period. Classicism was used as an antidote, while Ambrose Phillips was delighting "society" with pieces like that "On the Little Lady Charlotte Pulteney drest to go to a Ball."[1] False love, false heroics, false pastoral pictures, false life, false thought, all more or less consequent on the foul corruptions from Italy and France, had shaken the whole fabric of English literature when Jonathan Swift composed his mock-erotic verses "On a beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed," and Pope & Co. their "Martinus Scriblerus on the Art of Sinking in Poetry;" but neither Pope nor Swift was strong enough to inaugurate a new and nobler art. English poetry was virtually dead.
A tranquil gleam of honest English light came with Cowper, whose patient and gentle services have scarcely yet been rated at their true worth. But the true seeds of a new life had been scattered abroad when Bishop Percy published his "Reliques." These seeds were slow to spring, the slower because they sank so deep. At last, however, Wordsworth came, and English literature was saved. Then, with one loud trumpet-note, Byron amazed matrons and disarmed critics. Then, with a shining face, Coleridge uttered stately syllables of mightiest thought. Then, too, Southey gave his help, now unjustly forgotten. Then Lamb and Hazlitt began to criticize, directing men's eyes back to the true fount of English thought and diction—the tales of Chaucer and the Elizabethan drama. Then Scott arose, simple and deep as the sea—freighted with golden argosies of history and lighted with the innumerable laughter of the waves.
- ↑ These verses are worth studying, as showing how the only effect produced on the "poet of the period" by the sight of a little female child was the regret that the infant was not yet old enough "to be made love to."
