with all our gains from modern science, it is doubtful whether the language has not lost as much in power and picturesqueness as it has gained in refinement and in its multiplied synonymes.

A glance over the following table will bring to mind many immortal names. There is room to mention but a few. Sir Philip Sidney, a soldier of renown and a writer of mark both in prose and verse; James Shirley, remembered, if for nothing else, by the couplet,

"Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in the dust; "

Sir John Davies, a poet whose imaginative power is shown in this oftquoted fragment, from "The Orchestra," a poem upon Dancing, –

Thomas Hobbes, of whom Mackintosh says, "His style is the very perfection of didactic language ;" and Macaulay says, "His language is more precise and luminous than has ever been employed by any other metaphysical writer; - Burton, whose quaint "Anatomy of Melancholy" is an exhaustless mine of ancient learning, and whose introductory poem was the precursor of "Il Penseroso; " Chapman, the great translator of Homer; - Massinger, whose "New Way to Pay Old Debts" still holds the stage; - Bishop Hall, one of the ablest and most impressive of divines;—and Sir Thomas Browne, the learned physician and essayist, hardly inferior to any of his brilliant contemporaries.

From Milton to Pope, although the period contains many of the greatest names in our literature, is certainly a descent. If prose improved, poetry as surely declined. The political history of the time will throw some light on the state of letters. The unblushing wickedness of the court of Charles I. was the cause of the rise of Puritanism; and this, for a time, added decency to the other qualities of the British muse. But with the Restoration a reaction came, and the license under the first Charles was modesty itself in comparison with the prevailing grossness under the second. There was but

* Dates uncertain.

little improvement in purity until after the Revolution of 1688. We look, therefore, in this period, to the more cultivated of the Puritans, and to the better portion of the clergy, for literature of a good moral tone. The royalist authors might display as much learning, fancy, and grace, and a more cheerful temper, but their dramatists and poets delighted in evil suggestions and in scoffs at virtue, and the eloquence of their preachers was mainly devoted to violent attacks upon precisians and nonconformists, and as violent upholding of royal and priestly tyranny.

A few names are selected from the list.

Sir John Suckling is principally remembered for his poem. "The Wedding," from which the following stanza is frequently quoted:

"Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out,

As if they feared the light:
But O, she dances such a way,
No sun upon an Easter day

Is half so fine a sight."

Richard Crashaw, in a Latin poem upon Christ's turning water into wine, used the figure, —

"The conscious water saw its God and blushed.”

To this period belong the Diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys, in which we see, as upon a stage, the characters of two hundred years ago; the vehement exhortations of Baxter, which still hold their place in religious libraries; the noble poetry of Denham, whose description of the Thames and Windsor has charmed generations; the essays of Sir William Temple, "the first writer," says Johnson, "who gave cadence to English prose; " the profound treatises of Locke and of Newton; the witty and wicked plays of Congreve and Wycherley; the hymns of Dr. Watts, and the sombre Night Thoughts of the worldly Dr. Young.

Bishop Berkeley holds his place in the history of philosophy by his theory of the non-existence of matter; but he is better known

to us by his labors in Rhode Island, and by the poem in which occur these familiar lines:

"Westward the course of empire takes its way;

The first four acts already past,

A fifth shall close the drama with the day:

Time's noblest offspring is the last."

William Cleland has fixed his name in our annals by a lively poem, of which the burden is,—

"Hallo, my Fancy, whither wilt thou go?"

As this period begins with Milton, it is proper that our last reference should be to John Bunyan, the immortal Dreamer. "There is no book," says Macaulay, on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old, unpolluted English language, no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed.

Though there were many clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent degree. One of those minds produced Paradise Lost, the other the Pilgrim's Progress."

IV. FROM POPE TO WORDSWORTH.

This period is in many respects one of the most important in our literary history. In the essays of Addison and Steele, the novels of Fielding and Smollett, and the verse of Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, the language attained to such a degree of refinement that the grace and ease of the Spectator, the natural pathos of the Deserted Village, and the polish of the Rape of the Lock, have become proverbial. To equal these productions in style at our day is like attempting to copy the perfect symmetry of the Parthenon. In the same age we have the sententious wisdom of Johnson, the luminous commentaries of Blackstone, the bold forgeries or the impressive imitations of Gaelic poetry by Macpherson, the magnificent oratory of Burke, Pitt, and Fox, the clever comedies of Colman and Goldsmith, — that would seem brilliant but for the blazing lustre of Sheridan's wit, the profound studies of Adam Smith, and the gorgeous Oriental dreams of Beckford.

Two poets, now nearly forgotten, deserve mention. John Dyer