"Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne," first published in 1789. Edmund Malone (b. 1741, d. 1812) distinguished himself as an acute literary critic. He published editions of Shakespeare and Dryden, and several biographies. Anna Seward (b. 1747, d. 1809) wrote verses and a "Life of Dr. Darwin;" but is chiefly remembered for her "Letters," published after her death. Hannah More (b. 1745, d. 1833) was a prolific and popular writer of dramas, and afterwards of religious and moralizing works, especially in the form of stories. Her most noted books are "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," "Practical Piety," and "Cœlebs in Search of a Wife." Henry Mackenzie (b. 1745, d. 1831) wrote plays, essays, and novels. His most successful novels are "The Man of Feeling," 1771; "The Man of the World," 1773; and "Julia de Roubigné," 1777. Frances Burney, or Madame D'Arblay (b. 1752, d. 1840), wrote several famous novels, "Evelina," "Cecilia," and "Camilla." The sisters Sophia and Harriet Lee were once popular story-writers, their joint work, "The Canterbury Tales" (five vols., 1797-1805), having still a wide diffusion among children. A celebrated romance entitled "Vathek " was published in 1784 by William Beckford (b. 1760, d. 1844). Clara Reeve (b. 1725, d. 1803) wrote several novels, of which the most notable is "The Old English Baron." Ann Radcliffe (b. 1764, d. 1823) has had great popularity as a novelist, especially by her "Mysteries of Udolpho."

CHAPTER XVI.

SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: POETS AND DRAMATISTS.

1. Mark Akenside. — 2. Thomas Gray.—3. Oliver Goldsmith; Thomas Chatterton; Charles Churchill. — 4. James Grainger; William Falconer; James Beattie; James Macpherson; Thomas Percy. —5. Samuel Foote; David Garrick; Richard Cumberland ; John Home; Richard Brinsley Sheridan. — 6. William Cowper.-7. Robert Burns.—8. Erasmus Darwin; Elizabeth Carter; John Wolcot; Anna Lætitia Earbauld; Henry James Pye; James Grahame.-9. Elizabeth Inchbald; Hannah Cowley; Charles and Thomas Dibdin.

1. Mark Akenside (b. 1721, d. 1770) was son of a butcher at Newcastle-on-Tyne. He was sent to the Edinburgh University, with aid of a fund for the purpose, to be educated as a Dissenting minister; but he made medicine his study, was proud of his oratory in the debates of the Medical Society, and aspired to a seat in Parliament. After three years at Edinburgh Akenside went to Leyden, where he staid another three years, took his degree as M.D., and found a friend in a student of law, Jeremiah Dyson, who came home with him. "The Pleasures of Imagination," in its first form, appeared in 1744, when Akenside's age was twentythree. Its subject was suggested by Addison's essays on Imagination, in the "Spectator." Akenside wrote odes also, and worked at the elaboration of his chief poem throughout his life, publishing the enlargement of his First Book in 1757, and of the Second in 1765; the enlargement of Book III., with an unfinished fragment of Book IV., appeared after his death. Akenside had less feeling for the sense of poetry than for its sound. His style was artificial. In life he affected a false dignity, and his pompous manner laid him open to Smollett's ridicule. He was ashamed of a lameness caused in childhood by the fall of a cleaver in his father's shop. He never married, and was greatly indebted to the liberality of Mr. Dyson for income while he was endeavoring to make a practice.

2. Thomas Gray, born in 1716, was son of a money-scrivener on Cornhill, and the only one of his twelve children who survived their infancy. His father was morose and indolent, neglected business, and spent money in building a country house at Wanstead, without telling his wife what he was about. Mrs. Gray. on her part. had joined Miss Autrobus — one of

her sisters-in business, and made money by a kind of India warehouse, on Cornhill. Gray was sent to school at Eton, because his mother had a brother among the assistant masters there. At Eton he formed a friendship with Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert. His uncle at Eton being a fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, Gray entered there as a pensioner, in 1734, but afterwards removed to Peterhouse. In 1738 he left without a degree, and in the spring of 1739 set out for travel in France and Italy, as the companion of Horace Walpole. In Italy the friends disagreed. Gray left Walpole at Reggio, went on before him to Venice, and returned to England about two months before his father's death, in 1741. Gray and Walpole were not reconciled till 1744. Being urged by his friends to make law his profession, Gray went to reside at Cambridge again, and took the degree of B.C.L. At Stoke, in 1742, he wrote his ode "On the Spring " much verse was written by Gray in the spring and summer of this year- - and in the autumn his ode "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College," the first published verse of Gray's, although it did not appear until 1747. From 1742 until his death, in 1771, Gray lived chiefly at Cambridge, where, in 1768, he was made Professor of Modern History. In 1750 he had completed his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," suggested by the churchyard at Stoke Pogis. In February, 1751, Gray wrote to Horace Walpole that the proprietors of a magazine were about to publish his Elegy, and said: "I have but one bad way left to escape the honor they would inflict upon me; and therefore am obliged to desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately (which may be done in less than a week's time) from your copy, but without my name, in what form is most convenient for him, but on his best paper and character. He must correct the press himself, and print it without any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in some places continued beyond them; and the title must be, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.' If he would add a line or two to say it came into his hands by accident, I should like it better." Walpole did as was wished, and wrote an advertisement to the effect that accident alone brought the poem before the public, although an

apology was unnecessary to any but the author. On which Gray wrote, "I thank you for your advertisement, which saves my honor." Gray's fame has its deepest foundations in the simplest of his poems that on the site of his old Eton playground, and the Elegy, which in all revisions he sought to bring into simple harmony with its theme. He expunged classicism. In one familiar stanza he put Hampden in the place of Gracchus, or some other ancient worthy. Milton and Cromwell, for Tully and Cæsar, improved the lines

"Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest,

Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood."

In March, 1753, Gray's mother died, as his father had died, of gout, from which he himself suffered severely; and in the same year appeared "Six Poems," with designs by R. Bentley. In 1754 he wrote his odes on "The Progress of Poesy," and on "The Bard," both published in 1757, at Strawberry Hill. The first collected edition of Gray's "Poems was not published till 1768, three years before his death.

3. Oliver Goldsmith (b. 1728, d. 1774) was one of seven children of a poor Irish clergyman; was educated at the village school of Lissoy; entered, with aid from an uncle, Mr. Contarine, in 1745, as a sizar at Trinity College, Dublin, and there graduated as B.A. in 1749. From 1752 to 1754 he was studying medicine at Edinburgh, and continued like studies in 1755 at Leyden. He then travelled on foot about the Continent. In 1756 he was in London, and tried many ways of earning bread. He had no skill in managing outward affairs of life, but had within him a pure breath of genius. He wrote criticisms for "The Monthly Review," and then for "The Critical Review;" published, in 1759, "An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe;" produced eight numbers of a paper called "The Bee;" and contributed in 1760, to Newbery's new daily paper," The Public Ledger," two articles a week for a guinea apiece. These essays, collected in 1762, as "The Citizen of the World," are full of the kindliest humor, and in prose written with the unaffected grace of a true poet. In 1763 Johnson, who felt the worth of Goldsmith, and was his firm friend, sold the manuscript of the "Vicar of Wakefield"

for sixty pounds, to relieve Goldsmith from immediate distress and debt. In December, 1764, his poem of the "Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society," appeared, and Goldsmith rose in fame. Its success caused the purchaser of the "Vicar of Wakefield" to publish it, at last, in February, 1766; and it went through three editions before the end of August. Goethe tells us that when, aged twenty-five (and in the year of Goldsmith's death), he was a law-student at Strasburg, Herder read to him a translation of the "Vicar of Wakefield." More than half a century after Goldsmith's death, when the German poet was by many regarded as the patriarch of contemporary European literature, he ascribed, in a letter to his friend Zelter, the best influence over his mind to the spirit of that wise and wholesome story as it was made known to him "just at the critical moment of mental development." In 1768 Goldsmith's first comedy, the "Good-natured Man," was produced; in 1770 appeared his other poem of great mark, "The Deserted Village; " in 1773, his other comedy," She Stoops to Conquer," was acted; and Goldsmith died on the 4th of April, 1774. He did much other work of the pen, wrote histories of Greece, Rome, England, and of Animated Nature. His "Vicar of Wakefield" brought idyllic grace into the novel of real life, and his "Traveller" and "Deserted Village" calmly reflect some shadows of the life and thought of Europe in his day.

Thomas Chatterton was born in 1752, and was taught at a charity school in his native town of Bristol, and articled to an attorney. The boy, with a poet's genius, and a turn for antiquities, played upon the reviving taste for our old national literature among men who had still but a faint critical sense of its form of thought or language, by inventing a series of mock antique poems, which he ascribed to an imaginary priest of Bristol, named Thomas Rowley. Rowley lived, he said, three centuries before the poems were discovered by his father in an old chest in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, where he and his forefathers had been sextons for many generations. Chatterton came to London in 1770, with the confidence of genius, warmed by young hope and ambition; found himself starving in the midst of plenty, with a defiant sense of power. He was