fairs
foreshadowed what was to be one of the marked tendencies of the movement
in the last quarter of the century. Thus in 1777 Thomas Day interpreted
the American Revolution as a conflict between the pitiless tyranny of a
corrupt civilization and the appealing virtues of a people who had found
in sequestered forests and prairies the abiding place of Freedom and the
only remaining opportunity "to save the ruins of the human name." At the
same time the justification of sentimentalism on historical grounds was
strengthened by the young antiquarian and poet, Thomas Chatterton. Like
Macpherson, he answers to Pope's description of archaizing authors,--

Ancients in words, mere moderns in their sense.

He fabricated, in what he thought to be Middle English, a body of songs
and interludes, which he attributed to a monk named Thomas Rowleie,
and which showed that, in the supposedly unsophisticated simplicity of
medieval times, charity to Man and love for Nature had flourished as
beautifully as lyric utterance. Even more lamentable than Chatterton's
early death is the fact that his fanciful and musical genius was shrouded
in so grotesque a style.

In 1781 appeared a new poet of real distinction, George Crabbe, now the
hope of the conservatives. Edmund Burke, who early in his great career
had assailed the radicals in his ironic _Vindication of Natural Society_,
and who to the end of his life contended against them in the arena of
politics, on reading some of Crabbe's manuscripts, rescued this cultured
and ingenuous man from obscurity and distress; and Dr. Johnson presently
aided him in his literary labors. In _The Library_ Crabbe expressed the
reverence of a scholarly soul for the garnered wisdom of the past, and
satirized some of the popular writings of the day, including sentimental
fiction. He would not have denied the world those consolations which flow
from the literature that mirrors our hopes and dreams; but his honest
spirit revolted when such literature professed to be true to life.
His acquaintance with actual conditions in humble circles, and with
hardships, was as personal as Goldsmith's; but he was not the kind of
poet who soothes the miseries of mankind by ignoring them. In _The
Village_ he arose with all the vigor and intensity of insulted common
sense to refute the dreamers who offered a rose-colored picture of
country life as a genuine portrayal of truth and nature. So evident
was his mastery of his subject,