retained the seventeenth-century conviction of the inherent badness of human nature, or of its tendency to moral decay. Smith's second book is vastly superior to his first. He had been to France in the meantime, and had come into personal relations with the great French economists Quesnay (1694-1774) and Turgot (1727-1781). His mind was eminently receptive, and in an element of extreme tranquillity he worked out his theories slowly to their last results. The chief merit of the Wealth of Nations, and that which enables it still to hold its place at the head of the politico-economic literature of the world, is not any very great originality in detail, but an extraordinary grasp of all parts of the subject, and a marvellous ability in illustrating theoretical propositions by apt instances from practical life. Adam Smith is usually spoken of as the first prophet of Free Trade; it would be nearer the truth, remarks Mr. Leslie Stephen, "to say that he was the first writer who succeeded in so presenting that doctrine as to convince statesmen" in its favour. To the purely literary student, desirous of an example of Adam Smith's style, which is always lucid and correct, no better specimen can be recommended than the letter he wrote to Strahan, describing his last interview with the dying Hume: ; "He said that when he was reading, a few days before, Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, among all the excuses which are alleged to Charon for not entering readily into his boat, he could not find one that fitted him for he had no house to finish, he had no daughter to provide for, he had no enemies upon whom he wished to revenge himself. 'I could not well iinagine,' said he, 'what excuse I could make to Charon in order to obtain a little delay. I have done everything of consequence which I ever meant to do; and I could at no time expect to leave my relations and friends in a better situation than that in which I am now likely to leave them. I therefore have all reason to die contented.' He then diverted himself with inventing several jocular excuses, which he supposed he might make to Charon, and with imagining the very surly answers which it might suit the character of Charon to return to them. Upon further consideration,' said he, 'I thought I might say to him "Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time, that I may see how the public receives But Charon would answer, "When you have seen the the alterations." IX BLACKSTONE 307 effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses: so, honest friend, please step into the boat." But I might still urge, "Have a little patience, good Charon; I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition." But Charon would then lose all temper and decency. "You loitering rogue, that will not happen those many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue.' Several of the pioneers of science in the eighteenth century, the great technical teachers, were far from disdaining the arts of graceful expression. There is no more interesting example of this fact than Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), who contrived to make one of the most readable of books out of a compendium of jurisprudence. Blackstone began life as a poet. His copy of octosyllabics, entitled The Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse, is one of the best minor poems of the time, and suggests that so skilful a versifier might have taken his place with the professional lyrists. In one hundred lines it describes the charms of poetry, the obligation of the author to quit the Muse, and the solemn enthusiasm with which he will devote himself to another mistress, and, absorbed in the study of "Britannia's laws," "Observe how parts with parts unite In one harmonious rule of right; These lines are usually attributed to the year 1741, when Blackstone entered himself at the Middle Temple; but they seem too vigorous and too polished to be the work of a lad of eighteen, and it may be suggested, as more probable, that they were written in 1746, when the author was called to the bar. Until 1766 Blackstone remained identified with Oxford, successively as undergraduate at Pembroke, as fellow and bursar of All Souls, as principal of New Inn Hall, and as first Vinerian professor. In 1765-69 he published his Commentaries on the Laws of England, in four quarto volumes By this work he made about £15,000. Although the Commentaries had faults which have since been abundantly pointed out, their merits were obvious alike to lawyers and to the public, and no legal work has ever enjoyed or deserved so eminent a popular success. Blackstone writes easily and brightly, though few critics of to-day would endorse Fox's enthusiastic dictum that the Vinerian Professor was the best prose-writer of his day, "far more correct than Hume and less studied than Robertson." The earliest art-criticisms of any value published in this country were contained in the annual and biennial Discourses which Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723-1792), delivered from January 1759 to his retirement in December 1790. They were issued year by year, and collected after his death. The popularity of these essays has been steadily maintained, and Reynolds can now be omitted in no catalogue of the leading writers of the second half of the century. His periods are full and eloquent, and he mingles with his æsthetic philosophy, which he borrowed mainly from the French, a practical knowledge due to his own technical experience. He is often enthusiastic and always singularly sympathetic as a teacher, while the best proof of the value of his discourses is that they are still in constant demand, and eagerly consulted by professional artists. It is in the course of his Fourteenth Discourse that the President pauses to make his touching reference to the recent death of his rival Gainsborough : "It may not be improper to make mention of some of the customs and habits of this extraordinary man; points which come more within the reach of an observer: I, however, mean only such as are connected with his art, and indeed were, as I apprehend, the causes of his arriving to that high degree of excellence which we see and acknowledge in his work. Of these causes we must state, as the fundamental, the love which he had to his art; to which, indeed, his whole mind seems to have been devoted, and to which everything was referred; and this we may fairly conclude from various circumstances of his life, which were known to his intimate friends. Among others, he had a habit of continually remarking to those who happened to be about him, whatever peculiarity of countenance, whatever accidental combination of figures, or happy effects of light and shadow, occurred in prospects, in the sky, in walking the streets, or in company. If, in his walks, IX REYNOLDS 309 he found a character that he liked, and whose attendance was to be obtained, he ordered him to his house and from the fields he brought into his painting-room stumps of trees, weeds, and animals of various kinds; and designed them, not from memory, but immediately from the objects. He even framed a kind of model of landscapes on his table, composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking-glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water. How far this latter practice may be useful in giving hints, the professors of landscape can best determine.” It was, doubtless, through his lifelong companionship with Johnson, Burke, and Goldsmith that Reynolds learned to write in the English language only a little less brilliantly than they. CHAPTER X THE POETS OF THE DECADENCE THERE is no section of our national poetry so sterile, so unstimulating, as that which we have now reached, the poetry of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Compared even with the period which immediately preceded it, although that was not greatly inspired, it is singularly dull, mechanical, and dusty. There is nothing here so majestic as the odes of Gray or so tender as those of Collins-nothing to challenge comparison with the frank nature-study of Thomson. Names there are in plenty, names of poets not yet utterly discrowned, but on whose brows the laurel is growing very thin and brittle. The greatest of the group is a noble prose-writer, who wrote graceful verses. The rest are either survivals, or else men with the light of the next age already dimly reflected in their faces. The most characteristic of them is scarcely a poet at all, but a versifier, who without charm or imagination, summed up all that the mere tradition of poetic art in the eighteenth century could teach an extremely clever artisan. the verses of Erasmus Darwin the classic style found itself unsurpassed, and, in that direction, fortunately unsurpassable. As the century approached its close, a newer and a nobler choir of true poetic voices began to be heard, not always to be distinguished at the outset from the hard see-saw of the older generation, yet for ears attuned bringing real music in the Village of Crabbe, and the Poetical Sketches of Blake, both in 1783, the Table-Talk of Cowper In |