O fool to think God hates the worthy mind,
The lover and the love of human kind,

Whose life is healthful, and whose conscience clear,
Because he lacks a thousand pound a year."

Thus "whatever is, is right," in that all things work together for good, because they are designed to nourish the higher life of the soul, and must not therefore be judged from their accordance with lower desires, and happiness is to be found in the life of love :

"See the sole bliss Heaven could on all bestow,

Which who but feels, can taste; but thinks, can know.
Yet poor with fortune, and with learning blind,
The bad must miss; the good untaught will find.
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks thro' Nature up to Nature's God;
Pursues that chain, which links the immense design,
Joins heaven and earth and mortal and divine;
Sees that no being any bliss can know,

But touches some above, and some below;
Learns from this union of the rising whole,
The first, last, purpose of the human soul,
And knows where faith, law, morals, all began,
All end, in love of God, and love of man.
For him alone hope leads from goal to goal,
And opens still, and opens on his soul;
Till lengthened on to faith, and unconfined,
It pours the bliss that fills up all the mind.
He sees why Nature plants in man alone
Hope of known bliss, and faith in bliss unknown.
Wise is her present, she connects in this
His greatest virtue with his greatest bliss ;
At once his own bright prospect to be blest,
And strongest motives to assist the rest ;
Self-love thus changed to social, to divine,

Gives thee to make thy neighbour's blessing thine.
Is this too little for the boundless heart?

Extend it, let thy enemies have part :
Grasp the whole worlds of reason, life, and sense,
In one close system of benevolence;

Happier as kinder, in whate'er degree,

And height of bliss but height of Charity."

The objections which Pope met rested on lower grounds than those which disturbed men's minds in Milton's days, and Pope does not rise like Milton to "the height of the great argument." Milton showed the victory of God's love over moral evil; Pope showed the victory of human love over physical evil; but both in their way strove to—

"Assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men."

The later years of Pope's life were much disturbed by the attacks of the critics and small poets whom he had offended, and to these he replied by bitter, and sometimes unjust, satires. This war of words and angry feelings seems to us now a miserable abuse of literary skill and art; but in those days, when every man wore a sword, and thought it his duty to fight and slash his friend if he offended him, it appears to have been considered also a point of so-called honour for every writer to return reviling for reviling.

The "long disease" of Pope's life made it at last impossible for him to continue to write any longer. He died on the 30th of May, 1744.

CHAPTER XIX.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774).

WE have seen how the energy of the life pent up in the minds and hearts of men was beginning to rise against the outside bondage which kept it down. The intellectual life of the mind could no longer be suppressed under political or social laws, nor the feelings of the heart be frozen by the coldness of selfish, worldly customs and aims. When anything has been forced out of its own true direction, we know how it will spring too far on the opposite side directly the restraint is broken through; and so it was now with the new life of thought and feeling. Having burst through the false bondage, the true rule of faith and duty were for a while cast off also; and the fresh, strong vigour showed itself at first rather in the distortion of reaction than in the completeness of growth.

In England thought had always been more or less free, but in France it had been long crushed under the most despotic Government, joined with the tyranny of a corrupt Church which misrepresented the religion of Christ. was here, the fore, that the reaction was the most powerful. The writer who gave clearest and strongest expression to the new life of thought bursting through the dead forms was Voltaire. In France, too, the reaction against the selfishness and luxury of the age was also felt the most strongly, because it was here that self-indulgence and regardlessness of human suffering prevailed the most; and the

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writer who gave the most powerful expression to the rising life of the feelings was Rousseau. Both writers expressed the necessary exaggerations of reaction; and while Voltaire. claimed freedom for the intellect, independent of faith, Rousseau claimed free action for every impulse of feeling, independent of duty.

In Germany, meantime, there was a revolt going on against the French influence in literature. Bödmer first, and later Lessing, showed that there could be no vigorous growth of literature among any people which did not spring from the literature of its own life; and they asserted that Shakespeare in the drama, and Milton in poetry, were more true followers of the classics than the French, because, while the French imitated classic forms, these English writers had worked according to classic principles; for the Greeks made the inner truth the essential part of literature, and the forms grew around it, according to the genius of their nation and language. The casting-off in Germany of the French influence was the beginning of a true, vigorous, national literature, of which Goethe and Schiller were two of the greatest writers.

We must now see the influence of these writers on our English literature. Although Voltaire had no special follower of any great distinction in English literature, his influence in casting off false restraints upon thought led to a more courageous search for truth, and gave freedom and energy to the expression of it even if it were contrary to the prejudices and self-interest of the world. Rousseau's influence was more directly seen in some of the English writers of the time, who followed him in looking upon everything from the side of feeling. Of these writers, one of the principal was Laurence Sterne. He wrote a novel called "Tristram Shandy," and an account of his travels in France, which he called "The Sentimental Journey." Sterne reflected Rousseau's exaggerated expression of feeling, and,

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like him, lost sight of duty as the true guide of life. the new life of feeling did not become in England a mere expression of false sentiment. A hearty, honest sympathy with the sorrows and sufferings of human life broke up the dull, selfish indifference which had so much separated man from man and class from class; and the true English sense of duty led to efforts being made to find out the causes of misery, and to make these known, with the view of getting them remedied. The writer who best represents this rise of kindly sympathy and genuine love of his fellow-men is Oliver Goldsmith. We may also take him as a type of the time in illustrating the rising reaction. against the French influence, and the return to simple truthfulness, to Nature, and to unartificial life.

Oliver Goldsmith was the son of an Irish clergyman, whose income when Oliver, his fifth child, was born, was little more than "forty pounds a year." At the time of Oliver's birth, in 1728, his father held the small living of Pallas, or Pallasmore, a very out-of-the-way Irish village; but two years afterwards he succeeded to the living of Kilkenny West, with an increased income of nearly two hundred a year. In this Irish home little Oliver grew up in the midst of six or seven brothers and sisters. Here he began that fight with poverty, which was a life-long struggle; here he gained that perfect simplicity of character, which in all his after intercourse with the world he never lost; and here he learned that kindly sympathy and love for others, and that self-forgetful generosity, which nothing could ever chill. Of his father he afterwards wrote:-"He loved all the world, and he fancied all the world loved him. We were told that universal benevolence was what first cemented society; we were taught to consider all the wants of mankind as our own, to regard the human face divine with affection and esteem; he rendered us incapable of withstanding the slightest impulse made by distress; in a word, we were