wn with an idyllic sweetness and purity, and with
touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted
after Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the English Church in
Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country parson in
Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, 1770, who was "passing rich on forty
pounds a year." This poem, though written in the fashionable couplet of
Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. Johnson--so
that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists--did,
perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins to recall English
poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country life.

[Illustration: Johnson, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns.]

Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few
other plays, the stage had now utterly declined. The novel, which is
dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and to
represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely than the
theater could do. In the novelists of the 18th century, the life of the
people, as distinguished from "society" or the upper classes, began to
invade literature. Richardson was distinctly a _bourgeois_ writer, and
his contemporaries--Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith--ranged
over a wide variety of ranks and conditions. This is one thing which
distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century from
that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all previous
centuries. Among the authors of this generation whose writings belonged
to other departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned,
in passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose _Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire_ was published from 1776-1788, and Edmund Burke,
whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary quality.

The romantic poets had addressed the imagination rather than the heart.
It was reserved for two men--a contrast to one another in almost every
respect--to bring once more into British song a strong individual
feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of speech. These were
William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns (1759-1796). Cowper spoke
out of his own life-experience, his agony, his love, his worship and
despair; and straightway the varnish that had glittered over all our
poetry since the time of Dryden melted away. Cowper had scribbled verses
when he was a young law student at the Middle Temple in Lon