Of Gibbon and Burke Mr Saintsbury says but little ; he recognises the refreshing qualities of The Decline and Fall, but he by no means does justice to the gorgeous rhetoric of our noblest statesmen. Lawyers invariably tell me that they always look on a man who doesn't know his Burke as only half educated, and certainly I have derived more considerable æsthetic refreshment from the speeches on India, France and America than in any writers of a like kind in any language. To some extent a novel depreciation of Sheridan has of late set in. There were better things written between 1700 and 1798 than his three plays, and critics wax angry because we don't read them; but that ought not to blind them to the fact that in their class these comedies stand alone, and have been the constant delight of all playgoers and readers ever since. No one in his senses would deny that he gains a very definite sense of rest and refreshment after seeing or rereading the comedies of Sheridan or Goldsmith; the stage, without these two in this century, would have been poor indeed. But all this time there has been an undercurrent of revolt against the tenets of the Augustan school; The Fugitives from the Happy Valley were headed, of course, by Gray and Collins, who, in spite of their personified abstractions, handed on a very definite torch to Wordsworth himself.

Collins, in particular, had that peculiar dream quality, that touch of pure lyrical softness, which haunts us in the later romantics. He at least breaks with a school which aims at neatness and polish and common-sense above all else. How Sleep the Brave and The Ode to Evening need no relative eulogy; they are absolute, final, ineffably graceful and sweet. Macpherson's Ossian is, I fear, still caviare to the general, but its popularity and influence were once widespread throughout

Europe. The point is that this verse-prose, with its breath of the blue mountains of Skye and the Hebrides and magic vagueness, shows yet another cleavage from the school of Pope. But it is when we come to Percy's Reliques (1765), the most epoch-making book that appeared between 1700 and 1798, that we see the first real glimmerings of the great dawn of the Romantic revival. How good it must have been for the eighteenth century to read Sir Cauline, Sir Patrick Spens and The Nut Brown Maid. It would, we feel, have been worth while to have lived at that period, ordinarily ignorant, and suddenly to have come across a copy fresh from the press. No wonder Scott raved so about it. I never met anyone, boy or man, who was not in raptures over it when it was first brought to his notice.

It is difficult to analyse the charm which ballad poetry exercises over us; the fact remains that we would part with many precious heritages before we would consent to lose Chevy Chase, The Battle of Otterbourne, Young Waters and so on. It is hardly necessary at this time of day to recommend people who are in need of rest and refreshment to go back to the ballad, but it is worth noticing that it is to the eighteenth century that we owe its revival and consequent popularity. Chatterton's Ballade of Excellent Charity and Smart's Song to David will never fail to provide restful pleasure to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear, but their place at this time of day is also well assured. And so we arrive at the setting of the Augustan sun. Cowper, almost as versatile as Goldsmith, we already know as a letter-writer. His hymns stand out as the finest we possess, his John Gilpin and The Task scarcely need mention here, but it is perhaps permissible once more to draw attention to the import

ance of Yardley Oak, which certainly contains matters entirely foreign to the earlier writers in the century. Here we have the imaginative envisagement of everything, the half-pantheistic feeling of the community of man and Nature and God, which is so perfectly developed later on in Wordsworth. In all his poems, however, there is the same peacefulness and quiet humour which are so necessary for those in search of rest.

We feel, on laying down The Peace of the Augustans, that Mr Saintsbury has conferred upon the State a real benefit, for there never was a time when we all of us so sorely needed all that the eighteenth century has to give us-level-headedness, a sense of humour, a sense of quiet, even though oppressed and weighed down by innumerable troubles, robust strength, an avoidance of thinking too precisely on the event—all these and many more are the gifts which this age has to bestow. It is all the more difficult when we feel so grateful for such a piece of criticism to have to comment adversely on many features, but, in common fairness to ourselves, a word must be added on the reverse side.

Never before can there have been such an astute literary critic who wrote so deplorably as Mr Saintsbury. His style has long been recognised as almost as bad as his criticisms are good, but in this book he has "outSaintsburied Saintsbury," which must weigh with university lecturers before they take the responsibility of advocating this book as a text-book of criticism. Furthermore, he is a Tory of the Tories, and obviously prefers a political fight to all the literature there ever was. Like many others of his belief, he is unable to understand the moderns, and consequently reviles them most unjustly. Lastly, and most important of all, we close this book with a feeling that he himself does actually prefer the low-lying levels of the Augustan

poets to the sublime heights of Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth. We feel that we have been cheated by a very clever counsel, who insidiously recommends that, for our sanity's sake, we should try his prescription of eighteenth-century literature; and, when he has us in his clutches, he would have us leave all our glories of sea and sky and mountain, and stay with him in this field of very limited vision for ever.

The clever reader will take Mr Saintsbury's advice gladly for a cure, but, when he is rested, he will rise again like a giant refreshed with wine and come back to the present age, ready to fight afresh for the new ideals and the twentieth-century theory of life and letters, which anyone less biased than Mr Saintsbury will allow are incomparably finer than those of the nineteenth and totally beyond the ken of the very earthy schemers of the eighteenth century.

W

III

SOME MODERN POETS

HEN Mr Marsh first collected the poems most representative of his age in 1912, he kindly provided the critic with a beaconlight by quoting the following passage from Lord Dunsany :

Of all materials for labour, dreams are the hardest; and the artificer in ideas is the chief of workers, who out of nothing will make a piece of work that may stop a child from crying or lead nations to higher things. For what is it to be a poet? It is to see at a glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as one's own, to know mankind as others know single men, to know nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God.

This brave venture appeared just at a time when there was literally no sale whatever for poetry, when Richard Middleton was driven to commit suicide because he could make no headway in an age given over to materialism. It seemed that so far as the general public was concerned poetry was at its nadir; the poet was, in Dunsany's words, truly thought to be a fool; yet Mr Marsh persisted, and, as we now know, took the tide on its turn; by May, 1914, this slender volume had gone into its tenth edition; poetry had come into its own again.

Cambridge published its own productions in verse,