William Collins.

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remained till he took his degree. While in residence there he published his "Oriental Eclogues" (1742), of which he used afterwards to speak contemptuously, as destitute of Orientalism, calling them his "Irish Eclogues." About 1744 he came to London, "with many projects in his head, and very little money in his pocket." Though depending for his means of support on the liberality of a relative, he was dissipated and profuse in his expenditure, and soon, like many another author of the day, knew what it was to be in the hands of a bailiff. Collins was a learned man, with a taste for reading and study, and could, no doubt, if he had exerted himself, have earned at least a fair competency by his pen. But he was one of the class of men who, like Coleridge, love much better to draw up magnificent projects which they intend to accomplish at some future time than to put their shoulder to the wheel and do the duty which lies nearest them. Among his plans was a "History of the Revival of Learning," of which he published proposals, but none of the work ever appeared, and very little of it was ever written. He also planned several tragedies, and on one occasion, when confined to his house lest he should be captured by a bailiff who was prowling in the street, entered into an engagement with the booksellers to execute a translation of Aristotle's "Poetics," for which he received as much money as enabled him to escape into the country. Soon afterwards he received a legacy of two thousand pounds, whereupon he repaid the booksellers the sum they had advanced him and abandoned the translation. His only publication besides the "Eclogues" was his "Odes," which appeared in 1746, and proved such a failure in point of sale, that the sensitive author purchased the remainder of the edition from the publisher and burned it. About 1751 he began to decay in body and in mind. "His disorder," says Johnson, who knew and liked him, "was no alienation of mind, but general laxity and feebleness, a deficiency rather of his vital than his intellectual powers. What he spoke wanted neither judgment nor spirit; but a few minutes exhausted him, so that he was forced to rest upon the couch, till a short cessation restored his powers, and he was

again able to talk with his former vigour." He lingered on in this deplorable state for some years, till, in 1759, death relieved him from it. Once when, during his malady, Johnson called on him, he found the unfortunate poet reading the New Testament, which he always carried about with him. “I have but one book," said Collins, "but it is the best."

After Collins's death there was found among his papers a long ode on the "Superstitions of the Highlands," which has since been printed. His entire works form a very slender volume, but it is a volume which will always be dear to those who can appreciate real poetical genius. His brilliant personification of the Passions and his fine "Ode to Evening" show pure taste, deep poetic feeling, and a wide command of poetical diction. His contemporaries, including Johnson, were blind to his merits, but their neglect of him has been amply avenged by the honour paid to him by posterity.

We have only mentioned a few of the poets who flourished during the reign of Queen Anne and the first Georges. The list might be indefinitely extended; but it is idle to try to keep alive the memory of a crowd of versifiers, most of whose compositions are inferior to those which every day appear in the pages of our periodicals. Of all kinds of reading, that of bad or middling poetry is the most profitless. One or two of the poets who belong to the first half of the eighteenth century will be mentioned in a subsequent chapter, but we may here mention, as belonging to the school of Pope, Mark Akenside, whose "Pleasures of the Imagination" (1744) was inspired by Addison's papers in the Spectator on the same subject. This poem is in blank verse, and though frequently commonplace and wearisome, is not without dignity and force. But poems which aspire to treat such a theme in a poetical way are apt to prove failures unless in the hands of a great master of his art, and Akenside did not possess genius enough to grapple successfully with the many difficulties of his subject. Accordingly, although it deserves and will reward the attention of the student of English poetry, the "Pleasures of the Imagi nation" is now generally neglected.

VI

OUR FIRST GREAT NOVELISTS.

Defoe; Richardson; Fielding; Smollett; Sterne.

IR WALTER SCOTT, in the beginning of his "Essay on Romance," referring to the division of fictitious prose narratives into two classes, defines the romance as that in which the interest turns chiefly on marvellous and uncommon incidents, and the novel as that in which the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society. The definitions are not, perhaps, altogether unexceptionable, but they indicate the distinction in a way sufficiently clear and broad for practical purposes. Romances of one kind or another, pastoral and heroic, were known in England from an early period-Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," which Scott calls "indisputably the best prose romance the language can boast of," was written during the reign of Edward IV.; but as a rule they were very extravagant and of small literary merit. The novel, on the other hand, is of comparatively recent introduction into English literature. It seems strange to us, who live in a time when novels constitute by far the most generally attractive species of composition, when they are produced by thousands and read by tens of thousands, when more deft and gifted penmen employ themselves in this branch of literature than in any other, to think that we have not to go farther back for the beginnings of this fascinating species of composition than

the early part of the eighteenth century. Its rise coincides pretty much with the decline of the drama. Education was beginning to be more widely diffused, and people were not only able to follow a story with interest as represented on the stage, but also to read it with pleasure.

Daniel Defoe, the first of our great writers of fiction, was scarcely a novelist in the modern sense of the word. His tales may be described as fictitious biographies, intended to be accepted as authentic; they have no carefully wrought out plot, so contrived as to keep the reader's attention enchained to the last. He wrote enormously-about 250 distinct productions it is said, and in all departments of literature-verse, history, fiction, politics, &c.-but his memory is now mainly kept alive by his incomparable "Robinson Crusoe,” which has charmed the schoolboys of many generations, and bids fair to continue to charın them as long as the English tongue is spoken. Defoe, who had almost as stirring and chequered a career as any of the heroes he loved to celebrate, was born in 1661, the son of a wealthy butcher in St. Giles, Cripplegate. According to his own account, he was educated with a view to becoming a dissenting clergyman, and studied with this intent for about five years. However this may be, he seems by some means or other to have picked up a very unusual amount of learning, for he tells us in one of his Reviews that he had been master of five languages, and that he had studied mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, geography, and history. His education over, he entered into business, becoming a hosier, his enemies said; a trader, he himself said. While still a very young man he visited Portugal, and perhaps other parts of the Continent, and in 1683 he began his long and industrious career of political pamphleteering by writing on the war be tween the Turks and the Austrians. Defoe's life was so shifty and intricate, his own statements about it, despite their air of plausibility, have been proved to be so little trustworthy, so many parts of it are still in some degree matter of controversy, that here we cannot attempt to do more than indicate briefly sume of its great outstanding features. He appears to have

joined the Duke of Monmouth's party in 1685; he started many ingenious projects, and entered into some business speculations which proved unsuccessful; and in 1695 he was appointed accountant to the commissioners for managing the duties on glass, an office which he held till 1699, when he lost his situation owing to the suppression of the tax. In 1701 he won his way to royal favour by his satire "The True-Born Englishman," an enthusiastic eulogium on King William and the Revolution. His "Shortest Method with the Dissenters,” an ironical pamphlet published in 1703, gave such offence that the unfortunate author was fined, pilloried, and imprisoned. In February 1704 he began the publication of The Review, a periodical publication which deserves remembrance in literature as the forerunner of the Tatler and the Spectator; and in the same year he began his profitable if somewhat dishonourable career of hack political writer in the pay of the Government, in which capacity he wrote dozens of pamphlets, In 1706-7 he was sent to Scotland to assist in promoting the Union. He died in 1731, writing steadily to the last. Defoe's personal appearance is thus described in a proclamation offering a reward for his capture after the publication of his "Shortest Way with the Dissenters:"-" He is a middle-sized, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark brown coloured hair, but wears a wig, a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth." His character presents few features, save his indomitable industry, calculated to win respect or regard. He appears to have been an habitual and shameless liar, and in the latter years of his occupation as a hired political writer he acted a treacherous part, insinuating himself into the staff of a Jacobite journal in order to mitigate the fierceness of its attacks on the Whig statesman by whom, of course, he was paid for his services.

As a writer of these political pamphlets, which were then. nearly as powerful agents in the dissemination of political opinions as newspapers are now, Defoe has been ranked along with Swift. Both of them, by the studied simplicity of their style, the homeliness of their illustrations, the clearness and