Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, who is by no means to be confounded with the author of The Theory, is another writer whose fame has considerably transcended his merits. G. Burnet, however, for better or for worse, has been a good deal more talked about than Sprat, and must be less briefly dismissed. He was a man born with a genius for success. At the age of twenty-nine he had been offered, and had refused, a choice of four bishoprics. In 1679 he made a great reputation by the first volume of his History of the Reformation, still in some sort a standard work. Next year he made capital out of the repentant deathbed of the wicked Earl of Rochester by describing the scene in a pamphlet which enjoyed an astounding popularity. Again a mitre was pressed upon the young divine, but he knew how to wait. Meanwhile he was the

most admired preacher in England, and would belabour the pulpit for two whole hours at a time. Burnet, who did not lack courage, took Charles II. to task for his public and private offences, and was discharged from his offices. He went to Holland and schemed for the House of Orange, returning in 1688 as William III.'s confidential chaplain. He was promptly made Bishop of Salisbury, and gave the rest of his life to literature. His famous Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles dates from 1699, and in 1706 he collected his sermons and pamphlets into three thick volumes. In 1724-1734 his best-known work, The History of My Own Times, was posthumously issued. This credulous and violent collection of memoirs brings the reader down to 1713. Burnet had been an actor in too many of the political dramas of his time not to possess information which the student of history would be sorry to miss. His gossip is direct and convincing, and he has the gift of bringing a scene plainly before our eyes. Research has made it increasingly certain that he was a conscientious observer, and that his attitude, even in describing his enemies, was accurate and candid. But no one ought to say that Gilbert Burnet is a good writer. He is dry, flat, and particular in a way which becomes common in the eighteenth century, but which had not characterised the writers

we have hitherto mentioned. In Burnet, for the first time, we meet with a writer from whose speech the last glimmering reflection of the old enthusiastic style has disappeared. But it is not to be denied that he is wonderfully modern, or that his best character-pieces read very much like leaders in the newspapers of to-day. He is described as "a son of Anak," full of vigour and sap, "black-brow'd and bluff, like Homer's Jupiter."

It will perhaps have been observed that, with the solitary exception of Gilbert Burnet, every one of the authors hitherto dealt with in this chapter was of mature age at the date of the Restoration. Between 1645 and 1675 there was opportunity for plenty of prose-writers to be born, whose work should be a fresh ornament to the seventeenth century. But by a very strange accident these thirty years seemed to add singularly little to prose literature. Defoe, Arbuthnot, Swift, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Steele, and Addison were all born during that period, and all refrained from publishing prose of any importance until the beginning of the next century. Neither Lewis Atterbury (16561731) nor his more famous brother Francis, Bishop of Rochester (1662-1731), each of whom printed sermons, claims more than a bare mention here. Only one new prose-writer of high distinction belongs to the last decade of the seventeenth century, namely, Richard Bentley (1662-1742), the famous Master of Trinity. He was a very great scholar, a man of eminent good sense and vigorous intellectual character, and a personality which set its stamp upon the age. His youth was passed as the domestic tutor of Stillingfleet's son, and his prodigious acquirements were obtained in the Dean's excellent library. When Stillingfleet was made a bishop, Bentley proceeded to Oxford, and there published, in 1691, his Letter to Dr. Mill, in Latin, a daring essay in destructive criticism. In 1692 he brought out his Boyle Lectures, and through them obtained the friendship and correspondence of Newton. Next year he was appointed King's Librarian. He was now already a famous scholar, on terms of familiar intimacy with such men as Evelyn, Locke, and Sir

Christopher Wren, too famous, indeed, not to excite the petulance of mediocrity. There was much controversy regarding the socalled letters of Phalaris, which Temple had praised in 1692 and Charles Boyle had edited in 1695. Bentley, who knew that he could prove these letters to be spurious, was led into contemptuous controversy about them, and the learned world rang with a very pretty quarrel. Bentley's first essay appeared in 1697, and the rapid exchange of paper bullets went on until 1699. Atterbury, Temple, Garth, Aldrich (even Swift, a little out of date), a host of wits and scholars, were on the one side, and Bentley alone on the other. Yet Bentley conquered all along the line of his foes; nor since 1699 has Phalaris the letter-writer existed. In April 1699 Bentley was made Master of Trinity, and the rest of his career— his insolent struggle for college supremacy, his irregular progress as a scholar, his final victory and repose-belong to the following century. He wrote very little more in English prose, and we are not here concerned to pursue his fascinating adventures any further. The vernacular style of Bentley is rough-hewn, colloquial, shot through with fiery threads of humour, the ideal style for confident and angry polemic. His position as a scholar is summed up in Professor Jebb's statement that his is "the last name of first-rate magnitude which occurs above the point at which Greek and Latin studies begin to diverge." Bishop Stillingfleet is reported to have said that Bentley wanted only modesty to be the most remarkable person in Europe; he was certainly, in the absence of modesty, the most considerable English critic of his time.

CHAPTER IV

POPE

At the head of a list of "departed relations and friends" which Pope kept, he wrote, "1700 Maji primo obit, semper venerandus, poetarum princeps, Joannes Dryden," although he only saw that poet once, and never knew him. It was the literary relationship that he recognised. King John was dead,-long live King Alexander. Yet between the death of Dryden and the first public appearance of Pope there came an interregnum of nine years, during which any man who was strong enough might have seized the sceptre. But the only pretender was Addison, whose absence of poetic genius is plainly proved by the fact that though Dryden had been ready to recognise him, and though Pope was still a child, he failed, without any lack of will on his own part, to strike a commanding figure on the empty stage. If Addison had never come under the influence of Swift and Steele, he would in all probability never have discovered his true power. He would have gone on writing political copies of verses and academic memoirs on medals, and would have held a very inconspicuous place in the history of literature. At thirty-five Addison had written most of his existing poetry, and was yet, properly speaking, undistinguished.

Joseph Addison (1672-1719) was the son of a Dean of Lichfield, who had written two good books on Morocco. He was educated at the Charterhouse, where he found Steele, and at

Queen's College, Oxford, whence he proceeded to Magdalen and became a fellow. He stayed at Oxford until 1699, cultivating polite literature in a dilettante way. In 1693 Addison came forward with a fluent address To Mr. Dryden, and began, under the supervision of that poet, to join the band of young men who were placing the Latin classics in the hands of those who read none but English verse. In April 1694 he produced a brief Account of the Greatest English Poets, in verse; the poets were Chaucer and Spenser, at whom he sneered, and Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, and Congreve, whom he praised. In this brief copy of verses there is room for a compliment to "godlike Nassau," which showed the author's Whig bias. In 1695 Addison published a poem To His Majesty [William III.], in a strain of grovelling eulogy. He describes noble Nassau as

Reeking in blood, and smeared with dust and sweat,

Whilst angry gods conspire to make him great."

Meanwhile Addison had been producing a series of very clever mock heroic Latin poems, and a serious one on the Peace of Ryswick. These he published at Oxford in 1699, and so closed his academic career with great applause. Montague, the ideal patron, whose encouragement was to do so much for letters, secured Addison a pension and sent him abroad. In 1701 he wrote to Montague, now Lord Halifax, a Letter from Italy, which Mr. Courthope thinks the best of Addison's poems. It is very much in the manner of Waller. He was then writing his cold tragedy of Cato, and in 1704 he celebrated Marlborough's victory at Blenheim in The Campaign, "a gazette in poetry," as Warton called it; after this he wrote but little verse, except the graceful opera of Rosamund in 1706. Addison was totally without lyric gift. He never excelled except in the heroic couplet. As to his versification, it has been considered to mark the transition between Dryden and Pope; but, in the opinion of the present writer, it shows a curious absence of all influence from Dryden; and if it marks any transition at all, it is that between Waller and Pope.