along the earth's orbit, or along the mightier path in which our whole system is voyaging, of a kind sometimes to cause epidemics which sweep through the life of the globe, and seem like admonitions that the globe itself might be replunged into the fell preAdamite state whence it emerged to support man, and, at other times, without any such glaring stroke of decimation and death, to lead with equal certainty to weaknesses and untoward intellectual variations? On the other hand, if we adopt the more general notions of Progress, which do not suppose any such givings and takings as going on between Humanity and the rest of the universe known or unknown, but suppose a definite amount of energy or of possibility locked up once for all beyond escape in the actual organism of Humanity, and subject only to evolution, then, as all times are successively parts of the selfcontained evolution, none is to be depreciated, and those nearest to ourselves least of all.

I am not going to discuss these alternatives— either, on the one hand, to add my voice to the popular and now commonplace outcry against the poor Eighteenth Century; or, on the other, to fight its battle. This only seems, for the present, pertinent to my subject, that, agreeably to the views we took in the former lecture, as to the relative capabilities

of Prose and Verse, we should expect to find that, to the extent to which we do allow some such change to have taken place in British thought and British society as that which some would call offhand a degeneracy, to the same extent Prose would assert its sway in those regions of authorship which are more peculiarly its own. If the peculiar regions of Prose-not those into which it may penetrate, or into which, perhaps, it will yet penetrate, but those which were first assigned over to it, and where its rule is least disputed-are the regions of the comic, and the historically complex, the didactic, and the immediately practical, while Verse retains a certain superior, though not exclusive, mastery in the realms of the sublime, the elemental or ideal, and the highly impassioned; then British society, when it lost, if it did lose, those peculiarities of sustained ideality of conception, of faith in things metaphysical, and of resoluteness in impassioned aims, which had formerly borne it up to the poetic pitch, and fell into a comparative flat of complicated and bustling activity, with Whiggism and Toryism regulating the currents, did at least, by that very change, present a state of things favourable to the increase of Prose Literature as regards relative quantity, and also to the use of new and special prose forms.

Do not the facts correspond with the expectation? In the eighteenth century, as we have defined its duration, the chief poets or writers of verse in Britain are, after Dryden, who links it with the time foregoing,-Pope, Prior, Gay, Addison, Southerne, Rowe, Hughes, Allan Ramsay, Young, Thomson, Dyer, Shenstone, Gray, Co lins, Akenside, Johnson, Goldsmith, Churchill, Chatterton, Blair, Home, Beattie, the two Wartons, and Darwin; names suggestive of very various excellence, but not, save in one or two instances, of excellence either very extraordinary in degree or in kind peculiarly poetic. In the list of prose-writers for the same period, we have the names of-Dryden again, and Locke, and Clarke, and Berkeley, and Butler, and Hartley, and Hume, and Adam Smith; of Burnet, and Atterbury, and Tillotson, and South; of Defoe, and Swift, and Addison again, and Steele, and Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke, and several comic dramatists; of Johnson again, and Goldsmith again; of Richardson, and Fielding, and Smollett, and Sterne, and Walpole, and Henry Mackenzie; of Hume again, and Gibbon, and Robertson, and Hugh Blair, and the younger Warton; and of others, and still others in different departments, not forgetting Junius and Burke. Are we not here in the middle of a tide of prose unexampled

in any former time? That, in older times, there were specimens of prose perhaps higher in some respects than any belonging to this era-more majestic, more impassioned, more poetical-may be admitted, in conformity with what has been said as to the ultimate capabilities of Prose, even in competition with Verse. But what wealth here, what variety, what versatility! It is clearly an age in which Prose was, on the whole, the more congenial, and in which the most important and effective work of the British mind, as the British mind then understood its work, devolved on Prose naturally, and was shared in by Verse chiefly because Verse had come sorely down in the world, had little of its proper work left, and undertook anything rather than bè idle. Does not Gibbon alone outweigh, in real merit, half a score of the contemporary versifiers? And Hume or Adam Smith another half-score; and Fielding or Burke another? With the exception of Pope and Thomson, and one or two others of the poetic list, has not Prose the evident advantage, even in the finer and subtler exercises of mind; and are not Addison and Johnson in prose superior to their own selves in verse? In short, accepting, if we choose, the opinion that the eighteenth century was a prosaic age, may we not subject the opinion, in

accepting it, to a slight etymological twist, so as to turn it, to some extent, into a compliment to the poor shivering century of which it is intended as a vilification? May we not, when we next hear the eighteenth century in Britain spoken of as a prosaic century, acquiesce in the phrase, with this interpretation attached-that it was indeed a prosaic century, inasmuch as it produced an unprecedented quantity of most excellent and most various Prose?

The new British prose fiction which came into being near the beginning of the century in the works of Swift and Defoe, was one of the most notable manifestations of the increasing sufficiency of Prose generally. There had been already in Britain the Arthurian prose romance, with its wondrous ideality, the grotesque and facetious tales of the chap-books, the Utopian or political romance, the wearisome Arcadian Romance or Pastoral-Heroic, the still more prolix romance of modernized classic heroism, the unique romance of Bunyan, and also, to some extent, the Novel of French and Italian gallantry; but here was a kind of fiction which, whatever it might lack in comparison with its predecessors, grasped contemporary life with a firmer hold at a thousand points simultaneously, and arrested more roughly the daily forms of human interest.