of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. But after the civil war, religious, political, and social influences turned the imagination of the English people exclusively upon their own manners. The old modes of medieval thought had lost their power over the mind: the spirit of religious fanaticism which rose up in opposition to them seemed hostile to every form of creative art. In the sphere of politics the ancient traditions of Monarchical Government were subverted first by the Rebellion and afterwards by the Revolution. Everywhere men were asking themselves wherein consisted the foundations of society, what were the limitations of liberty, and how they were to recognise the first principles of art. And, these being the questions which agitated the mind of the nation above all others, it was these for which a natural, an irresistible instinct drove men of genius to provide an answer, either in a philosophic or in an imaginative shape. The poetry of the eighteenth century is the poetry of Society and Manners.

So long as a powerful necessity compelled men to think and act for themselves, their work

was marked by a vital originality of matter and form, and hence in literature almost everything of imaginative value belonging to what may be broadly called the eighteenth-century movement came into existence between the Restoration and the accession of George III. Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Gray, Johnson, among the poets; Swift, Steele, Addison, Fielding, and Smollett, among the essayists and novelists, had written their all or their best before 1760. The 'Deserted Village,' the 'Traveller,' the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' Crabbe's Village,' and Miss Burney's novels, are nearly all the works of genius or talent, peculiarly characteristic of the eighteenth century, produced after this date and before the French Revolution. When the liberties of the nation were finally secured, and the principles of taste and manners advocated in the 'Tatler' and Spectator' had met with general acceptance, the creative impulse of the age seems to have ceased. Faction reigned supreme in politics : the Church sank into slumber artifice in poetry prevailed over thought. We see a Junius succeeding a Swift as a controversialist; a War

burton following a Butler in theology; for Pope as a satirist we have to put up with Churchill ; and the pure Horatian style of the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot' is exchanged for the sonorous emptiness of the 'Botanic Garden.'

I endeavoured to illustrate the decay of mediævalism in the seventeenth century by citing two poems of Cowley and Crashaw; a comparison of a passage from Thomson's 'Seasons' with one from Darwin's poem mentioned just above, will be equally suggestive of the exhaustion of the inspiring impulse of the eighteenth century. The following extract from 'Winter' shows the creative spirit of the age still in its vigour :

What art thou, Frost? and whence are thy keen stores Derived, thou secret all-invading power

Whom even the illusive fluid cannot fly?

Is not thy potent energy, unseen,

Myriads of little salts, or hooked, or shaped
Like double wedges, and diffused immense
Through water, earth, and ether? hence at eve,
Steamed eager from the red horizon round,
With the fierce rage of Winter, deep suffused,
An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the pool
Breathes a blue film, and in its mid career

Arrests the bickering stream. The loosened ice
Let down the flood, and half-dissolved by day
Rustles no more; but to the sedgy bank
Fast grows, or gathers round the pointed stone,
A crystal pavement by the breath of heaven
Cemented firm; till, seized from shore to shore,
The whole imprisoned river growls below.
Loud rings the frozen earth, and hard reflects
A double noise; while at his evening watch
The village dog deters the nightly thief;
The heifer lows; the distant waterfall
Swells in the breeze; and with the hasty tread
Of traveller, the hollow-sounding plain
Shakes from afar. The full ethereal round,
Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,
Shines out intensely keen, and, all one cope
Of starry glitter, glows from pole to pole.

In the following from the 'Botanic Garden'

the same spirit is seen in its decay :

Nymphs, your fine forms with steps impassive mock
Earth's vaulted roofs of adamantine rock;

Round her still centre tread the burning soil,
And watch the billowy lavas as they boil:
Where in basaltic waves imprisoned deep
Reluctant fires in dread suspension sleep;
Or sphere on sphere in widening waves expand,
And glad with genial warmth the incumbent land.
So when the Mother-bird selects their food
With curious bill, and feeds her callow brood,

Warmth from her tender heart eternal springs,
And pleased she clasps them with extended wings.
You from deep cauldrons and unmeasured caves
Blow flaming airs, or pour vitrescent waves,
O'er shining Ocean ray volcanic light,
Or hurl innocuous embers to the night;
While with loud shouts to Etna Hecla calls
And Andes answers from his beaconed walls:
Sea-wildered crews the mountain-stars admire,
And Beauty beams amid terrific fire.

There is evidently a common element in these two passages. In both (though only in the first few lines of Thomson) the description is, to some extent, scientific, and, as far as it is so, would find a more fitting expression in prose; in both the frequent use of Latin words and the Latin method of linking epithets to substantives is observable; but while Thomson has conceived his subject with enthusiasm, and imparts his enthusiasm to the reader, Darwin thinks throughout in a matterof-fact spirit, and uses metre merely for decorative purposes; so small is his sense of sublimity that he does not perceive anything ridiculous in imagining one volcano hallooing to another.