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

seems to have been one of the earliest of what may be termed landscape poets. "Grongar Hill" may fairly challenge comparison with many more famous pictures. His chief poem, "The Fleece," was founded upon a prosaic subject; since Jason's adventure wool has hardly been a theme for serious verse. The other is Dr. John Langhorne, in whose poem, "The Country Justice," occur these lines of pity for a female vagrant :·

"Cold on Canadian hills or Minden's plain,
Perhaps that parent mourned her soldier slain,
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew ;

The big drops, mingling with the milk he drew,
Gave the sad presage of his future years,

The child of misery, baptized in tears."

Sir Walter Scott has mentioned that when a lad of fifteen he saw Burns shedding tears over a picture that represented this scene.

For further illustrations the reader must be referred to the appended list, and to the ampler materials in the body of the collection.