unworthy Sweet William visits Marjorie, and shows her at his grave that which makes her give back to him the plight of troth he suffers for having broken:

"And she took up her white, white hands,

And struck him on the breast,

Saying, 'Have here again thy faith and troth,
And I wish your soul good rest.""

In Mallet's ballad, Margaret, killed by William's faithlessness, comes to the living William and draws him to her grave, where "thrice he called on Margaret's name, And thrice he wept full sore; Then laid his cheek to her cold grave, And word spoke never more." Mallet said that the ballad was suggested to him by lines in Fletcher's “Knight of the Burning Pestle:"

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"When it was grown to dark midnight,

And all were fast asleep,

In came Margaret's grimly ghost

And stood at William's feet."

The reviving taste for simple writing is indicated by this piece, as by Shenstone's Jemmy Dawson." Vincent Bourne (b. about 1697, d. 1747), a sub-master of Westminster School, who was the best Latin poet of his time, turned "William and Margaret" into Latin, as "Thyrsis et Chloe." Vincent Bourne's Latin poems were collected in 1772. William Whitehead (b. 1715, d. 1785), son of a baker at Cambridge, was educated at Winchester School and Cambridge, became tutor to the son of Lord Jersey, wrote poems and plays, prospered by the good will of the Jersey family, and, in 1757, succeeded Cibber as poet-laureate. Paul Whitehead (b. 1710, d. 1774) was of another family, born in London, and apprenticed to a mercer before he entered the Temple. He married a rich wife, and also obtained a place worth eight hundred pounds a year. Among his verse was "The Gymnasiad," a mock heroic against the taste for boxing. Richard Glover (b. 1712, d. 1785), son and partner of a London merchant trading with Hamburg, published, at the age of twenty-five, in 1737, a serious epic poem on "Leonidas." It appealed to patriotic feeling, and was very popular. In 1739 he produced another poem, "London; or, the Progress of Commerce;" and the ballad of "Hosier's Ghost," to rouse national feeling against Spain. He produced, in 1753, a tragedy, "Boadicea," and afterwards "Medea" and "Jason." He entered Parliament at the beginning of the reign of George III. Christopher Pitt (b. 1699, d. 1748), educated at Winchester School and New College, Oxford, was Rector of Pimpern, in Dorsetshire. He wrote some original verse, published in 1725 a "Translation of Vida's Art of Poetry," and in 1740 a "Translation of the Eneid." Stephen Duck, who began life as a thresher, had a turn for verse, which was developed in his early manhood by the reading of Milton, who inspired him with a deep enthusiasm. His chief pieces, drawn from his work and his religion, were "The Thresher's Labour,"

and "The Shunamite." Spence's good offices obtained for Stephen Duck a pension of thirty pounds from Queen Caroline, and afterwards, when he had prepared himself for holy orders, the living of Byfleet, in Surrey. Like his friend Spence, Stephen Duck died by drowning. He fell into religious melancholy, and committed suicide from a bridge near Reading, in 1756.

26. Edward Young, also, was a Winchester boy, son of a chaplain to William III., and born in 1681 at Upham, near Winchester. He passed from Winchester School to New College, obtained a fellowship at All Souls, and published his first verse in Queen Anne's reign, in 1712, an "Epistle to the Right Honorable George Lord Lansdowne," and a poem on "The Last Day" in 1713. He produced, in the reign of George I., his tragedies of "Busiris, King of Egypt," and "The Revenge," both acted at Drury Lane, in 1719. In 1725-26 appeared his "Love of Fame, the Universal Passion," in seven satires. He took orders soon afterward, became chaplain to George II., and was presented by his college to the living of Welwyn, Herts. In 1730 he published "Two Epistles to Mr. Pope, concerning the Authors of the Age," satires in aid of Pope against the Dunces. Dr. Young-he had graduated as LL.D. ―married, in 1731, the daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, and widow of Colonel Lee. She died in 1741. While in grief for this, he began to write his "Night Thoughts." "The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts," in nine parts, first appeared in 1742-46. In 1755 Young published a prosebook, "The Centaur not Fabulous; in Six Letters to a Friend on the Life in Vogue," the Centaur being the profligate seeker of pleasure, in whom the brute runs away with the Young died in 1765. The leading subject of Young's "Night Thoughts" is the Immortality of the Soul; but, with aim to produce good lines that very often hit the mark, the treatment of the theme has a gloom not proper to it, although characteristic of much of the literature of his time. Robert Blair (b. 1700, d. 1746), the minister of Athelstaneford, in Haddingtonshire, published his poem of "The Grave" in

man.

1743.

27. William Collins (b. 1721, d. 1759), the son of a hatter at Chichester, was another Winchester boy. He passed from

Winchester to Oxford in 1740; published, in 1742, his "Persian Eclogues," afterwards republished under the title of "Oriental Eclogues;" and, having taken his degree of B.A., came to London with genius and ambition, but an irresolute mind, not wholly sound. He suffered much from poverty. In 1747 he published his "Odes," polished with nice care, and classical in the best sense, rising above the affectations of the time, and expressing subtleties of thought and feeling with simple precision. "The Ode to Evening" is unrhymed, in a measure like that of Horace's "Ode to Pyrrha." The Ode on The Passions," for music, rose in energy of thought and skill of expression to the level even of Dryden's "Alexander's Feast." But the volume was not well received. When Thomson died,

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in 1748, William Collins wrote an ode suggested by the event. In 1749 Collins was released from want by the death of his mother's brother, Colonel Martyn, who had often helped him, and now left him about two thousand pounds. But, in another year, his reason began to fail. He had been in a lunaticasylum at Chelsea before he was removed to Chichester in 1754. There his sister took charge of him, and he died, at the age of thirty-eight, in June, 1759. When the great cloud was coming over him, he carried but one book about with him

a child's school Bible. "I have but one book," he said, "but that is the best; " and when he suffered most, in his latter days at Chichester, a neighboring vicar said, "Walking in my vicaral garden one Sunday evening, during Collins's last illness, I heard a female (the servant, I suppose) reading the Bible in his chamber. Mr. Collins had been accustomed to rave much, and make great moanings; but while she was reading, or rather attempting to read, he was not only silent, but attentive likewise, correcting her mistakes, which, indeed, were very frequent, through the whole of the twenty-seventh chapter of Genesis."

28. Richard Savage, born in 1698, was a natural son of the Countess of Macclesfield. When he accidentally discovered who was his mother she repelled him. He wrote plays, and was befriended by Steele, lived an ill-regulated life, killed a man in a tavern brawl, was found guilty, and had his mother

active in opposing the endeavors made to obtain mercy for him. He was pardoned, and stayed from writing against his mother by a pension of two hundred pounds a year from Lord Tyrconnel, who also received Savage into his family. He published, in 1729, a moral poem called "The Wanderer." Lord Tyrconnel found Savage's wild way of life unendurable, and Savage, asked not to spend all his nights in taverns, resolved to "spurn that friend who should presume to dictate to him." They parted. Savage attacked his mother in a poem called "The Bastard inscribed with all due reverence to Mrs. Brett, once Countess of Macclesfield; " in another poem, "The Progress of a Divine," he described a profligate priest who rose by wickedness, and who found at last a patron in the Bishop of London. He received fifty pounds a year from the queen, and, when he received the money annually, disappeared till it was spent. After the queen's death his friends promised to find him fifty pounds a year, if he would live quietly in Wales. He went to Wales, but was coming back to London when he was arrested for debt, died in prison, July 31, 1743, and was buried at the expense of his jailer. Johnson, who knew and pitied him,-as poor as he, and knowing what the struggle was in which Savage had fallen, while he rose himself in dignity,said, "Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty." He told Savage's sad tale with the kindliness of a true nature, while he drew from it the lesson, "that nothing will supply the want of prudence; and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible."

CHAPTER XIII.

FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION.

1. Thomas Burnet. -2. William Whiston.-3. Richard Bentley.-4. George Berke ley.-5. David Hartley.-6. Bernard de Mandeville.-7. Henry St. John.— 8. Isaac Watts.-9. Joseph Butler.-10. John Wesley; Charles Wesley. — 11. William Warburton. 12. Francis Atterbury; Samuel Clarke; Benjamin

Hoadly.

1. Thomas Burnet was born about 1635, was educated at Cambridge, and became, in 1685, Master of the Charterhouse. Four years before, he had published his “Telluris Theoria Sacra," in which he discussed the natural history of our planet, in its origin, its changes, and its consummation, and the four books contain-(1) The Theory of the Deluge by Dissolution of the Outer Crust of the Earth, its Subsidence in the Great Abyss, and the Forming of the Earth as it now Exists; (2) Of the First Created Earth and Paradise; (3) Of the Conflagration of the World; and (4) Of the New Heavens and the New Earth, and the Consummation of all Things. This new attempt made by a doctor of divinity to blend large scientific generalization with study of Scripture, more imaginative than scientific, stirred many fancies, and was much read and discussed. But, under William III., Thomas Burnet's speculations in his "Archæologiæ Philosophicæ Libri Duo" drew on him strong theological censure; and he was called an infidel by many because he read the Fall of Adam as an allegory. This not only destroyed his chance of high promotion in the church, but caused him to be removed from the office of Clerk of the Closet to the king, and he died at a good old age, in 1715, still Master of the Charterhouse.

2. William Whiston, who was born in 1667, was chaplain to a bishop when, in 1696, he published “A New Theory of the Earth, from its Original to the Consummation of all Things." This fed the new appetite for cosmical theories with fresh speculation. In Burnet's system, fire, in Whiston's, water, played chief part as the great agent of change. In 1698 Whiston became Vicar of Lowestoft, and in 1700 he lectured at Cambridge, as deputy to Newton, whom he succeeded in the Lucasian professorship. In Queen Anne's reign his search for a primitive Christianity affected his theology, and brought on him loss of his means of life in the church and university. He taught science; lived,