cally different doctrines. Pope's God is the God of the old ontologists. Wordsworth, on the contrary, habitually and systematically bases his pantheism upon immediate intuition. He is simply embodying the vague emotions of awe, reverence, and love generated in his mind by the contemplation of the phenomena of the universe. He feels profoundly the incapacity of the old metaphysics to satisfy his imagination. They may prove a God; but not the God who appeals to his sympathies. His emotions find a theological utterance; but the theology must be based on the testimony of facts, not of abstract reasoning. He hates science, because it regards facts without the imaginative and emotional colouring; because it seems to desire to reduce the universe to a set of unconnected fragments; and, in breaking it up for examination, to lose the principle of unity and continuity. His pantheism, therefore, if it could be logically formulated, would imply what we may call the deification of natural laws. It would be the expression of reverential awe in which man regards the universe when conceived as an organic whole. Pope, on the other hand, has logically to regard the visible universe as a troublesome and illusory intruder, to be dismissed from our minds when we try to rise to the highest contemplative altitude. Thus, though there are many curious coincidences of language, the tendency of the earlier writer is to separate the highest thoughts of man from actual experience; of the other, to see the facts transfigured by his imagination.

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135. Cowper occupies an intermediate position. satisfied by the dominant theology of his times, he had taken refuge in the more vigorous creed of the early Evangelicals. The starting-point of Cowper's feelings was a profound sense of the corruption of the existing order of society. He quotes and approves Brown's 'Estimate,' one of the earliest indications, as we have seen, of the new current of opinion. His early poems are satires, adhering in form to the precedent of Pope, though wanting in the brilliancy attained by Pope alone. They differ, however, in this respect-that Pope's interest is fixed upon the individual character; and that he does not seriously contemplate the necessity of any change in the structure of society. He attacks faults prevalent in his day; but apparently holds that they can be sufficiently put down

by satire or by the general good sense of mankind. Cowper, on the contrary, holds that the society is tainted by a deeply seated disease, and has a cure to set forth. So far he agrees with Rousseau; but the remedy is characteristically different. Rousseau says, in substance, Upset the world; Cowper says, Leave the world. Rousseau looks for regeneration by a return to nature and reason. Cowper expects a regeneration in the sense of those who opposed nature to supernatural grace. The difference is characteristic of the difference of the national modes of development. In France, as I have so often remarked, the issues were more distinct and thoroughgoing. To attack the political or the social order was to attack the Church and the orthodox faith. There could be no medium or compromise. In England, as the religious movement was to a great extent independent of the political, it was possible to be a reformer in one sense, whilst remaining a dogged conservative in the other sense. Cowper was nominally a Whig ; but his Whiggism sat very lightly upon him. It meant nothing less that revolutionary sentiment. He saw in the poor not the victims of an oppressive caste, but sufferers from their own vices. He admires liberty; but he explains that the true liberty is not liberty from slavery, but liberty from the tyranny of spiritual evil. He escapes, in short, from a corrupt and cruel world by becoming a religious recluse. Brought up as a good Protestant, he has no taste for asceticism; but his ideal existence is one of quiet contemplation and unobtrusive benevolence, outside the hurry and the jar of the great turmoil of life.

136. With Cowper, then, the appeal to nature has a narrow though a most sincere meaning. The sight of nature— that is, of the external world of animal or material existence -is as the drop of cold water to a soul in purgatory. He escapes to quiet fields and brooks from the torture of his own excited imagination, and from the agonies inflicted upon a morbidly sensitive character by the conflict with his coarser fellows. The pantheistic phrase which escapes him is merely an expression of the sentiment that the divine element, no longer to be found in the hearts of man, manifests itself in the flowers of the field and the harmless animal creation. The position is not strictly logical. To a strict theologian, the curse

which has passed upon human nature must appear to have been inflicted upon the surrounding world. Suffering exists wherever there is feeling; and that struggle for existence, from which Cowper had rescued his pet hares, was not entirely due to the interference of man. Cowper differs from Rousseau in that he regards the natural man as corrupt, and proves his case very forcibly by realistic pictures of the savage and the simple peasant. But he persists in regarding inanimate nature and its irrational dependents as still under the light of the Divine countenance. The dogma of corruption is so arbitrary in its essence as easily to admit of such modifications. Many Calvinists, Jonathan Edwards for example, have tacitly imposed the same limits upon the sphere of corruption. If, according to their logic, the only refuge from misery should be in deliverance from the bondage of the material world, they are willing so far to depart from logic as to preserve some visible symbols of the divine order. Cowper, therefore, might be sanctioned by the teaching of his creed, though he was undoubtedly influenced by the teaching of Rousseau and the school of Rousseau. Their love of nature at least was congenial to him. Scornfully rejecting their theories of the dignity of human beings, he shares their delight in an escape to the fields from the corrupt air of streets or drawing-rooms. Indeed, his delight is probably keener than theirs; for these remnants of Paradise, left in the midst of a corrupt world, are all the more refreshing when contrasted with the supernatural gloom which, in his imagination, lay all around. Cowper's diatribes against the growth of luxury have become obsolete; his religious meanings are interesting to those alone who share his creed; but his intense love of calm scenery fell in with a widely-spread sentiment of his age, and has scattered through his pages vignettes of enduring beauty. The pathetic power in which he was unrivalled, and which gives to two or three of his poems a charm quite unique in its kind, seems to belong to no age.

137. Of Burns-a poet who has left behind him an impression of power quite astonishing when compared with the fragmentary character of his works-it is needless to say much. Here, too, it is curious to observe how the spirit of the age manifests itself in a region at first sight quite beyond

the direct influence of the great intellectual currents. Burns is the spokesman of a social order which might not unfairly represent the interpretation of Rousseau's state of nature. The strong healthy race of the Scotch lowlands, unconsciously absorbing the influences of a free open-air life, and far apart from all sickly sentimentalism, had produced for ages a race of poets whose ballads reflect their vigorous character. In the age of Burns life had become peaceable, and not luxurious. The society in which he lived had acquired a certain degree of culture, but had not yet been broken up by the restless movements of modern development. Burns, therefore, was qualified to stand forth to the world ripening for revolution, and give in a few vigorous touches the presentment of the truly vigorous peasant life, not stained by idyllic sentimentalisms, and with strong manly blood coursing through every vein.

138. In one sense he was consciously a revolutionist. The vigour of the Scotch race had expressed itself in the national religion. The religion had become an effete sham. When Burns was writing his glorious lyrics, Blair was mouthing his sham rhetoric. In earlier times, the Scotch vigour was best represented by its spiritual guides. A hundred years before Burns might have been a Covenanter, and have met the shock of Claverhouse's troopers at Drumclog. But the old Covenanting spirit had become a thing of shreds and patches— an effete idol no longer capable of rallying true men to its side. And, therefore, Burns puts his whole heart into such tremendous satires as 'Holy Willie's Prayer.' The peasant expressed his hearty contempt for the hypocritical leaders who tried to traffic upon his lingering superstitions to gratify their own lust or avarice. Such poems were a blast of doom to the old order. It would no longer satisfy the manliest instincts of its subjects, for its creeds could no longer inspire worthy thoughts in their spiritual guides. Burns had no

more direct consciousness than his brethren of the force of the philosophical argument against the orthodox creed; but the foundations of the creed had been so far sapped by argument, and by its own incapacity to develope, that it could no longer restrain the vigorous passions of the noblest of the

race.

139. I have thus imperfectly and briefly sketched the chief leaders of the reaction. It remains only to make one remark. The various writers whom I have mentioned co-operated in a common movement; but, for the most part, their co-operation was quite unconscious. Neither Sterne, nor Richardson, nor Walpole, nor Macpherson, nor Cowper, had the smallest intention of fostering revolutionary tendencies. The religious movement of Wesley was so removed from any political influence that Wesley himself, and many of his followers, were | strongly conservative; and, indeed, the movement itself was, perhaps, a diversion in favour of the established order. It provided a different channel for dangerous elements. The English movement thus differs from the French, where the revolutionary and the conservative elements were gathered into two different camps, and every attack upon one part of the order reacted upon all others. It differs, again, from the German, where a new philosophical impulse impressed a certain general direction upon the various movements of liberation, and made men more conscious of the general solidarity. The cause is, perhaps, due to the difference of national character, or to the social and political differences which threw the German movement into the hands of the speculative classes, instead of stimulating a direct political action. However this may be, the process as exhibited in England illustrates one, and perhaps the normal, variety of speculative development. The philosophers did not lead, but followed. Their aggressive influence had, indeed, been considerable; but it acted indirectly. It is less accurate to say that the old creed was destroyed by an undergrowth of new ideas, than that the decay of the old creed left a variety of instincts unsatisfied, and, therefore, made room for the development of a number of new and, apparently, unconnected movements, which had only this in common, that they were all attempts to supply wants produced by a common cause. Perhaps, as a new philosophy arises, these blind impulses, whether superficially reactionary or progressive, may be co-ordinated and directed to a common end. But at the conclusion of the century we see rather an intellectual chaos, in which no definite movement has attained supremacy. The sentimentalism of Rousseau or Sterne was represented by the feeble imitations of

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