primitive Church, he leads the reader to consider these less as the results of human crime, folly, and ambition, than as the necessary consequences of the system itself. He either did not or would not distinguish between the parceque and quoique; and represents what is in reality an abuse as an inevitable consequence. Byron well describes him as

'Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer,

The lord of irony, that master-spell."

Moreover, though perpetually warmed by the grand or touching inci dents he relates into noble bursts of eloquence and enthusiasm, he has no admiration for the struggles of Christian fortitude and the triumphs of Christian virtue. The same energy and virtue which, appearing in a heathen or a Mahomedan, fills his heart with fervour, and his lofty periods with a swelling grandeur, leaves him cold and impassible, or cavilling and contemptuous, when it is exhibited in the cause of Christianity.

In Gibbon's character there is also a peculiarity which, whether innate and natural or acquired from Voltaire and similar writers of that period, renders his writings dangerous to the young this is a peculiar filthiness of imagination, which seems to revel in objects and events of gross and sensual immorality. No sooner does he find occasion to relate a scandalous or obscene story (and the corruption of manners during the period which forms the subject of his history gives him but too many opportunities to indulge in this vein) than he seems to delineate it with a peculiar gusto and minuteness which is in the highest degree offensive. He does not hasten rapidly over such scenes, saying, with Dante,

"Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa!”

but he seems to take a perverse pleasure in dwelling on degrading images. Voltaire has much of this, and never omits an opportunity to introduce ideas not only sensual, but often physically disgusting; but in Voltaire these images are coloured by wit and sarcastic drollery, and are in harmony with the satiric petulance of his ridicule. In Gibbon the majestic solemnity of style, and the grave earnestness. of the tone, render these offences against good taste exceedingly prominent and shocking.

In 1781 were published the second and third volumes, and the three last in 1787. Gibbon, who has with a justifiable pride given us the anecdote of the circumstances attending the origin of his great work, has left us an equally minute and not less interesting record of his feelings at its conclusion:-" It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took everal turns in a berceau or covered walk of acacias, which commands

a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious."

From Lausanne Gibbon again returned to England for a short time, but he came back again to Switzerland, where he remained till shortly before his death. Finding the society of Lausanne distracted by parties consequent upon the outbreak of the French Revolution, and induced by the death of Lord Sheffield, his most intimate friend, to return to London, in order to console and counsel the widow, he came back to his own country, and died in London in 1794.

With all its defects, Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' is a noble monument of genius and industry. The style is extraordinarily elevated and ornate, and resembles rather the antithetical tone of the French literature of the eighteenth century than an idiomatic English work. Indeed, so completely was Gibbon's mind saturated with French sympathies, that there is a tradition that he for some time hesitated whether his great work should be written in French or English. His narration is very clear, animated, and picturesque he brings before the reader's eye the persons and events which he describes; and wherever his scepticism and prejudices do not interfere, he gives a lively, penetrating, and natural account of the characters and motives of men. But his moral susceptibility was not very delicate, and he frequently lavishes on the external splendour of great actions that enthusiasm which should be reserved for the simple dignity of moral grandeur. His sympathies were somewhat theatrical; and though the general current of his narrative is exceedingly clear, his gorgeousness and measured pomp of language becomes fatiguing and oppressive. So great is his dread, too, of repeating the same word or name in the same page or at short intervals, that his expedients of finding a synonym are frequently productive of confusion and uncertainty in the reader. We cannot better conclude our remarks than by quoting the excel lent and elaborate judgment of Guizot:-"After a first rapid perusal which allowed me to feel nothing but the interest of a narrative, always animated, and, notwithstanding its extent and the variety of objects which it makes to pass before the view, always perspicuous, I entered upon a minute examination of the details of which it was composed; and the opinion which I then formed was, I confess, singularly severe. I discovered, in certain chapters, errors which

appeared to me sufficiently important and numerous to make me believe that they had been written with extreme negligence; in others, I was struck with a certain tinge of partiality and prejudice, which imparted to the exposition of the facts that want of truth and justice which the English express by their happy term misrepresentation. Some imperfect quotations, some passages omitted unintentionally or designedly, have cast a suspicion on the honesty of the author; and his violation of the first law of history-increased to my eyes by the prolonged attention with which I occupied myself with every phrase, every note, every reflection-caused me to form on the whole work a judgment far too rigorous. After having finished my labours, I allowed some time to elapse before I reviewed the whole. A second attentive and regular perusal of the entire work, of the notes of the author, and of those which I had thought it right to subjoin, showed me how much I had exaggerated the importance of the reproaches which Gibbon really deserved: I was struck with the same errors, the same partiality on certain subjects ; but I had been far from doing adequate justice to the immensity of his researches, the variety of his knowledge, and, above all, to that truly philosophical discrimination which judges the past as it would judge the present; which does not permit itself to be blinded by the clouds which time gathers around the dead, and which prevent us from seeing that, under the toga as under the modern dress, in the senate as in our councils, men were what they still are, and that events took place eighteen centuries ago as they take place in our own days. I then felt that his book, in spite of its faults, will always be a noble work; and that we may correct his errors and combat his prejudices without ceasing to admit that few men have combined, if we are not to say in so high a degree, at least in a manner so complete and so well regulated, the necessary qualifications for a writer of history."

CHAPTER XVI.

THE TRANSITION SCHOOL.

Landscape and Familiar Poetry-James Thomson-The Seasons-Episodes Castle of indolence - Minor Works - Lyric Poetry-Thomas GrayThe Bard, and the Elegy-Collins and Shenstone-The SchoolmistressOssian-Chatterton and the Rowley Poems-William Cowper-George Crabbe-The Lowland Scots Dialect and Literature-Robert Burns.

"THE less man really knows," says an eloquent and acute Russian writer, "the greater his contempt for the ordinary, for what surrounds him. A practical every-day truth appears to him a degra

dation; what we see before our eyes and often, were present to ourselves as undeserving of attention; we want the far, the remote; il n'y a pas de grand homme pour son valet-de-chambre." What is true of philosophy in general is applicable to art in particular, and to literature, the highest, completest, and most perfect of the arts. What is the distinction between the tone of literature of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth century? What but the substitu tion of the real and the actual for the abstract and the remote? I is true that the real and the actual are idealised, are glorified, in passing into the golden atmosphere of art, no less than were the abstract and the remote, and this is an indispensable condition, for the ideal is the very soul of poetry: but we now find in pictures of ordinary life, in the description of common nature, a source of profound pleasure, emotion, and improvement. What Coleridge has said of old paganism may with more justice be applied to the literature of modern times:

'Clothing the palpable and familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn."

The full and complete daylight of this new era is to be found in Scott, in Byron, in Shelley, in Wordsworth; but the dawning of the auspicious Aurora was gradual and slow. It was first seen to glimmer we mean in modern days, for of recent periods only do we speak) in the poetry of Thomson, and then gradually glowed with a stronger light, powerfully hastened in its development by the publication of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,' by the forgeries of Macpherson, and by the fabrications of Chatterton, Its characteristic was an intense and reverent study of Nature in all her manifestations, whether of physical or intellectual activity; cf the one, Thomson is the type-of the other, Cowper and Crabbe.

The early part of Thomson's career somewhat resembles that of Smollett. He was born in Scotland in 1700, and came up to London to push his fortune as a literary man. He carried with him the unfinished poem of 'Winter,' some passages of which he had shown to Mallet, by whom he had been strongly advised to publish the work. Arriving in London at the age of eighteen, he obtained the situation of tutor in the family of the Lord Binning, which he afterwards exchanged for the more powerful protection of Lord Chancellor Talbot. With the son of this distinguished lawyer Thomson had the advantage of travelling over the Continent, and thus feeding his rich imagination with the fairest scenes of natural magnificence, and filling his ardent fancy with recollections of the great and wise of ancient history. The poem of 'Winter' was published in 1726, and in the two succeeding years it was followed by its beautiful companions, 'Summer' and 'Spring,' 'Autumn' not appearing until 1730. The four works together compose a complete cycle of the various appearances of Nature during an English year,

and are known to all who feel what is beautiful, as the 'Seasons'the finest descriptive poem in the English or perhaps in any language. There is no country whose climate affords so great a variety and richness of external beauty as that of Great Britain; none in which the surface of the land is more picturesquely broken into every form and tint of beauty, none more abundant in spots sanctified by memory, none where the changes of climate are more capricious and imposing. The finest art and the most idiomatic literature of England bears testimony to the intensity of feeling for the external loveliness of nature which seems to form a distinctive feature of the national character- a trait more marked perhaps among us than even among the ancient Greeks. In that great and peculiar style, invented and principally cultivated in Englanddescriptive or landscape poetry-Thomson is by far our greatest artist; though this tendency to study and portray Nature for herself is singularly perceptible in all the greatest works of purely English genius. With what a fond enthusiasm has Father Chaucer, whose verses are modulated to the forest-music of an English landscape, the gurgle of the brook, the multitudinous rustle of leaves, and, above all, to the liquid melody of birds-with what an earnest joy has this divine poet seized every occasion of painting the physiognomy of English scenery! Spenser's fairy glades are full of this deep passion for nature as nature-Nature looked at for herself: neither Shakspeare nor Milton has ever written any twenty consecutive lines without giving us, often in a single word, and parenthetically as it were, some touch of natural scenery, some embodiment of a physical object familiar as the cloud or the leaf, ever-varying like them, yet, like them, invariable.

In the 'Seasons' of Thomson, we have a subject unbounded in variety, yet happily limited in extent; and it is no exaggeration to affirm that there is not a possible modification of English scenery, terrestrial or atmospheric, which he has not caught and fixed for ever. Everything appears in its natural light, in its relative perspective and proportion; and though we are of course carried in succession through the various appearances of the year, he always has the art to conceal the joinings in his canvas, and to give us the feeling of continuity which produces the charm of a well-executed panorama. Above all, the work is animated throughout with so gentle yet so genial a glow of philanthropy and religious gratitude, that its parts are so to say fused naturally together; the ever-changing landscape is harmonised by this calm and elevated and tender spirit, which throws over the whole a soft and all-pervading glow, like the tint of an Italian heaven.

The language and versification, however, are not always worthy of the subject nor of the sentiment of the work. Though very much purified and simplified in his later works, there is often an