out the first half of the century the main opposition lay between the King on the one side, as head alike of the National Church and of the Feudal System, aided by the Episcopacy and the larger part of the nobility and gentry with their dependants, and, on the other, the Parliament, representing the middle classes of the country, whose religious opinions, whether Presbyterian or Independent, were for the most part anti-Episcopal. In this Civil War the victory fell to the Parliament, with the result that, for a time, the old Monarchical and Ecclesiastical constitution of the country was swept away, the House of Lords abolished, and the Episcopal form of Church government replaced by the Presbyterian. Then came the Restoration of the Stuarts, with its strong monarchical reaction, and the purely constitutional conflict changed into one of a more fundamental character, in which the Monarchs sought to make use of their almost absolute powers to bring back the kingdom under Papal supremacy. The attempt produced a second reaction of which the final product was the Revolution of 1688.

When the time came to reckon up the gains and losses on both sides of the quarrel, it was manifest that, without any overthrow of the external fabric of society, the Catholic and Feudal order of things had been transformed into a more completely civic system of government. No attempt was made to define precisely the extent of the King's prerogative, but the danger of Absolutism was effectually guarded against by the Declaration of Right. Feudalism, in its ancient form, already undermined by Cromwell's destruction of the Castles, had been finally extinguished by the Act for abolishing military tenures. At the same time, while this Act retrenched the power of the Crown, the great landed proprietors all over the country retained their traditional power of guiding and influencing the course of affairs in their own neighbourhood. The Declaration of Right, on one side, provided that the nation should no longer be exposed to peril through the attempts of the Monarch to impose his own religious belief on his subjects; on the other side, the Test Acts

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C

served as a bulwark against the reappearance of the ecclesiastical despotism under which the country had groaned during the supremacy of the Presbyterians. Midway between the two extremes of religious opinion, the doctrines of the Church of England afforded an ample region of spiritual thought, in which the individual might exercise freedom of judgment, and yet keep in touch with the main stream of tradition and authority.

If these political results be considered, much light will be thrown on the resemblances and differences between English and French poetry in the long evolution of the art as practised in each country. Both show a struggle between the same imaginative elements, Scholastic Thought, Chivalrous Sentiment, Civic Tradition, Monarchical Centralisation both may boast of a capacity for reducing these elemental principles to the just balance of expression. In neither country was there ever, as in Italy, a tendency to reproduce, without assimilation, the external forms of classical art: poetry in France is always French, in England always English. The great difference is that, under the influence of the Renaissance, the centre of the Classical balance tended in France constantly to move towards Authority, in England towards Liberty.

This difference makes itself apparent as the eighteenth century advances. If we take the year 1688 as the starting-point of comparison, we find that about that period all the rules of French poetry have been very precisely prescribed in Boileau's Art Poétique, while Dryden is only just laying aside his youthful admiration for Cowley from his growing perception of the "correct" beauty of Virgil.' Boileau has founded his style, by right reasoning, on the example of Horace; beyond him, however, there seems to be no road, so that the new generation of French critics fails to appreciate, as he has done, the true meaning of Classical Authority; and Perrault (1628-1703), deprecating reverence for the ancients, maintains that the standard of good writing is to be looked for exclusively in the style of the moderns during the reign of Louis XIV.

1 See vol. iii. pp. 531-532.

With such conditions of taste, the absolute sterility of French poetry in the eighteenth century is not a thing to be wondered at. On English poetry the effect of the Renaissance has up to a certain point been the same as in France. In order to attain the balance of correctness and propriety of expression, aimed at by Dryden in his later years, much of the variety and individuality supplied by the genius of the Middle Ages has been sacrificed the lyrical impulse has for the time being ceased to agitate the mind of the nation: the ingenious extravagances of Donne, the spiritual conceits of George Herbert, the melodious caprices of Herrick, have been almost forgotten during the riots of the Restoration: Paradise Lost, to be endured, must be transfigured into The State of Innocence. Nevertheless, in England the element of Romance has only been subdued by the spirit of the Classical Renaissance it has not been destroyed; and in the course of events, with the natural expansion of society, we shall see the medieval element in the latter half of the eighteenth century once more exerting an active influence on the progress of English Poetry. Meantime we have to trace the onward movement of the Classical Revival in modifying the conditions of art and taste brought about by the fall of the Feudal Monarchy.

CHAPTER II

THE WHIG VICTORY

WHIG PANEGYRICAL POETRY AFTER THE REVOLUTION OF 1688: THE EARL OF HALIFAX ; MATTHEW PRIOR; JOSEPH ADDISON; THOMAS TICKELL; JOHN HUGHES.

1

"WHIGGISM," said Johnson, "is the negation of all principle." This is one of those party epigrams which are more specious than true; and old Mr. Langton, who was offended by Johnson's humorous hope that his niece was a Jacobite, might have justly retorted on him that Jacobitism was the negation of all constitutional principle. Both the constitutional English parties contain within themselves certain tendencies which, in their extreme development, lead, on one side, to Absolutism, on the other, to Anarchy. Yet Whig and Tory statesmen were agreed on the necessity of combining to bring about the Revolution of 1688.

That Revolution was, nevertheless, substantially the victory of a Whig principle, the nature of which may be readily understood by comparing the essence of Locke's Treatises on Government with that of The Leviathan of Hobbes, which gave a basis of philosophy to the Court party after the Restoration. Both schools begin with the hypothesis of a State of Nature, from which men deliberately choose to depart, and to submit themselves to the order of civil society. But the new state, into which, according to Hobbes (whose ideas we have seen anticipated by Jean de Meung in the Roman de la Rose 2), men volun1 Boswell's Life of Johnson (Croker's Edition), p. 148.

2 Vol. i. pp. 181-182.

tarily bring themselves, is Absolute Monarchy.

Locke's

theory is no doubt the negation of this doctrine. The Social State, according to him, is a mixed form of government, acting as trustee on behalf of citizens "for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which," says he, "I call by the general name, property." Locke holds

that men could never have voluntarily entered into agreement to submit themselves to one absolute ruler. Such a contract, he says, would be, "as if when men, quitting the state of nature, entered into society, they agreed that all of them should be under the restraint of laws, but that he [the absolute ruler] should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature, increased with power and made licentious with impunity. This is to think men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions." 1

The Whig principle after the Revolution of 1688 was not only embodied in philosophy but, for about half a century, adorned by poetry. Compared with the Tory principle of personal loyalty, it offered few opportunities to those who appeal in verse to the reason and imagination through the emotions; but that it was capable of rousing enthusiasm may be seen by poems published so long after the Revolution as Thomson's Liberty and Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination. These works, indeed, are of the didactic order. But in the period immediately following the Revolution, while men's passions were still strongly excited, and the success of the constitutional settlement was in doubt. -in other words, during the reigns of William III. and Anne-the kind of poetry most in vogue for exalting the Whig principle was panegyric. The abstract and intellectual character of Whiggism threw many difficulties in the way of poetical panegyrists; but their thoughts were elevated by the importance of the European interests, civil and religious, which were evidently at stake; by the vicissitudes of the war, in which England and France played the leading

1 Two Treatises of Government, book ii. chap vii.