s of London saloons. This low standard of morals
emphasizes the importance of the great Methodist revival under Whitefield
and Wesley, which began in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

The literature of the century is remarkably complex, but we may classify it
all under three general heads,--the Reign of so-called Classicism, the
Revival of Romantic Poetry, and the Beginning of the Modern Novel. The
first half of the century, especially, is an age of prose, owing largely to
the fact that the practical and social interests of the age demanded
expression. Modern newspapers, like the _Chronicle, Post_, and _Times_, and
literary magazines, like the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, which began in this
age, greatly influenced the development of a serviceable prose style. The
poetry of the first half of the century, as typified in Pope, was polished,
unimaginative, formal; and the closed couplet was in general use,
supplanting all other forms of verse. Both prose and poetry were too
frequently satiric, and satire does not tend to produce a high type of
literature. These tendencies in poetry were modified, in the latter part of
the century, by the revival of romantic poetry.

In our study we have noted: (1) the Augustan or Classic Age; the meaning of
Classicism; the life and work of Alexander Pope, the greatest poet of the
age; of Jonathan Swift, the satirist; of Joseph Addison, the essayist; of
Richard Steele, who was the original genius of the _Tatler_ and the
_Spectator_; of Samuel Johnson, who for nearly half a century was the
dictator of English letters; of James Boswell, who gave us the immortal
_Life of Johnson_; of Edmund Burke, the greatest of English orators; and of
Edward Gibbon, the historian, famous for his _Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_.

(2) The Revival of Romantic Poetry; the meaning of Romanticism; the life
and work of Thomas Gray; of Oliver Goldsmith, famous as poet, dramatist,
and novelist; of William Cowper; of Robert Burns, the greatest of Scottish
poets; of William Blake, the mystic; and the minor poets of the early
romantic movement,--James Thomson, William Collins, George Crabbe, James
Macpherson, author of the Ossian poems, Thomas Chatterton, the boy who
originated the Rowley Papers, and Thomas Percy, whose work for literature
was to collect the old ballads, which he called the _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_, and to translate the stories of Norse mythology in his
_Northern Antiquitie