CHAPTER XII
THE GEORGIAN DRAMA
Panas!
THE GEORGIAN DRAMA
Panas!
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v11
Lady Austen.
The Task.
John Gilpin. On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture. Trans-
lations. Letters
77
CHAPTER V
WILLIAM WORDS WORTH
By ÉMILE LEGOUIS, Professor of English Language and
Literature at the Sorbonne
The Influence of Rousseau. Wordsworth's Childhood. His Wander-
ings. The French Revolution. Dorothy Wordsworth. Friendship
with Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's Marriage. Ode
to Duty. The Excursion. The White Doe of Rylstone.
Laodamia. Sonnets. Later Years. The Ruined Cottage. His
poetry of Nature. There was a Boy. Wordsworth and Shelley.
Michael, The Lucy poems. His Description of the Moral
Emotions
93
## p. ix (#17) ##############################################
Contents
ix
CHAPTER VI
COLERIDGE
By C. E. VAUGHAN, M. A. , Balliol College, Oxford
PAGE
Early Years. The French Revolution. Coleridge's Friendship with
Wordsworth. The Opium habit. The Friend. Biographia
Literaria. Influence of Wordsworth. Kubla Khan. The Ancient
Mariner. Christabel. The Poetry of Nature. Anima Poetæ.
The Hour of Romance. Coleridge's Theory of Criticism. Coleridge
as Philosopher.
117
CHAPTER VII
GEORGE CRABBE
By HAROLD CHILD
Early Life. The Library. The Village. The Newspaper. The
Parish Register. Sir Eustace Grey. The Borough. Tales.
Tales of the Hall. The Change in English Poetry during
Crabbe's Lifetime. Crabbe's Couplets. Summary .
140
.
CHAPTER VIII
SOUTHEY
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY
A
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M. A. , Merton College, Oxford,
LL. D. , D. Litt. , F. B. A. Professor of Rhetorie and English
Literature in the University of Edinburgh
SOUTHEY
Details of Southey's Life. His Politics. Wat Tyler. Joan of Arc.
Southey's Blank Verse. Holly Tree. My Days among the Dead
are passed. Ballads. Thalaba. Madoc. Southey as Historian
and Reviewer. Commonplace Books. The Curse of Kehama.
The Life of Nelson. Roderick the last of the Goths. The Life
of John Wesley. Miscellaneous Prose. The Lives of the
Admirals. The Doctor. Southey's Letters. Southey and
Dryden.
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Anstey. The New Bath Guide. Hanbury Williams. John Hall
Stevenson. Crazy Tales. Erasmus Darwin. The Botanic
Garden. The Loves of the Plants. William Hayley. The
Triumph of Temper. The Della Cruscans. William Lisle Bowles.
Frank Sayers. Sir William Jones
153
## p. x (#18) ###############################################
x
Contents
CHAPTER IX
BLAKE
Profeu
PAGE
By J. P. R. WALLIS, M. A. , Assistant Lecturer in English
Tra irene
Literature in the University of Liverpool
Early Career. Poetical Sketches. An Island in the Moon. Begin-
nings of Mysticism. Songs of Innocence and Thel. Tiriel.
Revolutionary writings. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
and the earlier 'Prophecies. ' The later Lambeth books. Songs
of Experience. Europe and The Song of Los. The Urizen group.
The crisis in Blake's spiritual development. The Four Zoas. His
mystical Christianity. Milton and Jerusalem. His Theory of
Imagination. Lesser Verse and Prose. Blake and the Romantic
Revival
181
CHAPTER X
BURNS
LESSER SCOTTISH VERSE
By T. F. HENDERSON
LL. D. st thdra
BURNS
The Old School of Scottish Verse. Burns's Indebtedness to his Pre-
decessors. The Kilmarnock volume. The Cotter's Saturday
Night. Burns's 'English' poems. His six-line stave. Death
and Doctor Hornbook. The Address to the Deil. Holy Willie's
Prayer. The Auld Farmer's New Year Salutation to his Mare
Maggie. The Christis Kirk stave. The Holy Fair. Halloween.
The Cherrie and The Slae stave. The Jolly Beggars. Tam o'
Shanter. Burns at Edinburgh. His Songs and Adaptations.
LESSER SCOTTISH VERSE
Joanna Baillie. Lady Anne Lindsay of Balcarres. Susanna Blamire.
Mrs Grant of Carron. Mrs Grant of Laggan. Elizabeth Hamilton.
Mrs John Hunter. Mrs Maclehose (“Clarinda'). Caroline Oliphant
Lady Nairne. Dr Blacklock. Richard Gall. John Hamilton.
John Lapraik. John Lowe. Hector MacNeil. James Tytler.
John Mayne. Sir Alexander Boswell. Robert Tannahill. Alex-
ander Wilson. William Motherwell. James Hogg. The Queen's
Wake. John Leyden. Allan Cunningham. Thomas Mounsey
Cunningham. William Tennant. John Hyslop. Robert Gilfillan.
William Nicholson. William Glen. William Watt. Michael
Bruce and John Logan. The Cuckoo. James Grahame. Robert
Pollok
203
## p. xi (#19) ##############################################
1
Contents
xi
CHAPTER XI
THE PROSODY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M. A.
PAGE
Changes in the Heroic Couplet of Dryden. The Octosyllabic Couplet.
The Spenserian Stanza. Blank Verse. Lyric Poetry of the
Eighteenth Century. Edward Bysshe's Art of Poetry. Eigh-
teenth Century Prosodists. Joshua Steele. Young. Shenstone.
Gray. Johnson. John Mason. Mitford. Cowper. Summary
245
.
CHAPTER XII
THE GEORGIAN DRAMA
Panas!
By HAROLD V. ROUTH, M. A. , Peterhouse, Leeturer in
English Literature at Goldsmiths' College, London" (rimariset,
'
londe, Bertoni
The Decay of the Drama and the Advance of the Actor. The Theatre
in the Eighteenth Century and its Audiences. Richard Cumberland.
The Brothers. The West Indian Lesser Playwrights. Oliver
Goldsmith. She Stoops to Conquer. Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
The Rivals. A Trip to Scarborough. The School for Scandal.
Hannah More. Percy. Hannah Cowley. General Burgoyne.
The Heiress. Thomas Holcroft. The Road to Ruin. The
Deserted Daughter. Elizabeth Inchbald. George Colman the
Younger. Inkle and Yarico. Thomas Morton and others.
Cumberland's Jew. Realism and the Drama
257
CHAPTER XIII
THE GROWTH OF THE LATER NOVEL
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY
多,。
nh
Thomas Amory. John Buncle. Memoirs of Several Ladies. William
Beckford. Vathek. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, St Leon.
Thomas Holcroft. Autobiography. Novels. Mrs Inchbald.
A Simple Story. Nature and Art. Robert Bage. Hermsprong.
Maria Edgeworth. Belinda. The Absentee. Ormond. Tales
for the Young. Charlotte Smith. Regina Maria Roche. Eaton
Stannard Barrett. Clara Reeve. Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries
of Udolpho and other works. Matthew Gregory Lewis. The
Monk. Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer. Jane
and Anna Maria Porter. Thaddeus of Warsaw. The Scottish
Chiefs. Thomas Hope. Anastasius. Thomas Love Peacock
285
## p. xii (#20) #############################################
xii
Contents
CHAPTER XIV
BOOK PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION, 1625—1800
By H. G. ALDIS, M. A. , Peterhouse, Secretary of the
University Library
PAGE
14
Attempts at State Control under Charles I and the Commonwealth.
The Censorship of L'Estrange. Lapse of the Licensing Laws.
Copyright before 1709. The first Copyright Act. The battle for
Perpetual Copyright. The relations between Author and Publisher
in the Seventeenth Century. Milton, Baxter. Earnings of play-
wrights. Literature becomes a Profession. Increase of the Reading
Classes. Patrons and Dedications. The Publisher as Patron and
Employer. Leading Publishers in Commonwealth and Restoration
times. The Eighteenth Century. Tonson, Lintot, Dodsley, Millar.
Trade books. Society for Encouragement of Learning. Bell's
Poets and Johnson's Poets. Paternoster Row Numbers. Book-
sellers' Clubs. Cadell, Strahan. Literary Booksellers. Curll
and Grub Street. "The Trade' in London. Little Britain. Scot,
Bateman, the Ballards. Other Localities. Westminster Hall.
Literary Coffeehouses. Payne, Davies. Popular Literature.
Practical Divinity, Chapbooks. The Retail Bookseller. Sale by
auction. Printed Catalogues. James Lackington. Circulating
Libraries and Book Clubs. Trade Lists of Current Publications.
Trade sales. The Provincial Trade. Scotland and Ireland .
311
CHAPTER XV
THE BLUESTOCKINGS
By Mrs H. G. ALDIS
The term 'Bluestocking! Conversation parties. Mrs Vesey. Mrs
Montagu. Her share in Lord Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead.
Her Essay on Shakespeare. Mrs Montagu and Voltaire. Mrs
Elizabeth Carter. Her Translation of Epictetus. Hannah More.
Her friendship with Horace Walpole. Mrs Chapone.
343
## p. xiii (#21) ############################################
Contents
X111
CHAPTER XVI
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
By F. J. HARVEY DARTON, sometime Scholar of St John's
College, Oxford
PAGE
Schoolbooks. The Hornbook. Books of Courtesy. Hell-fire tales.
Exemplary' Compilations. Bunyan's Divine Emblems. Watte's
Divine Songs. The Chapbook. Fairy Tales. Nursery Rimes.
John Newbery. Dorothy Kilner. Sarah Trimmer. Mrs Sherwood.
Maria Edgeworth. Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton. The
Moral Tale in Verse. Ann and Jane Taylor's Original Poems.
Miss Turner's Cautionary Stories. Charles and Mary Lamb.
Later Writings for Children
366
388
Bibliographies .
Table of Principal Dates
Index of Names
493
.
.
196
.
## p. xiv (#22) #############################################
3
## p. 1 (#23) ###############################################
1
CHAPTER I
EDMUND BURKE
>
EDMUND BURKE, the greatest of English orators, if we measure
greatness not by immediate effect alone but by the durability and
the diffusive power of that effect, and one of the profoundest, most
suggestive and most illuminating of political thinkers, if we may
not call a philosopher one who did not elaborate any system and
who refrained on principle from the discussion of purely theoretical
issues, was an Irishman of the usual blended native and English
strain, born(1729) in a family which united the two creeds that divide
Ireland more profoundly and fatefully than any distinction of race.
His father, a small Dublin solicitor, was a protestant, his mother a
catholic. Burke himself was educated in the protestant faith, but
his sister adhered to the religion of her mother, and his wife was a
catholic who conformed to the Anglican church after her marriage.
Burke always professed his protestantism frankly and sincerely,
'We are protestants not from indifference but from zeal'—and
the charges that were brought against him of having, at one time
or other, been a catholic are without foundation, but his attitude
towards the catholic church was at once tolerant and sympathetic.
To him, she and every other church were allies in the defence of
the religious conception of life which was the centre of all his
thought about morals and politics, and of which atheistical
Jacobinism was the antithesis. In the last years of his life, he
fought for the cause of catholic emancipation in Ireland no less
ardently than he opposed a 'regicide' peace with France. The
'directory of Ireland' which upheld protestant ascendancy at
Dublin was hardly less odious to him than the Jacobin directory
in Paris.
Burke's education was received at Ballitore, under a quaker,
whose son, Richard Shackleton, became the chief friend of his
early manhood, and at Trinity college, Dublin. Fox believed
that Burke “had not any very nice critical knowledge even of
1
B, L, XL.
CH. I.
## p. 2 (#24) ###############################################
2
[CH.
Edmund Burke
Latin, still less of Greek,' but was well read in Latin authors,
especially Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, Horace and Tacitus, and that he
imitated the first mentioned of these authors most particularly,
as well in his turn of thinking as in his manner of expression. '
What survive of Burke's letters to Shackleton point to the same
conclusion as Fox's observation, that Burke was a wide and
curious reader rather than a minute scholar. Mathematics, logic,
history were, each in turn, he tells Shackleton, in one letter, a
passion, and all, for a time, yielded to poetry. The letter affords
a vivid glimpse into the education of one to whom knowledge,
knowledge varied and detailed, was always to be a passion, and
who was seldom or never to pen a sentence that has not something
in its form to arrest the attention or to give delight. But Burke
was not a poet. He could do many things that were beyond the
power of his less strenuous and less profound fellow student,
Oliver Goldsmith, but he could never have written The Deserted
Village or The Vicar of Wakefield. Nor, magnificent as Burke's
prose was to be, picturesque, harmonious and full of cadence, is
it ever the prose which affects us as poetry. It is always the
prose of an orator, addressed to an audience and aiming at a
practical effect. Beauty, as in the meditations of Browne or the
oratory of Taylor, is never to Burke an end in itself.
The wide and varied reading which began at Trinity college
was, apparently, the chief activity of the nine obscure years
(1750—59) which Burke spent as a student of law in London,
eating dinners at the Middle Temple, sojourning at country inns
or rooms during the vacation with his namesake and, perhaps,
kinsman William Burke, and making tentative excursions into
letters with an ironical answer to Bolingbroke's posthumous
writings in A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and an
essay in aesthetics after Addison in A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1756). Fulness of mind was the quality of Burke's conversation
which impressed Johnson and all who came to know him in these
and later years—knowledge and the power of applying that
knowledge, 'diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind. '
‘His stream of mind is perpetual,' was Johnson's comment;
‘Burke is the only man whose common conversation corresponds
with the general fame which he has in the world.
whatever topic you please, he is ready to meet you. Burke
owed his success in the House of Commons and its committees
not more, perhaps, to his eloquence than to this fulness of mind,
Take up
## p. 3 (#25) ###############################################
1]
Early Life and Work
3
to the fact that, whatever topic he handled, America, India,
Ireland, finance or trade, he spoke from a copious and close
knowledge of the subject.
The works which Burke composed during these years are not
of great importance. A Philosophical Enquiry is an unequal,
and, in the main, rather jejune, treatise of which the fairest criticism
is probably Lessing's, that it ‘is uncommonly useful as a collection
of all the occurrences and perceptions which the philosophers
must assume as indisputable in inquiries of this kind. ' Burke
distinguishes the sublime so sharply from the beautiful that his
description of the latter includes little which goes beyond the
pretty. More interesting and suggestive is the analysis of the
pleasure we take in terrible and painful spectacles—whether a
tragedy in the theatre or an execution in the street. But, perhaps,
most interesting of all is his discussion of the aesthetic and
emotional qualities of words, which he finds to depend less on the
images which they evoke than their other properties of sound and
association. The business of poetry and rhetoric is 'to affect
rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of
things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present
a clear idea of the things themselves. ' The germ of Laocoon is
contained in these paragraphs.
A Vindication is a much more characteristic and significant
document. In parodying the eloquence of Bolingbroke, Burke
caught some of the first tones of his own more sonorous and
varied harmonies. The conception of the essay, a defence of
religion by the application of a reductio ad absurdum to Boling-
broke's method of attack, revealed the deep religious spirit
in which all Burke's political and social speculation bottoms
and roots itself. Bolingbroke had indicted revealed religions by
pointing to some of the consequences which, in history, had
flowed from dogmatic creeds, and Burke answers him by applying
the same method to the criticism of political society.
Shew me an absurdity in religion, and I will undertake to shew you an
hundred for one in political laws and institutions. . . . If after all, you should
confess all these things, yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak
and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior, force con-
cerning the necessity of artificial religion; and every step you advance in your
argument, you add a strength to mine.
But, perhaps, the most interesting quality of the essay is the
sidelight that it throws on Burke's temperament, the sensitive,
brooding imagination which, coupled with a restless, speculative
1-2
## p. 4 (#26) ###############################################
4
[CH.
Edmund Burke
intellect, seeking ever to illuminate facts by principles, gives tone
to Burke's speeches and pamphlets ; for it is this temperament
which imparts vividness and colour to the dry details of historical
and statistical knowledge, and it is this temperament which at
once directs, keeps in check and prescribes its limits to, that
speculative, enquiring intellect. In the sentences in which Burke
paints the lot of those who bear the burden of political society,
the unhappy wretches employed in lead, tin, iron, copper and
coal mines, who scarce ever see the light of the sun, the enfans
perdus of the army of civil society; in these vivid paragraphs,
and not less in his failure to draw from them any but an ironical
conclusion, a reductio ad absurdum of Bolingbroke's paradoxes,
we get an insight into one of the most radical characteristics
of Burke's mind. In his later works, he did not often touch
directly on the subject of the poor and their lot, though it was
a theme, he says, on which he had 'often reflected and never
reflected without feeling from it’; but his sensibility was not
more acute than his conviction was profound that legislation
and political adjustment could do little or nothing to alleviate
their lot.
John Gilpin. On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture. Trans-
lations. Letters
77
CHAPTER V
WILLIAM WORDS WORTH
By ÉMILE LEGOUIS, Professor of English Language and
Literature at the Sorbonne
The Influence of Rousseau. Wordsworth's Childhood. His Wander-
ings. The French Revolution. Dorothy Wordsworth. Friendship
with Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's Marriage. Ode
to Duty. The Excursion. The White Doe of Rylstone.
Laodamia. Sonnets. Later Years. The Ruined Cottage. His
poetry of Nature. There was a Boy. Wordsworth and Shelley.
Michael, The Lucy poems. His Description of the Moral
Emotions
93
## p. ix (#17) ##############################################
Contents
ix
CHAPTER VI
COLERIDGE
By C. E. VAUGHAN, M. A. , Balliol College, Oxford
PAGE
Early Years. The French Revolution. Coleridge's Friendship with
Wordsworth. The Opium habit. The Friend. Biographia
Literaria. Influence of Wordsworth. Kubla Khan. The Ancient
Mariner. Christabel. The Poetry of Nature. Anima Poetæ.
The Hour of Romance. Coleridge's Theory of Criticism. Coleridge
as Philosopher.
117
CHAPTER VII
GEORGE CRABBE
By HAROLD CHILD
Early Life. The Library. The Village. The Newspaper. The
Parish Register. Sir Eustace Grey. The Borough. Tales.
Tales of the Hall. The Change in English Poetry during
Crabbe's Lifetime. Crabbe's Couplets. Summary .
140
.
CHAPTER VIII
SOUTHEY
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY
A
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M. A. , Merton College, Oxford,
LL. D. , D. Litt. , F. B. A. Professor of Rhetorie and English
Literature in the University of Edinburgh
SOUTHEY
Details of Southey's Life. His Politics. Wat Tyler. Joan of Arc.
Southey's Blank Verse. Holly Tree. My Days among the Dead
are passed. Ballads. Thalaba. Madoc. Southey as Historian
and Reviewer. Commonplace Books. The Curse of Kehama.
The Life of Nelson. Roderick the last of the Goths. The Life
of John Wesley. Miscellaneous Prose. The Lives of the
Admirals. The Doctor. Southey's Letters. Southey and
Dryden.
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Anstey. The New Bath Guide. Hanbury Williams. John Hall
Stevenson. Crazy Tales. Erasmus Darwin. The Botanic
Garden. The Loves of the Plants. William Hayley. The
Triumph of Temper. The Della Cruscans. William Lisle Bowles.
Frank Sayers. Sir William Jones
153
## p. x (#18) ###############################################
x
Contents
CHAPTER IX
BLAKE
Profeu
PAGE
By J. P. R. WALLIS, M. A. , Assistant Lecturer in English
Tra irene
Literature in the University of Liverpool
Early Career. Poetical Sketches. An Island in the Moon. Begin-
nings of Mysticism. Songs of Innocence and Thel. Tiriel.
Revolutionary writings. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
and the earlier 'Prophecies. ' The later Lambeth books. Songs
of Experience. Europe and The Song of Los. The Urizen group.
The crisis in Blake's spiritual development. The Four Zoas. His
mystical Christianity. Milton and Jerusalem. His Theory of
Imagination. Lesser Verse and Prose. Blake and the Romantic
Revival
181
CHAPTER X
BURNS
LESSER SCOTTISH VERSE
By T. F. HENDERSON
LL. D. st thdra
BURNS
The Old School of Scottish Verse. Burns's Indebtedness to his Pre-
decessors. The Kilmarnock volume. The Cotter's Saturday
Night. Burns's 'English' poems. His six-line stave. Death
and Doctor Hornbook. The Address to the Deil. Holy Willie's
Prayer. The Auld Farmer's New Year Salutation to his Mare
Maggie. The Christis Kirk stave. The Holy Fair. Halloween.
The Cherrie and The Slae stave. The Jolly Beggars. Tam o'
Shanter. Burns at Edinburgh. His Songs and Adaptations.
LESSER SCOTTISH VERSE
Joanna Baillie. Lady Anne Lindsay of Balcarres. Susanna Blamire.
Mrs Grant of Carron. Mrs Grant of Laggan. Elizabeth Hamilton.
Mrs John Hunter. Mrs Maclehose (“Clarinda'). Caroline Oliphant
Lady Nairne. Dr Blacklock. Richard Gall. John Hamilton.
John Lapraik. John Lowe. Hector MacNeil. James Tytler.
John Mayne. Sir Alexander Boswell. Robert Tannahill. Alex-
ander Wilson. William Motherwell. James Hogg. The Queen's
Wake. John Leyden. Allan Cunningham. Thomas Mounsey
Cunningham. William Tennant. John Hyslop. Robert Gilfillan.
William Nicholson. William Glen. William Watt. Michael
Bruce and John Logan. The Cuckoo. James Grahame. Robert
Pollok
203
## p. xi (#19) ##############################################
1
Contents
xi
CHAPTER XI
THE PROSODY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M. A.
PAGE
Changes in the Heroic Couplet of Dryden. The Octosyllabic Couplet.
The Spenserian Stanza. Blank Verse. Lyric Poetry of the
Eighteenth Century. Edward Bysshe's Art of Poetry. Eigh-
teenth Century Prosodists. Joshua Steele. Young. Shenstone.
Gray. Johnson. John Mason. Mitford. Cowper. Summary
245
.
CHAPTER XII
THE GEORGIAN DRAMA
Panas!
By HAROLD V. ROUTH, M. A. , Peterhouse, Leeturer in
English Literature at Goldsmiths' College, London" (rimariset,
'
londe, Bertoni
The Decay of the Drama and the Advance of the Actor. The Theatre
in the Eighteenth Century and its Audiences. Richard Cumberland.
The Brothers. The West Indian Lesser Playwrights. Oliver
Goldsmith. She Stoops to Conquer. Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
The Rivals. A Trip to Scarborough. The School for Scandal.
Hannah More. Percy. Hannah Cowley. General Burgoyne.
The Heiress. Thomas Holcroft. The Road to Ruin. The
Deserted Daughter. Elizabeth Inchbald. George Colman the
Younger. Inkle and Yarico. Thomas Morton and others.
Cumberland's Jew. Realism and the Drama
257
CHAPTER XIII
THE GROWTH OF THE LATER NOVEL
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY
多,。
nh
Thomas Amory. John Buncle. Memoirs of Several Ladies. William
Beckford. Vathek. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, St Leon.
Thomas Holcroft. Autobiography. Novels. Mrs Inchbald.
A Simple Story. Nature and Art. Robert Bage. Hermsprong.
Maria Edgeworth. Belinda. The Absentee. Ormond. Tales
for the Young. Charlotte Smith. Regina Maria Roche. Eaton
Stannard Barrett. Clara Reeve. Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries
of Udolpho and other works. Matthew Gregory Lewis. The
Monk. Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer. Jane
and Anna Maria Porter. Thaddeus of Warsaw. The Scottish
Chiefs. Thomas Hope. Anastasius. Thomas Love Peacock
285
## p. xii (#20) #############################################
xii
Contents
CHAPTER XIV
BOOK PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION, 1625—1800
By H. G. ALDIS, M. A. , Peterhouse, Secretary of the
University Library
PAGE
14
Attempts at State Control under Charles I and the Commonwealth.
The Censorship of L'Estrange. Lapse of the Licensing Laws.
Copyright before 1709. The first Copyright Act. The battle for
Perpetual Copyright. The relations between Author and Publisher
in the Seventeenth Century. Milton, Baxter. Earnings of play-
wrights. Literature becomes a Profession. Increase of the Reading
Classes. Patrons and Dedications. The Publisher as Patron and
Employer. Leading Publishers in Commonwealth and Restoration
times. The Eighteenth Century. Tonson, Lintot, Dodsley, Millar.
Trade books. Society for Encouragement of Learning. Bell's
Poets and Johnson's Poets. Paternoster Row Numbers. Book-
sellers' Clubs. Cadell, Strahan. Literary Booksellers. Curll
and Grub Street. "The Trade' in London. Little Britain. Scot,
Bateman, the Ballards. Other Localities. Westminster Hall.
Literary Coffeehouses. Payne, Davies. Popular Literature.
Practical Divinity, Chapbooks. The Retail Bookseller. Sale by
auction. Printed Catalogues. James Lackington. Circulating
Libraries and Book Clubs. Trade Lists of Current Publications.
Trade sales. The Provincial Trade. Scotland and Ireland .
311
CHAPTER XV
THE BLUESTOCKINGS
By Mrs H. G. ALDIS
The term 'Bluestocking! Conversation parties. Mrs Vesey. Mrs
Montagu. Her share in Lord Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead.
Her Essay on Shakespeare. Mrs Montagu and Voltaire. Mrs
Elizabeth Carter. Her Translation of Epictetus. Hannah More.
Her friendship with Horace Walpole. Mrs Chapone.
343
## p. xiii (#21) ############################################
Contents
X111
CHAPTER XVI
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
By F. J. HARVEY DARTON, sometime Scholar of St John's
College, Oxford
PAGE
Schoolbooks. The Hornbook. Books of Courtesy. Hell-fire tales.
Exemplary' Compilations. Bunyan's Divine Emblems. Watte's
Divine Songs. The Chapbook. Fairy Tales. Nursery Rimes.
John Newbery. Dorothy Kilner. Sarah Trimmer. Mrs Sherwood.
Maria Edgeworth. Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton. The
Moral Tale in Verse. Ann and Jane Taylor's Original Poems.
Miss Turner's Cautionary Stories. Charles and Mary Lamb.
Later Writings for Children
366
388
Bibliographies .
Table of Principal Dates
Index of Names
493
.
.
196
.
## p. xiv (#22) #############################################
3
## p. 1 (#23) ###############################################
1
CHAPTER I
EDMUND BURKE
>
EDMUND BURKE, the greatest of English orators, if we measure
greatness not by immediate effect alone but by the durability and
the diffusive power of that effect, and one of the profoundest, most
suggestive and most illuminating of political thinkers, if we may
not call a philosopher one who did not elaborate any system and
who refrained on principle from the discussion of purely theoretical
issues, was an Irishman of the usual blended native and English
strain, born(1729) in a family which united the two creeds that divide
Ireland more profoundly and fatefully than any distinction of race.
His father, a small Dublin solicitor, was a protestant, his mother a
catholic. Burke himself was educated in the protestant faith, but
his sister adhered to the religion of her mother, and his wife was a
catholic who conformed to the Anglican church after her marriage.
Burke always professed his protestantism frankly and sincerely,
'We are protestants not from indifference but from zeal'—and
the charges that were brought against him of having, at one time
or other, been a catholic are without foundation, but his attitude
towards the catholic church was at once tolerant and sympathetic.
To him, she and every other church were allies in the defence of
the religious conception of life which was the centre of all his
thought about morals and politics, and of which atheistical
Jacobinism was the antithesis. In the last years of his life, he
fought for the cause of catholic emancipation in Ireland no less
ardently than he opposed a 'regicide' peace with France. The
'directory of Ireland' which upheld protestant ascendancy at
Dublin was hardly less odious to him than the Jacobin directory
in Paris.
Burke's education was received at Ballitore, under a quaker,
whose son, Richard Shackleton, became the chief friend of his
early manhood, and at Trinity college, Dublin. Fox believed
that Burke “had not any very nice critical knowledge even of
1
B, L, XL.
CH. I.
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2
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Edmund Burke
Latin, still less of Greek,' but was well read in Latin authors,
especially Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, Horace and Tacitus, and that he
imitated the first mentioned of these authors most particularly,
as well in his turn of thinking as in his manner of expression. '
What survive of Burke's letters to Shackleton point to the same
conclusion as Fox's observation, that Burke was a wide and
curious reader rather than a minute scholar. Mathematics, logic,
history were, each in turn, he tells Shackleton, in one letter, a
passion, and all, for a time, yielded to poetry. The letter affords
a vivid glimpse into the education of one to whom knowledge,
knowledge varied and detailed, was always to be a passion, and
who was seldom or never to pen a sentence that has not something
in its form to arrest the attention or to give delight. But Burke
was not a poet. He could do many things that were beyond the
power of his less strenuous and less profound fellow student,
Oliver Goldsmith, but he could never have written The Deserted
Village or The Vicar of Wakefield. Nor, magnificent as Burke's
prose was to be, picturesque, harmonious and full of cadence, is
it ever the prose which affects us as poetry. It is always the
prose of an orator, addressed to an audience and aiming at a
practical effect. Beauty, as in the meditations of Browne or the
oratory of Taylor, is never to Burke an end in itself.
The wide and varied reading which began at Trinity college
was, apparently, the chief activity of the nine obscure years
(1750—59) which Burke spent as a student of law in London,
eating dinners at the Middle Temple, sojourning at country inns
or rooms during the vacation with his namesake and, perhaps,
kinsman William Burke, and making tentative excursions into
letters with an ironical answer to Bolingbroke's posthumous
writings in A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and an
essay in aesthetics after Addison in A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1756). Fulness of mind was the quality of Burke's conversation
which impressed Johnson and all who came to know him in these
and later years—knowledge and the power of applying that
knowledge, 'diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind. '
‘His stream of mind is perpetual,' was Johnson's comment;
‘Burke is the only man whose common conversation corresponds
with the general fame which he has in the world.
whatever topic you please, he is ready to meet you. Burke
owed his success in the House of Commons and its committees
not more, perhaps, to his eloquence than to this fulness of mind,
Take up
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1]
Early Life and Work
3
to the fact that, whatever topic he handled, America, India,
Ireland, finance or trade, he spoke from a copious and close
knowledge of the subject.
The works which Burke composed during these years are not
of great importance. A Philosophical Enquiry is an unequal,
and, in the main, rather jejune, treatise of which the fairest criticism
is probably Lessing's, that it ‘is uncommonly useful as a collection
of all the occurrences and perceptions which the philosophers
must assume as indisputable in inquiries of this kind. ' Burke
distinguishes the sublime so sharply from the beautiful that his
description of the latter includes little which goes beyond the
pretty. More interesting and suggestive is the analysis of the
pleasure we take in terrible and painful spectacles—whether a
tragedy in the theatre or an execution in the street. But, perhaps,
most interesting of all is his discussion of the aesthetic and
emotional qualities of words, which he finds to depend less on the
images which they evoke than their other properties of sound and
association. The business of poetry and rhetoric is 'to affect
rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of
things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present
a clear idea of the things themselves. ' The germ of Laocoon is
contained in these paragraphs.
A Vindication is a much more characteristic and significant
document. In parodying the eloquence of Bolingbroke, Burke
caught some of the first tones of his own more sonorous and
varied harmonies. The conception of the essay, a defence of
religion by the application of a reductio ad absurdum to Boling-
broke's method of attack, revealed the deep religious spirit
in which all Burke's political and social speculation bottoms
and roots itself. Bolingbroke had indicted revealed religions by
pointing to some of the consequences which, in history, had
flowed from dogmatic creeds, and Burke answers him by applying
the same method to the criticism of political society.
Shew me an absurdity in religion, and I will undertake to shew you an
hundred for one in political laws and institutions. . . . If after all, you should
confess all these things, yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak
and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior, force con-
cerning the necessity of artificial religion; and every step you advance in your
argument, you add a strength to mine.
But, perhaps, the most interesting quality of the essay is the
sidelight that it throws on Burke's temperament, the sensitive,
brooding imagination which, coupled with a restless, speculative
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4
[CH.
Edmund Burke
intellect, seeking ever to illuminate facts by principles, gives tone
to Burke's speeches and pamphlets ; for it is this temperament
which imparts vividness and colour to the dry details of historical
and statistical knowledge, and it is this temperament which at
once directs, keeps in check and prescribes its limits to, that
speculative, enquiring intellect. In the sentences in which Burke
paints the lot of those who bear the burden of political society,
the unhappy wretches employed in lead, tin, iron, copper and
coal mines, who scarce ever see the light of the sun, the enfans
perdus of the army of civil society; in these vivid paragraphs,
and not less in his failure to draw from them any but an ironical
conclusion, a reductio ad absurdum of Bolingbroke's paradoxes,
we get an insight into one of the most radical characteristics
of Burke's mind. In his later works, he did not often touch
directly on the subject of the poor and their lot, though it was
a theme, he says, on which he had 'often reflected and never
reflected without feeling from it’; but his sensibility was not
more acute than his conviction was profound that legislation
and political adjustment could do little or nothing to alleviate
their lot.
