when truth was pursued for its own sake, nor an age of tranquil cultivation of art or literature, nor an age of a devout religious spirit. It was an age of hatred, sneering, scorn and contempt; and wit consisted in an epigrammatic representation of other people's failings, and an obstinate ignoring of all their excellences. "All the emotions of the Augustans," says Professor Ward, "except their hatred, seem shallow and transitory, and most of all so in their literary expression." Literature was not cultivated for itself, but was fostered as the expression of a restless and insatiable vanity. The age was, above all, self-conceited, it took the most careful note of all its own good points, and it is probable that an age or a person who does this, has a shallow and limited nature, and has no real depth of mental power or character.

8. Professor Masson reckons the Eighteenth Century from 1688, the year of our own Revolution, to 1789, the year of the French Revolution, and says that "Britain then passed into a period in which, to all appearance, it had done with the sublimities.' It was

not an age of poetry; or it was, as Southey said, the worst age. If we turn over the leaves of Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets, we shall find the names of Smith, Duke, King, Sprat, Hughes, Blackmore, Fenton, Yalden, Hammond and others, not one line of whose writings is now ever read by any one. But it has been pointed out by able critics that the eighteenth century was the age when the capacities of the English language for prose were most fully developed-the age when the largest number of really great prose-writers flourished. If, therefore on the negative side—it is fair to call it a prosaic age, we may give to this phrase a positive and laudatory term by translating it into the Age of Prose. It was also the age which gave birth to the modern novel, in which contemporary life was firmly grasped by great writers like Richardson and Fielding.

9. In this age may also be discerned the obscure beginnings of two popular phenomena, which did not attain their full development until the present century-newspapers and circulating libraries. DEFOE

is the true founder of the modern newspaper; and it was in 1704 that he began his Review. There had been gazettes, and what were called news-letters before his time; but he was the first man who made the newspaper the vehicle of independent criticism. The circulating library had its origin in the fact that books were in the eighteenth century comparatively dear. Another interesting point about this age

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was that it formed the period of transition from private patronage to public appreciation-when the author no longer looked to noblemen for help, but to the reward of his own merits. DR. JOHNSON was the man who fought out this battle. By independent criticism, and still more by his notable letter to Lord Chesterfield, Johnson dealt such a blow at the system of patronage, that henceforward literary men appealed less to titled patrons, and more to their surest critics and best paymasters, the outside public.

EXERCISES TO CHAPTER XV.

Ex. 1. Prepare the first passage from Temple with the following notes:1. Original power. 2. Agitation shaking them about. We have a similar figure in the word discuss-which means to shake apart. 3. A modern writer would not have used the pronominal adverb so, but would have repeated the word dwarfs. 4. Better, of heart or of brain.

State also, in four short sentences, the chief points maintained by Temple in this passage.

Ex. 2. Prepare the passage on Homer and Virgil with the following

notes:

1. Without is not here the opposite of with, but of within, and is=beyond. 2. Arrangement. 3. Management of his ideas. 4. Style. 5. The older form of alloy. Compare the lines from Lovelace:

When flowing cups run swiftly round

With no allaying Thames.

6. The phrase of all others is here correct; the other excludes Virgil. As usually employed, of all others is a most illogical phrase; it at once includes in a certain category and excludes from it the thing spoken of. 7. In their own kinds, or genera, of art. 8. To themselves alone.

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Ex. 3. Prepare the passage from Barrow with the following notes :— 1. Notice the Latin notitia the sum of distinguishing note or marks. 2. Absolutely apart from all relativity. 3. Tradition, from Latin tradere, to hand down. 4. The selection of terms should here be noted: reason dictates; nature declares; tradition attests; experience intimates. 5. Nature= original being, or disposition. 6. Essence, from a mediæval Latin word essentia-from the Latin word esse, to be. Essence means therefore being of being. 7. Simple, in the old sense of the Latin simplex (= sem-el plex = one fold), and hence: not complex. 8. Barrow, as a learned divine, seems to prefer Latin terms to English words when writing on theology. He might have said, All-knowing and Almighty instead of Omniscient and Omnipotent. But there is no English word for Omnipresent. 9. Impassible =not to be acted upon, never in a passive state. 10. As in the phrase absolute monarch-one whose power is unlimited.

Ex. 4. Prepare the passage from South with the following notes:1. Night-watchings, in the original sense of waking. The word watch is

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simply a form of wake. The instrument called a watch is so called because it remains awake. Instances of the changes of a k into a t are not uncommon in English; compare bake, batch; make, match; thack (the Scotch form), thatch. 2. Reason did not then want the help of the process called reasoning. Man knew by intuition, not by careful induction and comparison. 3. Doom lot adjudged. Doom is the noun from the verb deem; and a judge in Old English was called a dempster. Doomsday-book means the book of the day of valuation of land. 4. In the depth. 5. Impair, from the French empirer, to make worse. 6. Conclusion has two meanings-one, an ending; another, a summing up or inference from previously examined premises. South takes advantage of this double meaning to join his days and himself— pitiful and controverted, by an odd kind of zeugma. 7. Pore lit. to poke about slowly; probably of Celtic origin. 8. Expedite unencumbered. Expediti equites were horse-soldiers sent out on a sudden expedition with no, or with the minimum quantity of, baggage. 9. This use of the singular for the plural is only to be justified by the notion that South thought of freedom and firmness as one idea = a firm freedom. 10. Still always. 11. Fancy imagine. In Shakspeare's time the word fancy meant either imagination or love.

Tell me, where is Fancy bred ?

Or in the heart, or in the head?

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The word is simply a compression of phantasy (from the Greek phantasia). Later on, the language, finding itself in possession of two words for the same thing, detailed the one to mean the higher, and the other the lower and lighter, power. 12. Estimating. 13. Positive-privative-negative,— these are the three steps existence of something, absence of that something, and existence of the opposite. 14. Discourse, not of speech, but of reason. Discourse means running to and fro; and discourse of reason (a phrase used by Milton) means the going about of reason to find out truth. We have a somewhat similar meaning in a word from the same root-discursiveness. 15. Collect infer. We do not now use the word in this sense, except in the phrase "I collected from the remarks made that," etc. 16. Relics. 17. Empty and useless things. 18. With the face rubbed off. 19. Draughts= traits. Draught is a noun from draw. So a cheque drawn is called a draught; a person who draws plans a draughtsman. 20. The great Greek philosopher, who was the founder of almost all the sciences of the West. He has dominated European thought for centuries; and is still looked upon as the "Master of those who know." 21. The rude or unfinished

elements.

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Ex. 5. Prepare the passage on p. 288, with the following notes :1. Of about. We should now say simply read everything. 2. Materials for would now be the phrase. 3. From Lat. ruminare chew the cud. 4. Things collected. 5. Visible. It is difficult to say what Locke means by visible instances of deep thought. It is probably only a careless way of saying, It is plain that there are to be found, etc. 6. Particulars=facts or data. 7. Reach scope. 8. Better is rather a weak word here. 9. Hearsay one of the few old idioms still retained in modern English. The say is in the infinitive, and governed by hear, as in the same phrase in German, hörensagen. 10. Exhibition. 11. By rote literally, in a beaten path, by heart; from old French rote, which has also given us route, routine, rut, &c. 12. Sure foundations. 13. In the old sense of claimed. 14. Deduced from principles it is built on, is a very good example of Locke's loose English.

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1.

CHAPTER XVI.

POPE.

LEXANDER Pope was born in Lombard Street, in the city of London, on the 21st of May, in the year 1688. His father-who was also called Alexander-was engaged in the linen trade, and earned in it a competent fortune before he was fifty. He professed the religion of a Roman Catholic. His wife's name was Edith

Turner, the daughter of a Roman Catholic gentleman of Yorkshire. On retiring from business, his father took a house at Binfield, on the edge of Windsor Forest, and about nine miles from the town. He had made £20,000; but he would not entrust it to the keeping of a bank: he had a strong box made, and took out from it whatever money was needed for the week. There they lived till 1716, when they removed to Chiswick. Young Pope was a very weakly boy, deformed and slightly hunchbacked, but with a most expressive face, and dark, bright brown eyes. When grown up, he was only four feet high, with a very short body, and most disproportionately long arms. Hence, at school he went at different times by the nicknames of "The Spider," or "The Windmill." But he had a very sweet voice; and his friends and admirers called him "the little nightingale."

He was a very precocious child. At the age of five he had already shown signs so strong of literary tastes and powers, that an aunt appointed him the legatee of all her books, pictures, and models. When eight years of age, he learned the accidence of Latin and Greek from the family priest, whose name was Banister. He was afterwards sent to a private school at Twyford, near Winchester, where he wrote a lampoon on Mr. Deane, the master. He was flogged in consequence; and his father removed him. Thus his school training stopped at the early age of twelve. About this time he paid a visit

to London, and, in Will's Coffee-House in St James Street, he saw Dryden for the first and only time in his life.

2. At the age of eight he had translated into verse a part of the Latin poet Statius, who was one of his favourite Latin poets (the other was Virgil) throughout his life; and at twelve he had written a play in which he introduced Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, and other characters mentioned in the Iliad.

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As yet a child nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

It was difficult at that time for Roman Catholics to receive a good education; the public schools and the universities were quite closed to them. Considering," says Pope himself, "how very little I had when I came from school, I think I may be said to have taught myself Latin, as well as French and Greek; and in all these my chief way of getting them was by translation.” He knew French well,

Latin fairly, but not accurately, and his Greek scholarship was meagre and inaccurate. By nature he had a very correct taste in the choice of words and phrases, an exquisite ear for neat and telling rhythms, and a great fund of common sense. When he was fourteen, he went up to London to study French and Italian; but he does not seem to have ever known much of the latter language. After spending a few months in London he returned to Binfield, where he gave five or six years to study and close reading. His reading lay chiefly, almost entirely, among the poets. His literary life may be said to have begun at the age of sixteen.

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3. He was first encouraged to publish his verses by the praises of Sir William Trumball, an old diplomatist, and Mr. Walsh, a landed gentleman in the neighbourhood. "I know no one," wrote Trumball in 1705, so likely to equal Milton as yourself;" and Walsh said of his juvenile poems, "It is not flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age." This was very strong praise, but it helped to keep Pope in the special walk he had marked out for himself that of a "correct" poet.

His first long poem was his Pastorals, which he wrote when he was sixteen. His Ode to Solitude ("Happy the man whose wish and care," etc.) was written when he was twelve. The Pastorals were published by Jacob Tonson, in his Poetic Miscellany, in 1709. They had been handed about in manuscript and very much admired for four years before.