earlier days. In the eighteenth century even the purest litterateurs did not escape the taint of the times. The noxious atmosphere of the court of the Second Charles yet radiated all around. So universally had the conta gion diffused itself, that Addison-the gentlest spirit of his age-Addison, who wrote of the immortality of the soul and on Christian evidences, and of whom Macaulay has said he deserved as much love and esteem as can justly be claimed by any of our infirm and erring race

-even he permitted the vice of his times to become his master, and exposed himself to the coarse wit of Voltaire, who said, The best thing which he had seen come out of Joseph Addison, was the wine he had put in him. In that age literary men seem to have felt none of the responsibility which many of them are now beginning to feel.

It was this utter want of all sense of responsibility which produced that singular combination of frivolousness and fierceness by which the literature of the eighteenth century is characterized. Mingling with the pleasing and innocent prattle of Addison and Steele, might be heard the stinging and waspish satires of Pope, and the savage howl of the dean of St. Patrick's, Jonathan Swift. We have now a more healthy race of writers than that age could boast.

The age of which we write might be called the Augustan age of English literature, so far as the en

couragement of literary men was concerned: they basked in the sunshine of royal favour. Addison was a secretary of state, Steele was a commissioner of the stamp-office, Prior was ambassador to France, Tickell held a similar office to Addison. Congreve, Gay, and Dennis all held offices to which very considerable emoluments were attached. But this profusion of patronage purified neither our literature nor our litterateurs. The muse of Wycherley and Congreve, and even Dryden, was tainted with the grossest impurity; and not until one whom there was no possibility of mistaking for a Puritan-not until Jeremy Collier lashed into decency the "godless, reckless Jezebel of his age,”—was there any improvement. For a time, indeed, Congreve maintained with Collier an unequal struggle in defence of what was utterly indefensible. At length, however, the literary libertine was compelled to succumb beneath the vigorous blows dealt by the witty high-church parson. Looking back upon that sin-stained and polluted page of our national annals,. and contrasting those times with these, we think we may say, without egotism and without presumption, that the relations of literary men to society, are now of a more healthy kind than they have ever been before. No doubt there is still a large mass of our literature requiring an infusion of the moral element to tone and fit it for blessing the nation. But notwithstanding

every drawback, this much has been gained: no eminent name in literature would venture to serve up to the nation the grossness and impurity in which some of the most distinguished writers of the eighteenth century revelled. Vice has not yet altogether hid its head; but no man of genius is found prepared to prostitute his powers in garnishing its grossness.

The growing sense of responsibility now animating the literary class, is already exerting a most salutary influence. The press teems with works devoted to the solution of great social problems-a proof that literary men are no longer contented merely to amuse, but are now seeking to mend mankind. This altered phase of our literature is, we are proud to think, the product of our own age. A century ago it had no existence. The litterateurs of that time would readily with one consent have buried for the moment their mutual animosities, and united to pooh-pooh it from amongst them as unworthy of consideration. To have a care for the canaille was no business of theirs. To write for the improvement of the vulgar herd would have been preposterous. Literature was a heartless, soulless thing in those days; and such as it was then, such it was a century earlier still. John Foster has, with all his peculiar and gloomy power, drawn a picture of the appalling contrast between the mass of England's popu lation in the Elizabethan age as compared with the great

men of that world-renowned epoch of our national his tory. "There was," he says, "then perhaps a learned and vigorous monarch, and there were Cecils, and Walsinghams, and Shaksperes, and Spensers, and Sidneys, and Raleighs, with many other powerful thinkers and actors to render it the proudest age of our national glory. And we thoughtlessly admit on our imagination this splendid exhibition, as in some manner involving or implying the collective state of the people in that age! The ethereal summits of a tract of the moral world, are conspicuous and fair in the lustre of the heavens, and we take no thought of the immensely greater proportion of it which is sunk in gloom and covered with fogs. The general mass of the population, whose physical vigour indeed, and courage, and fidelity to the interests of the country, were of such admirable avail to the purposes, and under the direction of the mighty spirits that wielded their rough agency—this great assemblage was sunk in such mental barbarism as to be placed about the same distance from their illustrious intellectual chiefs, as the hordes of Scythia from the finest spirits of Athens." Thanks to an extended culture, there is now no such marked disparity between teacher and taught, between sage and swain. If the swain has not quite shot up into the philosopher, he is at least capable of understanding him. We look upon this progress with unbroken, unalloyed de

light. We are no believers in the sounding nonsense talked by the Twickenham bard about the dangerousness of a little knowledge. Nor do we homologate a statement often in the mouths of the idolaters of the past, that what culture gains in breadth it will inevitably lose in depth-that in the rage for light literature and periodical reading, profound thinkers and profound thinking will disappear. We have often suspected, that those who are loudest in this outcry belong to a class who measure profundity by bulk. Let a man only write some folio volume, and instantly he acquires a reputation for profundity, though inane prolixity and senility be apparent on every page; while if even a more than Plato were to communicate his thoughts through the medium of a magazine or a novel, these solemn fools would designate it a dissipation of your mental energies to trouble yourself with his divine philosophy.

We have a firm faith that God will never leave the world without its legitimate quota of profound thinkers; and if there be any truth in that fine fancy of the poet, found on all lips, which points us to the many mute, inglorious Miltons who walk our earth, what so likely as an extended culture to give to them a tongue and a voice, that thus they may make earth vocal with their melody, and gladden the world with their song? Talk not of the cumulative influences now at work to seduce the