naturalize in England; it was not only finish of style, but the dignity and restraint of temper, the fastidious taste, which found merely a fitting garment in the outer technique of language. This is what Goldsmith meant when he said that Temple 'wrote always like a man of sense and a gentleman'; it was this fastidious taste and aloofness, rather than moral scruple, which kept him pure of speech in an age of licence. The somewhat flimsy learning of the first of these two essays, or rather the trivial blunder that provoked the controversy on the authenticity of the Letters of Phalaris, has been his undoing. Macaulay, in some violent and ill-considered pages, has thought it a simple matter to dismiss Temple's every claim to a serious place, and classical scholars have been content to echo these sneers; but the fact is that his real importance lies, not so much in the mere varnish of style, as in the regions of taste and ideas in criticism. In an age which failed to distinguish between classic art and neo-classic theory, Temple urged his generation alike to a defence of the ancients and to scorn of ancient rule. In a literary age which set store chiefly by dogmatic law, he urged the new criterion of critical 'taste'. The history of seventeenth-century classicism is not to be written in a few introductory pages. All the world knows how the Italians of the later Renaissance passed on this legacy to the France of Louis XIV, and how it passed thence to Stuart England. But it is not generally realized that the earliest reaction against its excesses, almost a century before the final romantic revolt, is represented by a school of wits and virtuosi for whom taste rather than formal precept served as the test of literary excellence. The alien Saint-Évremond was perhaps the chief standard-bearer of this movement in Temple's day; Dryden, in some of his rarer moods, gave it his sanction; but in Temple himself this new standard moves harmoniously, for the first time in English, in a medium of expression that illustrates the new theory by the very grace of its practice. He attacks all the rules that burdened the creative art of his period, praising English comedy as a natural and unhampered expression of English life. He seeks to substitute historical criticism for the abstract criticism of Rules. He is full of dicta and aperçus that hold the attention of later critics, full of phrases and ideas whose history begins, and only begins, with him. He attacks the moral licence of contemporary English literature and the excessive refinement of contemporary French style. He sets the seal of approval on English humour, and distinguishes it from its continental analogues. He foresees the new modes of romantic interest in the unknown literatures of the far North and the far East. The blunder of Phalaris cannot override such claims as these. It is in order that students may know something at first hand of the claims of Temple in this dual aspect of stylist and critic, that these two essays, long inaccessible, have been reprinted from the third volume of my Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. The notes which accompany them in that collection appear here also, with a few trifling variations and excisions, but without any really substantial change. J. E. SPINGARN. SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE (1690) I. AN ESSAY UPON THE ANCIENT AND MODERN LEARNING WHOEVER Converses much among the Old Books will be something hard to please among the New; yet these must have their Part too in the leisure of an idle man, and have, many of them, their Beauties as well as their Defaults. Those of Story, or Relations of Matter of 5 Fact, have a value from their Substance as much as from their Form, and the variety of Events is seldom without Entertainment or Instruction, how indifferently soever the Tale is told. Other sorts of Writings have little of esteem but what they receive from the Wit, Learning, or Genius 10 of the Authors, and are seldom met with of any excellency, because they do but trace over the Paths that have been beaten by the Ancients, or Comment, Critick, and Flourish upon them, and are at best but Copies after those Originals, unless upon Subjects never touched by them, such as are 15 all that relate to the different Constitutions of Religions, Laws, or Governments in several Countries, with all matters of Controversie that arise upon them. Two Pieces that have lately pleased me, abstracted from any of these Subjects, are, one in English upon the Antedi- 20 luvian World, and another in French upon the Plurality of Worlds; one Writ by a Divine, and the other by a Gentleman, but both very finely in their several Kinds and upon their several Subjects, which would have made very poor |