Thomas R. Malthus, a Cambridge man, published in 1798 his celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he endeavours to prove that it is the invariable tendency of population to increase faster than the means of subsistence.

99. Joseph, brother of Thomas Warton, is the author of an able Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756). Burke published in the same year his celebrated philosophical Essay on the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was then a young man, and had studied philosophy in the sensuous school of Locke; at a later period of his life, he would probably have imported into his essay some of the transcendental ideas which had been brought to light in the interval, and for which his mind presented a towardly and congenial soil. The analysis of those impressions on the mind which raise the emotion of the sublime or that of the beautiful is carefully and ingeniously made; the logic is generally sound, and if the theory does not seem to be incontrovertibly established as a whole, the illustrative reasoning employed in support of it is. for the most part, striking, picturesque, and true. The reader may find it difficult to understand how these two judgments can be mutually consistent, yet it is perfectly intelligible. The theory, for instance, which makes the emotion of the sublime inseparably associated with the sense of the terrible (terror, the common stock of everything that is sublime,' part ii. sect. 5), is not quite proved; for he gives magnificence -such as that of the starry heavens- -as a source of the sublime, without showing (indeed, it would be difficult to show) that whatever was magnificent was necessarily also terrible. But at the same time he proves, with great ingenuity and completeness, that in a great many cases, when the emotion of the sublime is present, the element of terror is, if not a necessary condition, at any rate a concomitant and influential circumstance. His theory of the beautiful is equally ingenious, but perhaps still more disputable. By beauty he means (part iii. sect. 1) that quality, or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love or some passion similar to it.' He labours at length to prove that beauty does not depend upon proportion, nor upon fitness for the end designed; but that it does chiefly depend on the five following properties:-1, smallness; 2, smoothness; 3, gradual variation; 4, delicacy; 5, mild tone in colour. That the emotion of beauty is unconnected with the perception of harmony or proportion is certainly a bold assertion. However, even if the analysis were ever so accurate and perfect, it might still be maintained that the treatise contains little that is really valuable towards the formation of a

sound system of criticism, either in aesthetics or literature. The reason is briefly this-that the quality which men chiefly look for in works of art and literature is that which is variously named genius, greatness, nobleness, distinction, the ideal, &c.; where this quality is absent, all Burke's formal criteria for testing the presence of the sublime or the beautiful may be complied with, and yet the work will remain intrinsically insignificant. As applied to nature, the analysis may perhaps be of more value; because the mystery of infinity forms the background to each natural scene; the divine calm of the universe is behind the mountain peak or the rolling surf, and furnishes punctually, and in all cases, that element of nobleness which, in the works of man, is present only in the higher souls. Hence, there being no fear that we shall ever find Nature, if we understand her, mean, or trivial, or superficial, as we often find the human artist,-we may properly concentrate our attention on the sources of the particular emotions which her scenes excite; and among these particular emotions those of the sublime and beautiful are second to none in power.

100. Sir Joshua Reynolds' excellent Discourses on Painting, or rather the first part of them, appeared in 1779. Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, compiled from the unwieldy collections of Virtue on the lives and works of British artists, were published between the years 1761 and 1771.

William Gilpin, vicar of Boldre, in the New Forest, is the author of a delightful book, Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791). Sir Uvedale Price, in his Essays on the Picturesque, produced the first good book on Landscape gardening.

101. The Letters of Lord Chesterfield to his natural son, Philip Stanhope, were published soon after the writer's death in 1773. Johnson, who never forgave Lord Chesterfield for having treated him, at a time when he stood in great need of patronage, with coldness and neglect, said that the Letters taught the morals of a courtezan, and the manners of a dancing-master.' There is more point than truth in this censure. There might have been some awkwardness in writing about morals, considering to whom the letters were addressed; the subject of conduct, therefore, in regard to great matters, is not touched upon; but good conduct in little things, selfdenial in trifles,-in a word, all that constitutes good breeding, --is enforced with much grace and propriety. Johnson himself was only too vulnerable on this head; Lord Chesterfield describes him in the Letters under the character of a respectable Hottentot.'

CHAPTER VI.

RECENT TIMES.

(1800-1850.)

Ruling Ideas: Theory of the Spontaneous in Poetry.

1. As no summary which our limits would permit us to give of the political events between 1800 and 1850 could add materially to the student's knowledge respecting a period so recent, we shall omit here the historical sketch which we prefixed to each of the two preceding chapters.

At once, from the opening of the nineteenth century, we meet with originality and with energetic convictions; the deepest problems are sounded with the utmost freedom: decorum gives place to earnestness; and principles are mutually confronted instead of forms. We speak of England only; the change to which we refer set in at an earlier period in France and Germany. In the main, the chief pervading movement of Society may be described as one of reaction against the ideas of the eighteenth century. Those ideas were, in brief, Rationalism and Formalism, both in literature and in politics. Pope, for instance, was a rationalist, and also a formalist, in both respects. In his views of society, he took the excellence of no institution for granted--he would not admit that antiquity in itself constituted a claim to reverence; on the contrary his turn of mind disposed him to try all things, old and new, by the test of their rationality, and to ridicule the multiplicity of forms and usages-some marking ideas originally irrational, others whose meaning, once clear and true, had been lost or obscured through the change of circumstances-which encumbered the public life of his time. Yet he was, at the same time, a political formalist in this sense, that he desired no sweeping changes, and was quite content that the social system should work on as it was. It suited him, and that was enough for his somewhat selfish philosophy. Again, in literature he was a rationalist, and also a formalist; but here in a good sense. For in literary, as in all other art, the form is of prime importance; and his

destructive logic, while it crushed bad forms, bound him to develope his powers in strict conformity to good ones. Now the reaction against these ideas was twofold. The conservative reaction, while it pleaded the claims of prescription, denounced the aberrations of reason, and endeavoured to vindicate or resuscitate the ideas lying at the base of existing political society, which the rationalism of the eighteenth century had sapped, rebelled at the same time against the arbitrary rules with which not Pope himself, but his followers, had fettered literature. The liberal, or revolutionary reaction, while, accepting the destructive rationalism of the eighteenth century, it scouted its political formalism as weak and inconsistent, joined the conservative school in rebelling against the reign of the arbitrary and the formal in literature. This, then, is the point of contact between Scott and the conservative school on the one hand, and Coleridge, Godwin, Byron, Shelley, and the rest of the revolutionary school on the other. They were all agreed that literature, and especially poetry, was becoming a cold, lifeless affair, conforming to all the rules and proprieties, but divorced from living nature, and the warm spontaneity of the heart. They imagined that the extravagant and exclusive admiration of the classical models had occasioned this mischief; and fixing their eyes on the rude yet grand beginnings of modern society, which the spectacle of the feudal ages presented to them, they thought that by imbuing themselves with the spirit of romance and chivalry-by coming into moral contact with the robust faith and energetic passions of a race not yet sophisticated by civilisation-they would wake up within themselves the great original forces of the human spirit-forces which, once set in motion, would develope congenial literary forms, produced, not by the labor lime, but by a true inspiration.

Especially in poetry was this the case. To the artificial, mechanical, didactic school, which Pope's successors had made intolerable, was now opposed a counter theory of the poetic function, which we may call the theory of the Spontaneous. As light flows from the stars, or perfume from flowers-as the nightingale cannot help singing, nor the bee refrain from making honey;-so, according to this theory, poetry is the spontaneous emanation of a musical and beautiful soul. "The poet is born, and is not made ;' and so is it with his poetry. To pretend to construct a beautiful poem is as if one were to try to construct a tree. Something dead and wooden will be the result in either case. In a poet effort is tantamount to condemnation, for it implies the absence of inspiration. For the same reason, to be consciously didactic is incompatible with the true poetic gift.

E E

For whatever of great value comes from a poet is not that which he wills to say, but that which he cannot help saying-that which some higher power-call it Nature or what you willdictates through his lips as through an oracle.

2. This theory, which certainly had many attractions and contained much truth, led to various important results. It drove away from Helicon many versifiers who had no business there by depriving them of an audience. The Beatties, Akensides, Youngs, and Darwins, who had inflicted their dulness on the last century, under the impression that it was poetry-a delusion shared by their readers-had to 'pale their ineffectual fire' and decamp, when their soporific productions were confronted with the startling and direct utterances of the disciples of the Spontaneous. On the other hand, the theory produced new mischiefs and generated new mistakes. It did not silence inferior poets; but they were of a different class from what they had been before. It was not now the moralist or the dabbler in philosophy, who, imagining himself to have important information to convey to mankind, and aiming at delighting while he instructed, constructed his epic, or ode, or metrical essay, as the medium of communication. It was rather the man gifted with a fatal facility of rime-with a mind teeming with trivial thoughts and corresponding words who was misled by the new theory into confounding the rapidity of his conceptions with the spontaneity of genius, and into thinking revision or curtailment of them a kind of treason to the divine afflatus. Such writers generally produced two or three pretty pieces, written at their brightest moments, amidst a miscellaneous heap of fugitive poems'-rightly so called-which were good for little or nothing. Upon real genius the theory acted both for good and for evil. Social success, upon which even the best poets of the eighteenth century had set the highest value, was despised by the higher minds of the new school. They loved to commune with Nature and their own souls in solitude, believing that here was the source of true poetic inspiration. The resulting forms were, so far as they went, most beautiful and faultless in art; they were worthy of the profound and beautiful thoughts which they embodied. In dietion, rhythm, proportion, melody-in everything, in short, that constitutes beauty of form -no poems ever composed attained to greater perfection than Shelley's Skylark or Keats' Hyperion. Yet these forms, after all, were not of the highest order. The judgment of many generations has assigned the palm of superiority among poetic forms to the Epos and the Drama; yet in neither of these did the school of poets of which we speak achieve any success of