Why, goddess! why, to us denied, 100 Revenge impatient rose: He threw his blood-stain'd sword, in thunder, down; And with a withering look The war-denouncing trumpet took, And blew a blast so loud and dread Were ne'er prophetic sounds so full of woe! And, ever and anon, he beat The doubling drum with furious heat; And though sometimes, each dreary pause between, Dejected Pity, at his side, Her soul-subduing voice applied, Yet still he kept his wild unalter'd mien, Thy humblest reed could more prevail, Had more of strength, diviner rage, 50 While each strain'd ball of sight seem'd bursting from his head. Than all which charms this laggard age; Confirm the tales her sons relate! 110 We pass out of the reign of George II. without paying much attention to the minor poets of that reign. Of Mark Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination" something will have to be said in another volume. As published when he was a youth of about one-and-twenty, it was full of promise. Instead of leaving that behind him and advancing with the years, Akenside spent much of his after life in stuffing his first successful poem with intellectual horsehair; he became a physician, and, over-mastered by his wig, struggled to live up to the full dignity of that incumbrance upon nature. Akenside died in 1770, the year of Wordsworth's birth. That which Akenside represented was then going out, and that which Wordsworth was to represent was slowly coming in. Akenside was Smollett's original for the pedantic doctor who gave a dinner after the manner of the ancients to Peregrine Pickle. The doctor's dishes of meat are like many dishes of verse that were dressed, in his time and before it, according to the classical receipts imposed on us by the French cooks of literature. His attempt at the salacacabia of the ancients was matched by many a small poet's attempt at the Pindaric Ode. But Akenside was a poet, though a small one. Thus he sang 66 To the reign of George II. belongs the masque, Alfred," produced before the Prince and Princess of Wales, at Clifden, on the 1st of August, 1740. Frederick, Prince of Wales, was then thirty-three years old, had been four years married, and for the last three years had been living in open opposition to his father, gathering poets and wits to a court of his own, and advocating Liberty in the tone that caused Bolingbroke to write his "Patriot King," with Frederick in mind. In October, 1739, war with Spain was forced upon Walpole. In November, Admiral Vernon took Porto Bello, in the Isthmus of Darien; and in 1740, when "Rule, Britannia was written, a great armament of 115 ships, carrying 15,000 sailors and 12,000 troops, was assembled at Jamaica, and another squadron was being made ready, which set out in September, 1740, under Anson, to go round Cape Horn and attack Peru. The results of the two armaments were Vernon's failure to take Carthagena, and Anson's return in 1744, with one remaining ship, after his memorable voyage round the world. The patriotic masque of "Arthur" was written by James Thomson and his friend, David Malloch, a clever fellow-student of Thomson's at Edinburgh, who had found his way a little earlier to London, and had changed his name of Malloch into Mallet for euphony. Which of the authors of this masque contributed to it the ode now become national as "Rule, Britannia," cannot be determined. We must be content to say that either Thomson or Mallet was its author. The scene of "Alfred" "represents a plain, surrounded with woods. On one side a cottage, on the other flocks and herds in distant prospect. A hermit's cave is in full view, overhung with trees, wild and grotesque." The king is here, at Athelney, in habit of a peasant, living with the shepherd Corin and Corin's wife, Emma. The Danes hold Chippenham; the English have deserted their king; all seems to be lost. The Earl of Devon, finding his sovereign in his seclusion, rouses his slumbering virtue. Spirits of the air then call to Alfred : SONG. First Spirit. Hear, Alfred, father of the state, Thy genius Heaven's high will declare! What proves the hero truly great, Is never, never, to despair, Is never to despair. Second Spirit. Thy hope awake, thy heart expand With all its vigour, all its fires. Arise! and save a sinking land! Thy country calls, and Heaven inspires. Both Spirits. Earth calls, and Heaven inspires Then the Hermit comes out of his cave, welcomes the king to his cell, tells a vision of the future power of England, and teaches fortitude with a high aim for the future of his country. Next enters Alfred's queen, Eltruda, with his young children. Minds are exercised, and the Hermit shows the blessings of affliction. The genius of England appears in her radiant charms, and summons visions of Edward III. and the Black Prince; of Elizabeth; and of William III.; on each of which the Hermit delivers a short patriotic lecture. Then comes the Earl of Devon with men whom he has gathered, and who have already fleshed their weapons on the Danes. The spirit of their ancestors is up. Alfred resumes his royalty, and, leaving Eltruda with the shepherd's wife, is setting out "to pay the debt of honour to the public," with his wife's encouragement to do so; whereupon thus the piece ends with Thee haughty tyrants ne'er shall tame: To thee belongs the rural reign; "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; The Muses, still with freedom found, "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Hermit. Alfred, go forth! lead on the radiant years, A nation's tears shall teach my song to trace The prince that decked his crown with every milder grace. How well he knew to shun false flattery's shrine, To rove at large amid the landscapes still, How, locked in pure affection's golden band, Through sacred wedlock's unambitious ways, With even step he walked, and constant hand, His temples binding with domestic bays:5 Rare pattern of the chaste connubial knot, Firm in a palace kept, as in the clay-built cot! How with discerning choice, to nature true, Nor seldom waked the muse's living lyre How to the few, with sparks ethereal stored, But bade sweet Thomson share the friendly board, "Rule, Britannia" has perhaps more affinity to the verse of Mallet than to that of Thomson. There was a turn in Mallet for the simplicity of the ballad: witness his "William and Margaret," which he said was suggested by a snatch of a ballad sung by Old Merrythought in Beaumont and Fletcher's burlesque play of the "Knight of the Burning Pestle: " When it was grown to dark midnight, In came Margaret's grimly ghost, And stood at William's feet. But Mallet's piece looks like a version of the older ballad of "Sweet William's Ghost," given by Allan Ramsay in his "Tea Table Miscellany." As in all the English ballad making or mending of this time, the charm of simplicity is not thoroughly felt, and the work suffers accordingly. It is the same with Shenstone's" Billy Dawson," an original ballad really less pathetic than the short newspaper paragraph upon which it was founded. Still the production of such poems must be added to other indications of a coming change of taste, and we have a good illustration of their form in Mallet's WILLIAM AND MARGARET. "Twas at the silent, solemn hour, When night and morning meet; In glided Margaret's grimly ghost, And stood at William's feet. He left seven children, and an eighth soon to be born. 6 The regal mask, "Alfred." The tragic strain," Edward and Eleonara," produced the year before "Alfred," and supposed to imply glorifica tion of the Prince and Princess of Wales at the expense of the king, for which reason its public representation was forbidden. He hied him to the fatal place And stretch'd him on the grass-green turf That wrapp'd her breathless clay. And thrice he call'd on Margaret's name, Then laid his cheek to her cold grave, To Richard Savage, natural son of Earl Rivers and the Countess of Macclesfield, life was made painful by the cruelty of his mother and the ills he brought upon himself. He died in gaol in 1743, and Samuel Johnson told the story of his life with pity for his sufferings, and a wise comment that comes nobly from the strong heart which had borne also its own share of bitter trial without failing under it as Savage failed. Those," observed Johnson, "are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty; nor will any wise man presume to say, 'Had I been in Savage's condition, I should have lived or written better than 66 Savage.'" This is one of his poems : THE GENTLEMAN. A decent mien, an elegance of dress, Words which at ease each winning grace express; Thence taste, thence truth, which will from taste ensue; Unwilling censure, though a judgment clear, A smile indulgent, and that smile sincere; An humble, though an elevated mind; A pride, its pleasure but to serve mankind: If these esteem and admiration raise, Give true delight and gain unflattering praise, 20 My muse, a bird of passage, flies From frozen climes to milder skies; From chilling blasts she seeks thy cheering beam, A beam of favour, here denied; Conscious of faults, her blushing pride Hopes an asylum in so great a name. When these lines were written, François Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire, had produced his "Edipe" and published his "Henriade" in 1728-his age then being thirty-four-during a residence in England, which had made him personally known to Young. He had produced two plays, his "Pucelle and his History of Charles XII.;" but when Edward Young paid homage to his genius his name was not yet associated with the battle-cries of a day then near at hand. The day was then so near that Young in this poem truly expressed a sense of human life advancing by far other counsels and desires than once prevailed." It hoped at least to "stand on higher ground." CHAPTER XVII. BEFORE AND AFTER THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: GOLDSMITH, COWPER, BURNS, AND OTHERS.—A. D. 1760 TO A.D. 1800. It was in 1750 that Jean Jacques Rousseau, then thirty-eight years old, obtained the prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for an essay showing the origin of inequality among men, and whether it was authorised by the laws of nature-in short, whether man was the better for civilisation. Rousseau argued that he was not; and Voltaire, in complimenting him upon his success, said, "Really, the reading of your work makes one anxious to go on all-fours." They are in the wrong, said Rousseau, who call man by nature cruel, and say that he needs government control; "when there is nothing so gentle as he in his primitive state, because, placed by nature at equal distances from the stupidity of the brutes and the baleful lights of the civilised man, and led equally by instinct and reason to avert the harm that threatens him, he is withheld by natural pity from doing harm himself to any one, with nothing to lead him to it, not even the suffering of hurt. For, according to the axiom of the wise Locke, there can be no wrong where there is no property." This is a whimsical perversion of the doctrine of the fifth chapter of the really wise Locke's "Essay concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government." Rousseau dealt as fancifully with the principles of the English Constitution and of the Dutch Declaration of Independence when he published, in 1762, his famous treatise on the social contract, "Du Contrat Social, ou Principes du Droit Politique." This book was the source of much of the active sentiment that shaped afterwards the course of the French Revolution. Resistance against despotisms, great and small, was gathering wild force, and vague aspirations were being blended with the growing sense that man was not all that he should be to his fellow. Imagined merits of the noble savage were contrasted with the known demerits of the bewigged formalist who lived a life of shams, and many hearts in many lands were throbbing with desire for the recovery or the attainment of an innocence and love and truth. Never before in the history of the world had sense of wrongs and tyrannies led to the wide diffusion of an energetic wish to place humanity above the reach of wars and tyrannies, of lust and greed, and raise the standard of life to such a level as it would attain if all men ruled their actions by the Sermon on the Mount. Wild theories, impossible schemes for the sudden elevation of the race of men, associated sometimes with an abjuration of religion, had yet in their first impulses a yearning such as this. While thought is taking wider range and dealing |