a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, Directions to
Servants, Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated,
Verses on the Death of Dean Swift.

7. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. London:
Macmillan & Co., 1869. (Globe Edition.)

CHAPTER VI.

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

1744-1789.

Pope's example continued potent for fifty years after his death.
Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr.
Johnson's adaptations from Juvenal, _London_, 1738, and the _Vanity of
Human Wishes_, 1749, but Gifford's _Baviad_, 1791, and _Maeviad_, 1795,
and Byron's _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, 1809, were in the
verse and the manner of Pope. In Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_, 1781,
Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But long
before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which
is variously described as the Return to Nature or the Rise of the New
Romantic School.

For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of
towns--the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole concession
to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of
cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock
descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a
_Beggars Opera_ or a _Rape of the Lock_. These at least were true to
their environment, and were natural just because they were artificial.
But the _Seasons_ of James Thomson, published in installments from
1726-1730, had opened a new field. Their theme was the English
landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written
by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's _Pleasures of
Imagination_, 1744, published the year of Pope's death, was written,
like the _Seasons_, in blank verse; and although its language had the
formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably
in the new direction. Thomson had painted the soft beauties of a highly
cultivated land--lawns, gardens, forest-preserves, orchards, and
sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of
England alone, but of Germany and France--romanticism, the chief element
in which was a love of the wild. Poets turned from the tameness of
modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life
among primitive tribes. In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the
natural man, following his instincts in