to the
people. Its best priests could not leave the tripod, though many of the
oracular responses were heard some distance from the temple-doors. In
time, there arose a group of essayists and poets, who, with a similar
coterie of novelists, dictated religion, morals, politics, and
literature to the country. Their influence was so great that when they
flattered the heads of government, the latter were equally assiduous in
playing the Maecenas to them.

The writers of the eighteenth century, viewed in a literary sense alone,
have never had their superiors in English literature. The works of
Addison, Pope, Gray, Thomson, Goldsmith, and Johnson will continue to be
classics wherever the English language is spoken. The British metropolis
was pervaded with the atmosphere of Parnassus. It was a time when
literature was the El Dorado of youth and old age. Those were the days
when clubs convened statedly in the neighborhood of the Strand, and
when, every night, the attics of Grub street poured out their throngs of
quill-heroes, who were welcomed into the parlors of the nobility as
cordially as to their own club-houses. The last new work engaged
universal attention. Society was filled with rumors of books commenced,
half finished, plagiarized, successful, or defunct. Literary
respectability was the "Open Sesame" to social rank. There has never
been a season when cultivated society was more imbued with the mania of
book-writing and criticism than existed in England during at least
three-quarters of the eighteenth century.

While many of the publications of that time were prompted by Deism,
French society and literature were contributing an equal share toward
poisoning the English mind. France and England were so intimately
related to each other that the two languages were diligently studied in
both countries. If the English adventurer in letters had not spent a few
months in Paris, and could not read Corneille almost as readily as
Spenser or Shakspeare, he was cashiered by certain Gallicists west of
the Channel as a sorry aspirant to their coveted favor.[129] The rise of
the French spirit in England was mainly due to Bolingbroke, who was as
much at home in Paris as in London. He had numerous friends and admirers
in the former metropolis, and at two different times made it his
residence. Freely imbibing the skeptical opinions of the court of Louis
XIV., he dealt them out unsparingly to his English readers. He was one
of the most a