From
The History of English Literature, by Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian (1937)
Classicism: Chapter III - The Spirit of Controversy
1. Critical Thought and Prose
The age of classicism broadens and intensifies the practice of free rational inquiry, which the Restoration was able, or wanted, to apply only in a rather incomplete way. The effort of critical thought is at the very heart of this age. Contemporary poetry finds therein its true inspiration; and as such inspiration is not in itself creative of any rhythmic expression, the art of writing in verse is led to set up for itself as an end the search of an adequate form, and expends its energy entirely in this search.
Outside the field of poetry, there stretches the vast domain in which polemical intelligence gives itself fuller scope. As one passes from the poets to the polemists of reason, one has the impression of remaining in the same literary and moral plane; from the first to the second, there is continuity and imperceptible change. With the latter, the care of the form is no longer paramount, or is no longer reinforced by the strict laws of regular measure. Thought concentrates on the discussion and solution of problems; art is a superadded need. But as the mind is delivered from former constraints, and broken to the practice of liberty; moreover, as it has created for two generations past a style adapted to the clear statement of ideas, the aesthetic quality is here no longer distinguishable from the justness and the force of the reasoning. The prose of the classical age has merits that are often superior, almost always solid, and the least of these merits is not that they have not been sought after; they spring from the limpidity, the finesse, the vigour with which the energy of intelligence makes itself felt.
Only with some writers of this time has prose a character of more conscious and refined art. They belong to the group in which purely rational inspiration is diversified with motives of another order. Addison carries the scruple of style very far. On the contrary, it is without desiring to be so, at least directly, that Swift is one of the great masters of English prose. His main object was to be a polemist. His supremely ironical work must be viewed in the atmosphere of the controversies where philosophy, religion, politics, and science wage unceasing war, carried away as they are by the inner enthusiasm of dogmatic or, more frequently, critical affirmation.
2. The Deistic Quarrel: Joseph Butler.
The opening years of the eighteenth century are astir with religious controversies. Reason growing bolder sets to work upon the obscure parts of religion, and wants to shed upon them the rays of a natural light. Such an enterprise appears destructive to the essential beliefs of Christianity, and apologists rise up in their defence. On either side, the arguments are of a similar order; they appeal to the sole authority of reason. After varying fortunes, the victory seems to rest with the champions of orthodoxy. But they have wounded themselves with the very weapons they employed; a long and bitter struggle leaves the public mind uncertain and weary, and inclining towards indifference or skepticism.
The men who submit to a purely human test the nucleus of revelation which the Reformation had preserved, prolong the line of critical thought which had been traced out by Protestantism in the sixteenth century. But in the seventeenth they have more direct predecessors. Lord Herbert of Cherbury had found in internal evidence the data which sufficed for a philosophical creed. At a later date, Locke demonstrated the 'reasonableness' of Christianity (1695), while Charles Blount (
Anima Mundi, 1679) had given a systematic form of the thesis of a religion according to nature. The deep-seated need for rationality which is the characteristic feature of this age was to emphasize the latent conflict between revealed dogma and the demands of intellectual judgment; whilst the rivalries of sects, and their mutual persecutions, by weakening the prestige of the churches, drove the freest minds to inquire after a lay form of belief.
The Deists of the classical age, with some timidity at first, then with aggressive daring, carry these tendencies to the necessary conclusion. They are looked upon by their contemporaries, whose feelings they have shocked, as impious infidels. At the present day, the perspective of time enables us to understand them better. Theirs, on the whole, were temperaments keenly desirous of a truth that was rational, of sincerity, more than of a useful, passive conformity, or of humbleness. Their attempt to join up the domain of reason with that of faith points to the effort by which Locke had established their equivalence. If religion conforms entirely with good sense, they say, it cannot be in any way contrary to it; and so where religious tradition has some mystery to offer, some apparent absurdity, it is religious tradition that is at fault. Several of the capital tenets of Christianity are thus endangered; and the Establishment, the clergy and the hierarchy, become quite human and arbitrary institutions. It is no wonder, therefore, that Deism, despite the very positive character which it did not want to relinquish, should have been been denounced almost universally as a doctrine of negation pure and simple.
The series of its outstanding works opens with the
Christianity Not Mysterious of Toland (1) (1696), which deduces from the idea itself of revelation the necessity for an intelligible belief, and makes no distinction between faith and clear cognition. A Catholic by birth, Toland evolves towards Protestant liberalism, then towards the Anglican Church, and finally towards and independent pantheism. The
Discourse of Free Thinking of Collins (1713) draws from the principle of rational liberty, which the latitudinarian theologians had accepted without reserve, consequences which were destructive with regard to the authority of the clergy. The
Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour by Woolston (1727) are animated by a spirit of ironic hostility against priests, the jealous custodians of tradition; he assails the official version of the miracles in the New Testament, where he believes that he can make out improbable or absurd elements, and concludes in favour of the wholly symbolical and spiritual character of the Sacred Book, which, he declares, should strengthen the prestige of a reasonable religion. The work of Tindal (
Christianity as Old as the Creation, 1730) draws the general conclusions resulting from the application of reason alone to religious problems. He starts from the very formulae of contemporary theology, which affirmed the accord between faith by revelation and natural faith, and from it deduces the superfluousness of the first, or at least, submits it entirely to the control of the second. Finally, Peter Annet, in
The Resurrection of Jesus examined by a Moral Philosopher (1744) concludes openly in favour of disbelief in one of the vital articles of traditional Christianity.
Such theses roused the ire of many, and called forth a great number of refutations. Denounced and condemned by the Church authorities, worried in some cases by the civil power, the Deists avoid for the most part the rigorous application of the law, by being prudent in their language; they most often declare that they are still Christians, and only desire to rid religion of the dross of unreason. But the significance of their writings does not escape the orthodox believers. Armed with a knowledge that is usually superior, and with equal intellectual sharpness, the champions of the Church find fault with the erudition, the character of the private life of their adversaries, just as much as with their dialectics. The Deistic controversy is remarkably violent.
Among all the apologists are to be singled out Clarke, Warburton, and Butler (2). The first, a man of supple and versatile mind, brings to the controversy his scientific knowledge, his acquaintance with philosophical questions, and a somewhat formal rigour of mind. He refutes Deism in the name of logic and metaphysics. His
Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704) and his
Discourse Concerning Natural Religion and the Christian Revelation (1705), leave a lasting trace upon English philosophy in the eighteenth century. Those souls which are perturbed by the negative tendencies of religious rationalism here find an orthodox conciliation of reason with faith. Clarke has notions methodically linked up together about the existence and the attributes of God, from the wisdom and goodness of the Creator he draws very clear conclusions as to the good and evil in human actions, and boldly intellectualizes ethics. His theory of the pre-established 'fitness' of things will stimulate the robust irony of Fielding.
Warburton is no less of a reasoner, and adds the telling keenness of an aggressive eloquence to the weight and force of arguments. A theologian, moralist, political writer, literary critic, and editor of Shakespeare, the future Bishop of Gloucester supplies the figure of the classical age with one of its significant traits. He raises the the passion for debate to its climax, in a century when the faculty of persuasion has unlimited confidence in itself. Less richly gifted and with less originality and humour, he is like a first sketch of Johnson. The friend and favourite disciple of Pope, he systematizes to excess the moral ideas of his master, and makes himself the spirited defender of the orthodoxy of the
Essay on Man. His
Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (1737-41) belabours at great length a thesis which for the needs of the cause at issue he treats as a strong point of his adversaries.
Anglican apologetics reach their culminating point with Joseph Butler (3). His effort has given to the whole century a feeling of philosophical security against the threats of criticism; he has awed doubt, and comforted faith; and in the estimation of his contemporaries, has finally conquered Deism. Nothing is more English than his
Analogy. His method is severely intellectual, but inductive; in its general trend, it takes up again the favourite argument of the adversaries of revelation; it discovers in it an imperious invitation to go beyond the latter, and rise to the full belief of the Christian. The point of departure is thus the analysis of the data of human experience.
The life of man, when properly tested, reveals its own insufficiency; it necessarily implies a system of ends, logical but concealed from our understanding, where our earthly destiny is inserted between two mysteries, upon which revelation projects the only possible light. The mainspring of this reasoning lies in analogy, that is to say in the instinctive application to the whole order of the universe of a principle of continuity taught us by experimental reality; analogy governs our acts in virtue of the law which commands us to obey an enlightened view of our interest; it produces faith, according to this rule of the mind that an extremely strong probability is equivalent to a certitude. Thus this doctrine, which, at times, makes us think of Pascal, recalls rather the argument of the wager than the thesis of knowledge by way of the heart; utilitarian and relativist, it is already set in the direction in which the pragmatism of our times has developed.
Despite the ingenuity, the subtlety of which it gives proof, by showing that in the Christian dogma lies the necessary crowning of empirical wisdom, it owes its force to its realism. It has a grasp of the truth and actual conditions of human life, of the silent and scarcely conscious inductions by which are determined the tacit inferences of our thought. It analyses nature in a mood that wishes to be objective; it probes it, without showing it the secret complacency of the Deist; it perceives the character of things with a sober lucidity that inclines to pessimism. It has therefore exercised a deep and durable influence. But while it is relatively realistic for its century, it is no longer sufficiently so for ours. To-day, its postulates are immediately visible. The science of nature and that of man have come to be seen in a new light. To us the universe appears infinitely more complex than when Butler viewed it; and the lesson of a kind of implicit Christianity has ceased to emanate from it for those who are uninitiated; indeed it was not there, save on condition of having been first of all put there. Belief, just as incredulity, invokes other arguments to-day. Butler's system remains one of the most vigorous products of English thought in the eighteenth century; through its quiet anthropomorphism, its full confidence in reason, which empiricism limits but does not weaken, through the assurance with which it metes out its share to mystery and deciphers the plan of existence as if it were some familiar and simple text, it fitly represents a time when it seemed to be the extremity of modest caution to accept the view that the beyond was not completely intelligible.
3. Political Thought: Bolingbroke, Mandeville.
Bolingbroke (4) is in secret or avowed sympathy with Deism; he it is who furnished Pope with the outlines of the religious philosophy laid down in the
Essay on Man, which did not fail to awaken much uneasiness on the side of orthodoxy. His posthumous essays reveal an attitude of intellectual irony with regard to the superstitions with which, he hints, primitive religion based upon nature had saddled itself through the centuries. Though this disrespect is aimed, for the post part, at paganism, or at Roman Catholic rites, yet a set purpose of free-thinking as to the historical elements of Christianity is ill disguised. But Bolingbroke is also a political writer, an historian, a moralist. His figure of a great nobleman, enlightened, scheming, sceptical, a patron of the arts, and concealing very keen personal disappointments beneath a mask of superior indifference, is very interesting. He played a foremost part in the literature and the life of the classical age.
His ethics and his philosophy have nothing original about them. His general views on the origins of the English constitution, or on the recent struggles waged in the name of the balance of Europe, have breadth and penetration, but belong to literature rather than to history. It is in the domain of politics that his thought has attempted a personal synthesis. Of a clear, alert, even a realistic mind, he understood that the weakness of the parliamentary system, more obvious every day with its success, would offer to a statesman the elements of a positive doctrine, capable of rallying round him all the forces of reaction, which by comparison would become forces of progress. To what extent was the opportunist Toryism thus constituted sincere? It seems that Bolingbroke threw his feelings into it, at the same time as he staked upon it his political fortune. He shows up in a very strong light the excesses of party rivalry, chases away like idle phantoms the antiquated jealousy of a royal absolutism from henceforth doomed; evokes the principles of the Revolution of 1688, and claims to apply them better than the corrupt administration openly practised by Walpole; urging all good citizens to be reconciled, he singles out the national idea as the means to unify wills no less than interests; and places at the head of a unanimous nation a prince who shares the feelings of his subjects, who has a deep sense of his duties, and is the living symbol of the fatherland.
This apology for a renewed and modernized monarchy, associated with the theme of patriotism, now becoming a distinct sentiment, and based on the moral forces of imagination and the emotions, was to be brilliantly successful in the nineteenth century. It is impossible not to perceive in Bolingbroke a kind of unconscious cynicism from the way he handles these psychological mainsprings of action. He is too clear a thinker, too clever in his ambition, to allow us to believe in a deep enthusiasm of feeling; and he is too desirous of speaking the language of impassioned conviction, to invest his argument with the pure virtue of direct simplicity. The eloquence with which he pleads his cause is animated, warm, but never soul-stirring, and wakens in the reader a secret uneasiness. But as a writer he has distinguished merits; his language, a trifle ornate, is full without losing in firmness, and has a natural rhythm, an easy, harmonious sense of balance, which secure a place for it among the brilliant examples of classical prose.
Mandeville (5) also applies a lucid analytic mind to the examination of the political and moral basis of society. But his inquiry burrows and dissects in quite another way. Conceived in the same spirit of rationalism, it sacrifices nothing to the eloquence of sentiment. It recalls Hobbes by the unrelentingly keen spirit of the research. Still more realistic than with the author of
Leviathan, it does not superimpose a system of social metaphysics on the cold scrutiny of what exists.
The intention which animates these short treatises, as original as they are frankly cynical, is the wish to get at the forbidden or obscure truth of things; at that truth, hurtful to the preferences and sentimental habits of man as a social being, and against which manners, conventions, and psychological life itself, have erected countless barriers. The uncompromising rationalism of Mandeville is singularly in advance of the movement of modern thought, and in order to find its posterity, one has to come right down to the 'immoralist' thinkers and psycho-analysts of contemporary times. His thesis is that politics, with its deep inner dependences and hidden relations, links up moral behaviour with the success of states according to formulae quite different from those established or imposed by the official theory of conduct. This latter makes no distinction between the duty of the individual and that of a people, and affirms that for the former as for the latter prosperity is bound up with virtue. In fact, Mandeville declares, a nation is only rich and powerful through the vices and the corruption which are inextricably interwoven with its activities of every kind. London is the centre of a flourishing commerce, and the filthiness of its street is evidence of the fact. How can one hope to have them absolutely clean, without at the same time desiring that they should be less seething with trade? To unite austere virtues with the refinements of civilization, is a vain Utopia. In a republic of merchants, all compete to rob and cheat their neighbours more; the egoism of each will become the happiness of all, provided a wise government harmonizes and reconciles all these blind forces by limiting them one by another. Similarly, ethics are purely conventional. Each person, by nature, thinks only of himself. But society requires altruism; it produces it, cultivates it, by rewarding it with praises and honours, and men, vainglorious dupes, do through pride what their instinct urges them not to do.
Such is, at least, the active thought of Mandeville, and that which radiates imperiously from his work. On the surface, he respects moral observances; theoretical duty and absolute uncompromisingness, in accordance with official watchwords, retain their prestige; and the authority of principles is held up above all infringement. In fact, this apparent orthodoxy only heightens, by a kind of silent irony, the contrast endlessly suggested between the public reasons for and the real motives of human conduct.
Although thus veiled by transparent reserves, these analyses reveal a robust mind, firmly resolved to shake off the universal authority of fictitious values; rough, and rather indelicate, overstepping the correct limits, unmindful of fine shades; but sound, and animated by a scientific will. What would its conclusion be? Probably a clear-sighted wisdom, the outcome of moral modesty. It is directed against the austere professors of a puritanism which adapts itself very well, in reality, to deception in social life, and to cheating in business; it also has in view the idealistic and sentimental optimism of Shaftesbury. In the political order of things, it seems as it were an anticipatory outline, traced by an
enfant terrible, of the system of the liberal economists. In the moral order, it is in intimate agreement with the corrosive intuitions of Swift. It appears in a sense to prelude the denunciations of Rousseau, to show up the inward rottenness of the industrial civilization which is in course of development; but while Mandeville actually places the happiness that is least imperfect in a poor, frugal, and limited society, he labours under no illusion as to the appeal of such an ideal, and does not propose seriously to return to the state of nature. Finally there are in his work the germs of a revolutionary criticism of the established order; he allows us to see the equalities, the injustice, the lies upon which this order rests. Here again, Mandeville is only a precursor, and his anarchism remains implicit. As a political theorist, he gives us a lesson of intellectual liberty, and throws new light upon the complexity of social facts; as a psychologist and moralist, he belongs, except in the matter of literary talent, to the line of Machiavelli and Nietzsche.
4. Erudition and Literary Criticism.
On that intellectual battlefield, the classical age, a war of learning and literary scholarship is also waged. Bentley (6) and Dennis dominate a numerous group of humanists and critics by the vigour of their faculty of arguing, not less than by their knowledge or their doctrine.
The quarrels of the scholars touch too closely upon the origins of faith, not to be interwoven with religious discussions; Bentley is an upholder of orthodoxy; he refutes atheism, and violently attacks the deist, Collins. But it is against other adversaries that he carries out his finest campaigns. To a minute knowledge of ancient texts, he joins an instinctive sense of method, a strong critical shrewdness, and above all the gift of divining the truth. Once he has formed his conclusions, he defends them with extraordinary force, in a style that is compact, cogent, and at the same time racy, capable of irony, concrete vigour, and eloquence. Though he claims—as one might expect—to be the most pacific of men, the joy of fighting, the intoxication of a victory foreseen, expected, and enjoyed, cast a glow over the five hundred pages of his
Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris. There is something about Bentley that is better than the literary erudite, or the controversialist; he is already a modern savant. He explains literature and philology by means of linguistics: he makes, or opens the way for, many a discovery by turning to Greek dialects, metrics, and monuments. Nothing is wanting to this mind, save a certain detachment, the salutary liberation from oneself, the fine perception of superior artistic fitness. Thus we see his dogmatism and personal sentiment in the end crushing out his critical prudence; and his edition of Milton, strewn as it is with gratuitous corrections, is the strange error of an adventurous fancy.
In leaving the field of the old literatures, Bentley was quitting the solid ground, every corner of which he had explored. He stands as the greatest and last witness of the incomparable prestige of Graeco-Latin humanism. By a rather paradoxical fate, his part in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns is not, superficially, what one might be led to expect. In demonstrating that the so-called
Epistles of Phalaris are not authentic, he destroys an argument utilized by Sir William Temple to establish the superiority of the ancients (1690); and thus makes it possible for Swift to castigate, as having contemned them, the very man of his time who knew them best (
The Battle of the Books).
In principle, Dennis (7) is for the ancients; Shakespeare, he holds, is inferior to them despite his great merits, because he violated the unities, of which they were the inventors. But a background of national temperament comes to light in Dennis; he places Milton, from certain points of view, above Virgil. Very self-willed, his mind has firmness, and his abusive violence knows how to sting. He makes an interesting effort to deepen the grounds of criticism, to analyse the philosophical elements of the beautiful. His objections to Pope's
Essay on Criticism are often telling. While his attempt to explain the value of ancient poetry by its intimate fusion with religion is paradoxical, he already outlines, very clearly, the ethical theory of art, which is rooted in English instincts. He inveighs against Italian opera in the name of the dignity and seriousness of the stage, and assigns to the poet the duty of instructor and reformer. At the very heart of classicism, an ideal coloured with morality comes to free and define itself, opening up one of the avenues by which sentiment will steal into the stronghold.
5. The Criticism of Manners: Satire, Comedy, Memoirs.
The spirit of satire is present everywhere in the classical age; it forms by itself, or when allied with other elements, the inspiration of a great part of the poetry; the work of Pope is full of it. But outside of Pope, the formal satire in verse declines, and tends to become artificial; it will revive, however, under the influence of political motives, in the middle of the century. The satires of Young (
The Universal Passion, 1725-1728) are very estimable declamations; those of the young Smollett (
Advice, 1746;
Reproof,
1747) will prove to be merely the exercises of a schoolboy. The rational criticism of manners is being diffused into manifold literary expressions, and the prose of comedy, of the novel, of letters and memoirs, as that of sermons and pamphlets, furnishes it with a more supple instrument.
Generally speaking, the theatre of the classical age does not belong to the central current of literature; it reveals rather the divergent or complementary aspects of the epoch; the comedy of Colley Cibber or Steele, the drama of Rowe, have their place in the study of middle-class inspiration, or of the dawn of sentimentalism. An exception must be made for the correct tragedy in which Addison, more mindful on this occasion of the rules than of his moralizing ideal, gave the most finished imitation of the French model (
Cato, 1713). In fact, the influence of the French dramatists continues to be felt throughout the reign of Queen Anne; the adaptations of Racine and Corneille are numerous; and Ambrose Philip's
Distrest Mother, 1712 (
Andromaque), is only the most famous. However, the actual life of the dramatic art is to be found elsewhere.
Again it is not to be found in the expiring tradition of the Restoration. No doubt the licentiousness of the stage is not put to flight by the clarion call of Collier; indeed, it disappears only very gradually; the comedies of Mrs. Centlivre (8) show skill and movement, but vainly attempt to conceal an extremely crude frankness of tone beneath a final repentance of the wrongdoers. It is the change in society, in manners and in taste, that is shifting dramatic interest on to new subjects; and the old themes are visibly becoming exhausted.
If one had to look in the theatre for a brilliant comedy that voiced very well the tone of classical literature it would be
The Beggar's Opera (9). The spirit of parody is the very soul of the play: it is the facile sentimentalism of many contemporary pieces that Gay's biting and ironical talent is here assailing. but the scope of the parody is wider; it is heightened by a political and moral satire, and even—in no very serious intention—by a kind of deliberate reversing of values, symbolized by the confusing of the planes for which art is accustomed, that recalls Mandeville and Swift.
Similarly, the memoirs of the time, a fertile literary kind, reveal the intensity of the group and party spirit, and of society life. The savour of scandal which Mrs. Manley knows how to give to her transparent fictions (
New Atalantis, 1700), is fairly closely allied to the attraction which urges a Lord Hervey (10) to write. The dominant tone, in this latter work, is one of an almost universal severity; and one can scarcely avoid feeling in it the systematic bias of a malicious judgment.
There would be no artificiality in classing the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (11) with these works of so very diverse a nature, but of a psychologically similar inspiration. The tone of her moral personality harmonizes with that of temperaments which are intellectual, free, and critical. She is not exempt from some dryness, and even from a dash of cynicism. She is vivacious, witty, has an original gift of observation, a faculty for understanding the different exotic modes of life, and for painting them, a cultured taste, some pretension to philosophy, and with that a practical sense, and a great variety of interests. Despite the ease of her style, her correspondence, which she revised and which in every way is steeped in literary intentions, cannot be compared, as she hoped it would be, with that of Madame de Sévigné. She revealed the Turkish Orient to the general English public; and her friendships, her enmities, her famous quarrel with Pope, who was her admirer before he assailed her with biting irony, all give a rich documentary value to the story of her life.
The vein of satiric description, closely allied to that of parody, which runs at the very heart of the classical age, crops out again in a whole literature of burlesque, whose artistic and scholarly inspiration rejoins popular realism. Below
The Dunciad of Pope,
The Beggar's Opera of Gay, the
Gulliver's Travels of Swift,
and beside
The Splendid Shilling of John Philips, one must not forget the
Hudibras Redivivus of Ned Ward (1708), in short lines after the style of Butler, nor the
Amusements Serious and Comical of Tom Brown (1700) (12). The eighteenth century opens, as the seventeenth had closed, with an exuberance of criticism and mockery, where libety of thought seems to be practised in a mood of self-satisfied display.
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(1) John Toland, 1669-1722; Anthony Collins, 1676-1729; Thomas Woolston, 1669-1731; Matthew Tindal, 1665-1733. For the deistic movement see Leslie Stephen,
History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, and J. M. Robertson,
Short History of Free Thought, 1906.
(2) Samuel Clark, 1675-1729; William Warburton, 1698-1779.
(3) Joseph Butler, born in 1692, took orders, published in 1726 his
Sermons which exposed his moral ideas and in 1736
The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, which quickly acquired the authority of a decisive demonstration. Bishop of Durham in 1750, he died in 1752.
Works, ed. by Bernard, 1900.
(4) Henry Saint-John, born in 1678, of ancient family, was by birth destined for a public career; he shared with Harley the leadership of the Tory Government in 1710, and in 1712 was created Viscount Bolingbroke; the death of Queen Anne in 1714 interrupted his plans for a Jacobite restoration and caused him to flee to France where he was attached as secretary to the Pretender. Allowed to return to England in 1723, he was excluded from the Lords, and bitterly opposed the Whig minister, Walpole. After a further residence of seven years in France (1735-42) , he resigned himself to the complete failure of his political hopes, and died in 1751. His works were published by Mallet and comprise
Letters on the Study and Use of History, 1736;
A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism, 1736;
The Idea of a Patriot King, 1738; and letters or treatises such as
Remarks upon the History of England, and
A Dissertation upon Parties, published in the
Craftsman, the organ of the opposition to Walpole from 1727 to 1731. See Churton Collins,
Bolingbroke, 1886; W. Sichel,
Bolingbroke and His Times, 1901-2; Hassall,
Life of Bolingbroke, 1915; Butler,
The Tory Tradition (Bolingbroke, Burke, Disraeli, Salisbury), 1914.
(5) Bernard Mandeville, a medical practitioner of Dutch origin, born in 1670, settled in London and published in 1705 a philosophical poem,
The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest; republished in 1714, then in 1723, with notes, remarks, additions, etc., under the title
The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. He also published
Free Thoughts on Religion, 1720;
The Origin of Humour, and
The Usefulness of Christianity in War, 1732; and died in 17333. See the study by Sakmann, 1897; F. B. Kaye, edition of
The Fable of the Bees, with introduction, notes, etc., 1924.
(6) Richard Bentley, born in 1662, in Yorkshire, studied at Cambridge, then was appointed tutor to the Stillingsfleet family, becoming a man of vast learning. After several years at Oxford, he became royal librarian in 1694, and in 1700 was elected to the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge. His long life, fully devoted to work and controversy, maps itself out according to his treatises, sermons, commentaries, editorial contributions, letters, replies, etc., particularly:
Epistola ad Joannem Millium, 1691;
A Confutation of Atheism, 1692-1713;
A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, 1699; edition of Horace, 1711;
Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-thinking (by Collins), 1713; Milton's
Paradise Lost, a new edition, 1732.
Works, ed. by A. Dyce, 1838. See Jebb,
Bentley (English Men of Letters), 1902.
(7) John Dennis, 1657-1734, travelled in France and Italy, wrote for the stage, replied to Jeremy Collier, and led from 1700 onwards the life of a professional critic, in bitter conflict with most of the great writers of his time. He published
The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, 1701;
The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704;
Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare, 1712, etc. See H. G. Paul,
John Dennis, 1911; Lenz,
John Dennis, 1913.
(8) 1680-1722;
A Bold Stroke for a Wide, 1717.
(9) By Gay (1728). See above, Chap. II, sect. 7.
(10) 1696-1743;
Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second, ed. by Croker, 1848. See also the
Diary of Lady Cowper (1714-20), ed. by Spencer Cowper, 1864.
(11) Mary Pierrepont, born in 1689, had a studious youth, married in 1712 Edward Wortley Montagu, followed him to Constantinople, whither he was sent as ambassador (1717) and from there she revealed Turkey to her friends. Separated from her husband, she resided in Italy from 1743 to 1761, and began a correspondence with her daughter, Lady Bute, like Mme de Sévigné with Mme de Grignan; died in 1762, leaving a copious diary, destroyed by her daughter; society verses (satires, eclogues, etc.). Her
Letters, which she herself revised or made up with the help of the diary, were published in 1763.
Letters and Works, ed. by Moy Thomas, 1861; Everyman's Library, 1906. See Paston,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Times, 1907; I. Barry,
Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1928.
(12) Tom Brown's
Amusements, and Ned Ward's
London Spy have been re-edited by A. L. Hayward, 1927.
—oOo—
