She looked down to blush, and she looked up to sigh, He took her soft hand, ere her mother could bar,- So stately his form, so lovely her face, That never a hall such a galliard did grace; While her mother did fret, and her father did fume, And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume; One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear, When they reached the hall-door, and the charger stood near; So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung, So light to the saddle before her he sprung; "She is won! we are gone! over bank, bush, and scaur; They'll have fleet steeds that follow," quoth young Lochinvar. There was mounting 'mong Græmes of the Netherby clan ; So daring in love, and so dauntless in war, FROM "THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL." Hushed is the harp-the Minstrel gone, To linger out his pilgrimage? No:-close beneath proud Newark's tower, Arose the Minstrel's lowly bower; A simple hut; but there was seen The little garden edged with green, The cheerful hearth, and lattice clean. There, sheltered wanderers, by the blaze, Oft heard the tale of other days; And give the aid he begged before. So passed the winter's day! but still Then would he sing achievements high, And circumstance of chivalry, And noble youths, the strain to hear, These, then, were the influences at work during the fifteen years with which the century opened, and so completely was the old tradition overcome that poetry of the class of Johnson and Pope abruptly ceased, not, indeed, to be admired, but to be composed. A little group of pious writers, of whom Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823), and James Grahame (1765-1811) may be named, endeavoured to keep blank verse and the heroic couplet as they had received it from their Thomsonian forefathers. But although the Farmer's Boy (1798) and the Sabbath (1802) had many imitators and enjoyed a preposterous popularity, their influence was quite outside the main channels of literary activity. The critics stormed against the reforms introduced by Wordsworth, and ridiculed his splendid experiments. But after the preface of 1800 nobody who had any genuine poetic gift could go on writing in the eighteenth-century way, and, as a curious matter of fact, no one except the satirists did attempt to do so. But it is time to turn to the condition of prose, which, however, offers Edmund us at this juncture in our history fewer phenomena of importance. The Burke one great prose-writer of the close of the eighteenth century was EDMUND BURKE, and his peculiarities are to be studied to best effect in what he wrote between 1790 and his death in 1797. Burke is, therefore, strictly transitional, and it is not less rational to consider him as the forerunner of De Quincey than as the successor of Robertson and Gibbon. He is really alone in the almost extravagant splendour of his oratory, too highly coloured for the eighteenth century, too hard and resonant for the nineteenth. When Burke is at his best, as for instance in the Letter to a Noble Lord, it is difficult to admit that any one has ever excelled him in the melody of his sentences, the magnificence of his invective, the trumpet-blast of his sonorous declamation. It is said that Burke endeavoured to mould his style on that of Dryden. No resemblance between the richly-brocaded robes of the one and the plain russet of the other can be detected. It is not quite certain that the influence of Burke on succeeding prose has been altogether beneficial; he has seemed to encourage a kind of hollow vehemence, an affectation of the "grand style" which in less gifted rhetoricians has covered poverty of thought. We must take Burke as he is, without comparing him with others; he is the great exception, the man essentially an orator whose orations were yet literature. There is an absence of emotional imagination, however, in Burke which is truly typical of the rhetor. In this, as in so much else, Burke is seen still to belong to the eighteenth century. He died just when the young folks in Western Somerset were working out their revolutionary formulas in verse; he missed even the chance of having these presented to his attention. We may be absolutely certain, however, that he would have rejected them with as much scorn and anger as he evinced for the political principles of the French Revolution. Whoever might have smiled on Goody Blake and Betty Foy, it would not have been the fierce and inflexible author of the letters On a Regicide Peace. It was, perhaps, a fortunate thing for literature that Burke should die at that juncture and at the meridian of his powers. His last Tracts sum up the prose of the century with a magnificent burst of sincere and transcendent ardour. He retains the qualities which had adorned the dying age, its capacity in the manipulation of abstract ideas, its desire for the attainment of intellectual truth, its elegant and persuasive sobriety, its Edmund Burke After the Portrait by George Romney limited but exquisitely bal- his self-command. He died with the prophetic shrieks of the Regicide Peace still echoing in men's ears; he died without a gleam of hope for England or for Europe, his intellect blazing at its highest incandescence in what he believed to be the deepening twilight of the nations. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was the son of a respectable solicitor of Dublin, where he is believed to have been born on the 12th of January 1729. His mother was a Nagle, and an earnest Catholic, but he himself and his two brothers were brought up as Protestants. Burke went to school at Ballitore from 1741 to 1743, when he became a student of Trinity College, Dublin. He stayed there five years, engaged in desultory and violent studies, without a system. He preferred, however, to become a lawyer, and in 1750 he went across to London, and entered the Middle Temple. He was never called to the Bar, and his neglect of his profession was so scandalous that in 1755 his father withdrew the small allowance on which he lived. Of the events which followed, Burke was never in after years willing to give a detailed account. He "broke all rules, neglected all decorums;" he was "sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of the country; sometimes in France, and shortly, please God, to be in America." In 1756, at all events, he married a wife and became an author; this being the date of publication of Vindication of Natural Society, and 1757 of the Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. The sources of his livelihood now appear very dim to us, but from 1759 onwards Burke was certainly paid £100 a year to edit The Annual Register. At this juncture, too, he found at last a patron in "Single-speech " Hamilton, who employed him as his private secretary in London and Dublin for six years. During this period Burke was lost to literature; "Hamilton took me," he says, "from every pursuit of my literary reputation or Warren Hastings of improvement of my fortune." The secretary called his master an infamous scoundrel, and found himself in the street. But a better patron was at hand, and in July 1765 Burke became private secretary to Lord Rockingham, and was returned to the House of Commons in December as M.P. for Wendover. A month later he made his maiden speech, and was complimented by Pitt. He gained, Johnson records, more reputation than any man at his first appearance had ever gained before. After his long obscuration, Burke, at thirty-seven, was successful at last. In 1769, returning to literature, he published his Observations on the Present State of the Nation. About the same time he bought the estate of Gregories, near Beaconsfield, in Bucks, and how the man, so lately penniless and still without fortune or office, continued to pay for or to live in such a place is the bewilderment of all biographers. Burke must have secured some source of wealth the nature of which we are unable even to conjecture. The Beaconsfield property had been the seat of the poet Waller; Burke-wherever he got the money-paid £22,000 for it. Mr. John Morley, who has inquired closely into the mystery of Burke's income, has put together a number of possibilities. He is obliged to add "when all these resources have been counted up, we cannot but see the gulf of a great yearly deficit." Unhappily the result is patent; Burke was never henceforth free from heavy debts and anxiety about money. It is said that when Rockingham died in 1782 he ordered that Burke's bonds should be destroyed, and that these alone amounted to £30,000. In the constitutional crisis which culminated in the loss of our American Colonies, Burke took a prominent part both with his voice and with his pen. A whole series of brilliant pamphlets opened in 1770 with the anonymous Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents; this was suspected of being written by Juniu-, who had glared across the night of time in 1769. During Lord North's administration (1770-1782) it has been well said that "Burke's was as the voice of one crying in the wilderness." He kept the Rockingham connection together, he was appointed agent to the Province of New York (1771), he was urged, After a Portrait by Ozias Humphrey but in vain, to go out to India to examine into the affairs of the East India Company. In 1773 he took his only son over to Auxerre, in Burgundy, to be educated; he lingered for some time in Paris on his way back, welcomed in society, but with eyes critically open to the momentous signs of the times. After the dissolution of Parliament in 1774, Burke reappeared as M.P. for Malton, a Yorkshire borough, which he returned to represent for the last years of his life, but which he now immediately abandoned in favour of Bristol, where he sat from 1774 to 1780. It is interesting that the only years which Burke spent in Parliament as the member for a genuinely independent borough were those of the gigantic struggle with the American Colonies. On this subject he published three admirable pamphlets, On American Taxation (1774), On Conciliation with America (1775), and A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777). He now turned his thoughts to the amendment of the popular system of economics, and in particular to bringing to an end the shocking corruption of the House of Commons by Ministers and by the Court. In this project and especially in his daring onslaught Beaconsfield Church, where Burke is Buried upon the monstrous waste of the royal household, Burke rose to his height. But he was reminded of the dangers of reform by losing his seat at Bristol, and it was now that he exclaimed "What shadows we are! What shadows we pursue!" In 1782, even when Rockingham came in again, though Burke made part of the ministry, as Pay-master to the Forces, he had no place in the Cabinet, although the party owed their very existence to his loyalty and zeal. After many vicissitudes, which it would be out of place to chronicle here, Burke lost office with the ministers of the Coalition in December 1783 at the final collapse of the Whigs. Once out of place, Burke had time to concentrate his thoughts on a subject which had long attracted them, namely, the notorious abuses of government in India. The recall of Warren Hastings gave him at length his opportunity, and in June 1785 Burke asked a question in the House "respecting the conduct of a gentleman lately returned from India." This was the beginning of his ten years' campaign against that spirit of lawless Indian adventure of which Warren Hastings was the flower and symbol. In Mav 1787, in consequence of Burke's untiring efforts, Hastings was impeached; in February 1788 he was tried at Westminster; in 1795, in spite of all Burke's eloquence and ardour, he was acquitted. But though the man escaped, the shameful system was doomed; the conscience of the English people was at length awakened. Burke's health suffered from the strain, and after the first trial he went down to Beaconsfield for a needed rest. In 1789 his attention began to be closely drawn to the events of the French Revolution, and in the midst of the general gratulations which first attended that struggle for liberty, Burke gravely doubted and then strenously disapproved. He sat down to the composition of the most carefully executed of all his works, the Reflections |