of Prayers for the Scholars of Winchester College. In 1683, Ken went as chaplain-in-chief of the fleet sent to Tangier, and found, when he came home in April, that his brother-in-law, Izaak Walton, had died in December, 1683, aged ninety-one It had been in 1670 that Walton published in one volume the Lives-written from time to time-of Hooker, Sanderson, Wotton, Donne, and Herbert; and in 1676 that Charles Cotton (b. 1630, d. 1687), a translator of Corneille's "Les Horaces" and Montaigne's Essays, and author of a Travestie of Virgil, added the "Second Part of the Complete Angler: being Instructions how to Angle for Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream." as In October, 1684, Ken was at the deathbed of his friend George Morley, whose writings had been collected in 1683 Several Treatises written upon Several Occasions, by the Right Reverend Father in God, George, Lord Bishop of Winton, both before and since the King's Restauration : wherein his judgment is fully made known concerning the Church of Rome, and most of those Doctrines which are controverted betwixt her and the Church of England." Thomas Ken then became chaplain to Charles II., and was made Bishop of Bath and Wells not many days before the king's death. Ken published a Manual of Prayer, Seraphical Meditations, and a poem called Hymnotheo; or, the Penitent, but his fame rests on the Morning and Evening Hymns, and on his place among the Seven Bishops. 60. By some means the petition of the bishops was printed and hawked about London. When the appointed Sunday came the Declaration was read only in four London churches. It was read by not more than 200 of the clergy in all England. On the 8th of June the seven bishops were committed to the Tower for seditious libel, but enlarged on recognizances before their trial. They were tried and acquitted. The shouts of popular rejoicing were echoed by the soldiers in the camp at Hounslow. On the 10th of June, two days after the bishops had been sent to the Tower, a son was born to James and his queen. This event might ensure a Roman Catholic succession to the throne, and TO A.D. 1689.] the revolUTION. 735 gave, therefore, the finishing blow to the king's cause. The passions of the time produced also a common false impression that the child was an imposture. But John Dryden, as laureate, hailed this event with Britannia Rediviva: a Poem on the Birth of the Prince. Of course there are in this poem of panegyric for the parents and hope for the child indications that Dryden knew as well as other men the dangers of the time: By living well let us secure his days; On the 30th of June, the day of the acquittal of the seven bishops, a messenger was sent to invite William of Orange to enter England at the head of troops. On the 5th of November William's fleet entered Torbay, and William landed at Brixham. James found himself deserted. On the 19th of December the Prince of Orange held a court at St. James's. On the 13th of February, 1689, William and Mary became king and queen of England. Conditions and limitations of royal authority embodied in the Declaration of Rights and Liberties of the English People were joined to the offer of the throne. It was accepted presently with those limitations, and they were afterwards embodied in the Bill of Rights. CHAPTER XI. UNDER WILLIAM III. AND ANNE. I. IN the course of English Literature after the Revolution, the old contest about the limit of authority (ch. iii. § 10) became less and less prominent. For a time the same parties continued the same battle; the upholders of supreme authority sought to reconquer ground that had been won by their antagonists. There were years even in which many doubted whether we had seen the last of civil war. But the limitation of the monarchy was maintained. The machinery of government was brought by degrees into good working order, and slow changes tended constantly to the removal of undue restraints upon each life within the body of the people. Meanwhile, also, there was a slow rise in the average power of the unit in the population. We shall find, therefore, in the literature now to be described a gradual abatement of that strife of thought through which we won our liberties, and an increasing sense of the true use of freedom. A land is free when there is nothing to restrain and much to aid the full development of each one mind in it. Not many years after the Revolution we shall begin to find encroachment upon the French influence over our literature, by writers who do not address the polite patron, but find readers enough in the main body of their countrymen. As the natural mind of the people acted upon the Elizabethan dramatists who had England fairly represented in the playhouse audience, we shall find it also using healthy influence upon those writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century who did not follow the doctrine expressed in the Poétique of La Mesnadière, that literature is only for kings, lords, and fine ladies, scholars and philosophers. As the many-headed monster learns to read, we come into the last of the Four Periods into which our literature falls (ch. iv. § 10), the Period of Popular Influence. This we shall find encroaching more and more on the French influence during many years of its decline. There will be, indeed, another form of French influence upon our literature, not of polite French on polite English, but of nation upon nation. Our political settlement of 1689, following that of the Dutch, influenced opinion in other countries. It was a starting-point of thought which in France, under conditions unlike ours, advanced during the next hundred years to the Revolution of 1789. Out of intense feeling and quick wit of the French came bold suggestion of social systems that were to solve all problems and go far beyond any results attained by our dull habit of accommodating ourselves to the possible. We should have been worth little as a people if our neighbours had not stirred us by their noble ardour to achieve, if it might be, a perfect reconstruction of society, based on a complete reconsideration of the rights and duties of the individual in relation to himself, his family, his country, and his Maker if he had one. That spirit of inquiry which we have seen gathering strength since Elizabeth's time, we shall find active still; bold in its testing of accepted facts and search after new truth in all the realms of knowledge. In some directions we shall find it quickened |