Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car

Wide o'er the fields of glory bear

Two coursers of etherial race,

With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace.

6

His second Pindaric ode, 'The Bard,' was finished in 1757, and a few other odes, 'The Fatal Sisters,'' The Descent of Odin,' The Triumphs of Owen,' and the 'Death of Hoel,' followed in later years, and were the fruits of Gray's researches into early Scandinavian and Welsh literature.

During 1759 and the two following years he lived in London, in Bloomsbury, in order to avail himself of the antiquarian treasures of the newly opened British Museum. He was preparing materials for a history of English poetry, but failing health and spirits caused him to abandon a plan which he was so admirably fitted to execute, and his collections passed into the hands of Warton. And it may be well to quote here an extract from a tribute of praise, which was published soon after Gray's death by the Rev. W. Temple, a friend who knew him well.

Perhaps Mr. Gray was the most learned man in Europe; he was equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of Science, and not superficially but thoroughly. He knew every branch of history, both natural and civil; had read all the original historians of England, France, and Italy, and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his plan of study. Voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amusement, and he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and gardening.

The last seven years of Gray's life were passed at Cambridge, and as his mother and aunts were dead, he spent his summer holidays with various friends in travels to the South and West of England, to Cumberland and

to the Highlands. His letters, especially those from the Lake District, are delightful, and Dr. Johnson says:

He that reads his epistolary narration wishes that to travel and to tell his travels had been more of his employment.

Gray died at Cambridge in July 1771.

THE NOVELISTS

THE Georgian age, with its low aims and ideals of life, could produce no great masterpiece in poetry, but in the humbler field of prose romance great things were achieved, and Tom Jones' and 'Clarissa Harlowe'stand unrivalled still.

The first of the great novelists was Daniel Defoe, who was born in 1661, and who, till he was nearly sixty, spent his busy life in pamphleteering, using his pen sometimes for one party and sometimes for another, but always for liberty and progress. The Essay on Projects,' The True-Born Englishman,' and the ironical Shortest Way with the Dissenters,' are some of his chief political works.

Defoe possessed the power of rendering a narrative wonderfully real and lifelike by the addition of little circumstantial touches, and this is well shown in his 'Journal of the Plague Year,' and in the 'Account of the Great Storm of 1703.'

His masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe,' was written in 1719, and it was based upon the real adventures of the Scotch mariner Alexander Selkirk. The book was a

great success, and Defoe followed it up by writing 'Captain Singleton,'Colonel Jack,' Moll of Flanders,' and other stories, in all of which there is the same lifelike reality, but they lack the simplicity and unity of Crusoe.' As an example of Defoe's style, we may take an extract from Colonel Jack,' in which two lads share and spend their first day's pilferings in Bartholomew Fair.

' And what will you do with it now, Jack?' said I. 'Ido!' says he; 'the first thing I do I'll go into Rag Fair, and buy me a pair of shoes and stockings.' 'That's right,' says I, 'and so will I too.' So away we went together, and we bought each of us a pair of Rag Fair stockings in the first place for fivepence, not fivepence a pair, but fivepence together; and good stockings they were too, much above our wear, I assure you.

We found it more difficult to fit ourselves with shoes; but at last, having looked a great while before we could find any good enough for us, we found a shop very well stored, and of these we bought two pairs for sixteenpence.

We put them on immediately, to our great comfort, for we had neither of us had any stockings to our legs that had any feet to them for a long time. I found myself so refreshed with having a pair of warm stockings on, and a pair of dry shoes - things, I say, which I had not been acquainted with a great while-that I began to call to my mind my being a gentleman, and now I thought it began to come to pass.

Samuel Richardson, the author of Clarissa,' was born in Derbyshire in 1689, and his father was a joiner. He received little education, but he was fond of reading, and like Scott he became famous among his companions as a teller of stories.

My schoolfellows used to call me Serious and Gravity, and five of them particularly delighted to single me out either for a walk, or at their father's houses or at mine to tell them stories, as they phrased it. Some I told them from my reading, as true; others from my head, as mere invention, of which they would be most fond, and often were affected by them. All my stories carried with them, I am bold to say, a useful moral.

Not, however, with boys only were Richardson's special talents in request.

I was an early favourite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood. Half a dozen of them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them, their mothers sometimes with them; and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making.

I was not more than thirteen when three of these young women, unknown to each other, having a high opinion of my taciturnity, revealed to me their love secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after or correct for answers to their lovers' letters; nor did any one of them ever know that I was the secretary to the others.

I have been directed to chide and even repulse, when an offence was either taken or given, at the very time when the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection; and the fair repulser, dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word or that expression, to be softened or changed.

One, highly gratified with her lover's fervour and vows of everlasting love, has said, when I have asked her directions, 'I cannot tell you what to write, but' (her heart on her lips) 'you cannot write too kindly.'

So early did the young Samuel begin to acquire that intimate knowledge of the female heart in which he is unrivalled.

In 1706 Richardson came to London to be apprenticed as a printer, and so well did he prosper that in 1754 he was chosen Master of the Stationers' Company, and he had his villa at Hammersmith as well as his printing establishment in Fleet Street. He was kind to struggling men of letters, and Johnson and Goldsmith were among those whom he befriended. Vanity was the good man's chief failing, and Johnson, who loved him, has to admit that his love of continual superiority was such, that he took care always to be surrounded by

women, who listened to him implicitly and did not venture to contradict his opinions.

His first great romance, ‘Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,' was published in 1740, when the author was fifty years old, and it took the town by storm. Four editions were published in as many months, Sherlock praised it from the pulpit, Pope declared it would 'do more good than many volumes of sermons,' and we are told that even at Ranelagh the ladies would hold up the volumes of "Pamela" to one another to show that they had got the book that everyone was talking of.

The story of Pamela is a very simple one, of an innocent girl left by the death of her mistress unprotected, and winning by her virtue and constancy the heart of her young master and becoming his wife. The work consists entirely of letters, and the author has full scope for his minute painting of every incident and character. Pamela herself is sketched with the greatest fulness and perfection, but the minor characters also are well drawn.

Eight years later Richardson published his masterpiece, 'Clarissa Harlowe,' the pathetic story of a beautiful and accomplished young lady who falls a victim to the plots of Lovelace, who is as witty as he is wicked. The work contains a wonderful gallery of portraits, the innocent, light-hearted Clarissa herself, her stern father and uncles, her tender but timid mother, her spiteful sister and ill-natured brother, her impetuous friend Miss Howe, the dissolute Lovelace with his circle of reckless companions, and Colonel Morden, the noble avenger of Clarissa, besides a number of minor characters.

As the successive volumes of Clarissa appeared, the

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