this gentle enthusiast, and not a murmur reached him through
his lilacs and laburnums.

I have said that this book is one of the latest expressions of
unadulterated eighteenth-century sentiment. For form's sake, the
Diarist mentions now and again, very superficially, Shakespeare,
Bacon, and Milton; but in reality, the garden of his study is bounded
by a thick hedge behind the statue of Dryden. The classics of Greece
and Rome, and the limpid reasonable writers of England from the
Restoration downwards, these are enough for him. Writing in 1800 he
has no suspicion of a new age preparing. We read these stately pages,
and we rub our eyes. Can it be that when all this was written,
Wordsworth and Coleridge had issued _Lyrical Ballads_, and Keats
himself was in the world? Almost the only touch which shows
consciousness of a suspicion that romantic literature existed, is a
reference to the rival translations of Burger's _Lenore_ in 1797. Sir
Walter Scott, as we know, was one of the anonymous translators; it
was, however, in all probability not his, but Taylor's, that Green
mentions with special approbation.

In one hundred years a mighty change has come over the tastes and
fashions of literary life. When _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_
was written, Dr. Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop of
Worcester, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on the
tradition of his yet more formidable master Warburton. As people
nowadays discuss Verlaine and Ibsen, so they argued in those
days about Godwin and Horne Tooke, and shuddered over each fresh
incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in the
flesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and where
disputants were gathered together in country rectories. Dr. Parr
affected the Olympian nod, and crowned or checkmated reputations. "A
flattering message from Dr. P----" sends our Diarist into ecstasies
so excessive that a reaction sets in, and the "predominant and final
effect upon my mind has been depression rather than elevation." We
think of

_The yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung.
And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?_

Who cares now for Parr's praise or Soame Jenyns' censure? Yet in our
Diarist's pages these take equal rank with names that time has spared,
with Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and Reynolds.

Thomas Green was more ready for experiment in art than in literature.
He was "particularly struck" at th