middle-aged man for an infant is elevated above the commonplace by
assuming the tone of playful gallantry.

The ignobler aspects of life,--nutriment of the comic sense,--were not
ignored. The new school of poets, however deficient in the higher vision,
were keen observers of actuality; and among them the satiric spirit,
though not militant as in the days of Dryden, was still active. The value
which they attached to social culture is again shown in the persistence
of the sentiment that as man grew in civility he became less ridiculous.
The peccadilloes of the upper classes they treated with comparatively
gentle humor, and aimed their strokes of satire chiefly against the
lower. Rarely did they idealize humble folk: Gay's _Sweet William's
Farewett to Black-Eyed Susan_ is in this respect exceptional. Their
typical attitude is seen in his _Shepherd's Week_, with its ludicrous
picture of rustic superstition and naive amorousness; and in Allan
Ramsay's _Gentle Shepherd_, where the pastoral, once remote from life,
assumes the manners and dialect of the countryside in order to arouse
laughter.

The obvious fact that these poets centered their attention upon
Man, particularly in his social life, and that their most memorable
productions are upon that theme, led posterity to complain that they
wholly lacked interest in Nature, were incapable of delineating it, and
did not feel its sacred influence. The last point in the indictment,--and
the last only,--is quite true. No one who understood and believed, as
they did, the doctrines of orthodoxy could consistently ascribe divinity
to Nature. To them Nature exhibited the power of God, but not his will;
and the soul of Man gained its clearest moral light directly from a
_super_natural source. This did not, however, imply that Nature was
negligible. The celebrated essays of Addison on the pleasures of the
imagination (_Spectator_, Nos. 411-414) base those pleasures upon the
grandeur of Nature; upon its variety and freshness, as of "groves,
fields, and meadows in the opening of the Spring"; and upon its beauty of
form and color. The works of Nature, declares Addison, surpass those of
art, and accordingly "we always find the poet in love with a country
life." Such was the theory; the practice was not out of accord therewith.
Passages appreciative of the lovelier aspects of Nature, and not, despite
the current preference for general rather than specific terms, inaccurate
as descriptions,