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EXERCISES ON CHAPTER XVII.

Ex. 1. Prepare the passage from Defoe, with the following notes :1. Bow-now a part of London, west of Stratford-le-Bow. 2. Interest= something to do with. 3. Would have been-the old subjunctive, now used only in poetry. The subjunctive mood is now almost entirely out of use; if only survives in such phrases as I had as lief, I had rather (compare the German Ich hätte lieber, etc.). 4. Secure to make safe. A contraction of the Latin sine curâ, without care. Hence we have sinecure, secure, etc. 5. Going to sea. 6. Defoe adds to the verisimilitude of this story by his constant introduction of says he; they come in so often that we cannot at last help believing that all this happened. 7. Poplar is now a part of London, which in its enormous growth during the present century has swallowed a score of such villages. 8. Attacked. The original phrase is visited by God; and coroners' juries still give as a verdict in a case where the cause of death is unknown, "Died by the visitation of God." 9. Resigned. The modern use of this word is very curious. One of the older meanings is to put one's mark (signum) to a document when giving it back (re); and hence it came to mean to give up. 10. Repine to give one's self

(the reflective force resides in the re) pain or pine.

Ex. 2. Prepare the Academy of Projectors with the following notes:— 1. Warden, the genuine English form of the word. Guardian is an Old French form. Compare William, Guillaume; wise, guise; wile, guile; war, guerre; wicket, guichet; ward-robe, garde-robe, etc. 2. Colloquial for have been. 3. Cucumbers, from Latin cucumis. The b intrudes between the two liquids m and r, as in dissemble, number, nimble, etc. 4. Hermetically sealed, sealed so as to prevent any air from getting in. The old meaning is sealed with the mystic seal of Hermes Trismegistus (thrice great), an old Egyptian philosopher, who was regarded in the Middle Ages as the Father of Alchemy. 5. Calcine=reduce to a fine chalk or powder. Swift's object is to show that the Royal Society, which he is here believed to be satirizing, attempted the most downright impossibilities. 6. From malleus,

a hammer. Butler, in Hudibras, mentions Pythagoras as having first "made music malleable." What Pythagoras really did was to notice the different notes made by hammers of different sizes upon the anvil. 7. Prudent is a compressed form (through the French) of provident, foreseeing. 8. Learners, from apprendre, to learn. 9. Fraternity is a more technical word than brotherhood, and hence has in it a touch of contempt. 10. Leaving out verbs, which are the very life of speech. No sentence can even exist without a verb either expressed or thought. 11. Corrosion, again the greatest absurdity possible. The action of the lungs would prevent corrosion and everything like it, as "use destroys rust."

Ex. 3. Develop the meaning more fully, or illustrate the following passages from Swift's writings:

(a) When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad side.

(b) If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

(c) Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination. This I once said to my Lord Bolingbroke, and desired he would observe that the clerks in his office used a sort of ivory knife with a blunt edge to divide a sheet of paper, which never failed to cut it even, only requiring a steady hand; whereas, if they should make use of a sharp penknife, the sharpness would make it often go out of the crease and disfigure the paper.

(d) The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

(e) The reason why so few marriages are happy, is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

(f) The most accomplished way of using books at present is twofold: either, first, to serve them as some men do lords, learn their titles exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance; or, secondly, which is indeed the choicer, the profounder, and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes, by the tail.

Ex. 4. Write a short paper on the Table of Contemporaries from Milton to Dryden, thus:

1. Milton was eight years old when Shakspeare died.

2. Dryden was born in the year in which Drayton died.

3. Defoe was born in 1661; Fuller died in that year.

4. Pope and Gay were born in the year of the Revolution, and Bunyan died in the same year.

5. The poet Thomson was born in the year in which Dryden died (1700), etc., etc., etc.

Ex. 5. State the distances of time between the births and deaths of the following:

Steele was born 8 years before S. Butler died.

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1.

CHAPTER XVIII.

FROM POPE TO GOLDSMITH.

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HE first half of the eighteenth century is crowded with the names of literary men, all of whom have left a fame more or less stable. Speaking broadly, it may be said that Prose was more cultivated in this period than Verse; and that the most prominent literary men were all writers of prose. The spirit of the time was prosaic; and there was an absence of enthusiasm of great hopes and of great aspirations-which is unfavourable to the appearance of a great poet. The chief prose-writers in the first half of this century were the Essayists, ADDISON and STEELE ; the Philosophers, BISHOP BERKELEY and BISHOP BUTLER; the Novelists, FIELDING, RICHARDSON, and STERNE; while only second-rate names represent Poetry-such as PRIOR and GAY, YOUNG and THOMSON. Only the shortest notices can be given of these writers.

2. JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719) is a splendid example of the great rewards which the State in his time bestowed upon literary merit. He was educated at the Charterhouse, where his friend Richard Steele also was. He earned some distinction at Oxford by his skill in writing Latin verses; and, not long after leaving college, some verses in honour of the king obtained for him a pension of £300 a year, with travelling expenses to enable him to spend some time on the Continent. His chief piece of good fortune came to him, however, from a poem on the Battle of Blenheim. The Lord Treasurer Godolphin is said to have admired the celebrated simile of the angel*

*So when an angel by divine command
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
Such as of late o'er pale Britannia passed,
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast,
And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

The comparison is with the Duke of Marlborough.

so much, that he offered him the post of Commissioner of Appeals. He gradually rose to be one of the principal secretaries of state, married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, and lived for some time in Holland House, Kensington. Pope alludes to him as having

Married discord in a noble wife.

He died at the early age of forty-seven.

3. Addison is chiefly known by his Essays, which were first published in the Tatler and Spectator. His papers were in the Spectator marked with one of the letters in the name Clio; and, among these, his Essays on Milton are perhaps the best, as they were the first in the eighteenth century to call the attention of Englishmen to the forgotten merits of that poet. He is also known by some hymns, which are distinguised by their exquisite tranquillity and sweetness. Such are the ode which begins

The spacious firmament on high;

the hymn beginning

How are thy servants blest, O Lord;

and his exquisite version of the 23rd Psalm. Nothing can be finer than the gentleness and sweetness-somewhat ceremonious, as was the custom of the time-of these lines :

The Lord my pasture shall prepare
And feed me with a shepherd's care;
His presence shall my wants supply
And guide me with a watchful eye.
My noontide walks He shall attend,
And all my midnight hours defend.

But it is as a prose-writer that Addison takes his highest place in English literature. His tragedy of Cato is dull and pompous; his poem on Blenheim, most young versifiers of the present day could surpass; but there is a pleasant air of quiet humour in his prosewritings which has never been equalled in its own kind. Every one has read Dr. Johnson's statement: "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” And Lord Lytton goes even further: "His style has that nameless urbanity in which we recognise the perfection of manner; courteous, but not courtier-like; so dignified, yet so kindly; so easy, yet high

bred. It is the most perfect form of English." His most agreeable papers are those in which Sir Roger de Coverley* appears; and these have been collected in one volume by Mr. W. H. Wills. The chief characteristic of his style is ease-which now and then becomes looseness; and he is a master of quiet banter and "polite ridicule.” The following passage is a typical example of his manner of treating a subject:

Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful. A noble metaphor, when it is placed to an advantage,3 casts a kind of glory round it, and darts a lustre through a whole sentence. These different kinds of allusion are but so many different manners of similitude, and that they may please the imagination, the likeness ought to be very exact, or very agreeable, as we love to see a picture where the resemblance is just, or the posture and air graceful. But we often find eminent writers very faulty in this respect; great scholars are apt to fetch their comparisons and allusions from the sciences in which they are most conversant, so that a man may see the compass 5 of their learning in a treatise on the most indifferent subject. I have read a discourse upon love which none but a profound chymist could understand, and have heard many a sermon that should only have been preached before a congregation of Cartesians.7 On the contrary, your men of business usually have recourse to such instances as are too mean and familiar. They are for drawing the reader into a game of chess or tennis, or for leading them from shop to shop, in the cant of particular trades and employments. It is certain there may be found an infinite variety of very agreeable allusions in both these kinds; but, for the generality, the most entertaining ones lie in the works of nature, which are obvious to all capacities, and more delightful than what is to be found in arts and sciences.

4. RICHARD STEELE (1672-1729), or, as he was much oftener called during his lifetime, Dick Steele, was born in Dublin, but of English parents, and educated at the Charterhouse and Oxford. His friends refusing to buy him a commission in the army, he enlisted as a private in the Horse Guards; but he became a general favourite in the regiment, and his captain soon after obtained a cornetcy for him. His first work was a religious book called The Christian Hero; and this was written in the intervals of his carousings and gaieties. On

*The original conception of this character is due to Steele.

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