And to this power he gave for nearly a century its form and direction. In its outer shape as in its inner spirit our literature obeyed the impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century till near its close. His influence told especially on poetry. Dryden remained a poet; even in his most argumentative pieces his subject seizes him in a poetic way, and prosaic as much of his treatment may be, he is always ready to rise into sudden bursts of imagery and fancy. But he was a poet with a prosaic end; his aim was not simply to express beautiful things in the most beautiful way, but to invest rational things with such an amount of poetic expression as may make them at once rational and poetic, to use poetry as an exquisite form for argument, rhetoric, persuasion, to charm indeed, but primarily to convince. Poetry no longer held itself apart in the pure world of the imagination, no longer concerned itself simply with the beautiful in all things, or sought for its result in the sense of pleasure which an exquisite representation of what is beautiful in man or nature stirs in its reader. It narrowed its sphere, and attached itself to man. But from all that is deepest and noblest in man it was shut off by the reaction from Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that had sprung from religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labor, his politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides; with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the use of words and phrases, a clearer and more perspicuous style, a new sense of order, of just arrangement, of propriety, of good taste. But with it came a sense of uniformity, of monotony, of dulness. In Dryden indeed this was combated if not wholly beaten off by his amazing force; to the last there was an animal verve and swing about the man that conquered age. But around him and after him the dulness gathered fast.

Of hardly less moment than Dryden's work in poetry was his work in prose. In continuity and grandeur indeed, as in grace and music of phrase, the new prose of the Restoration fell far short of the prose of Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, but its clear nervous structure, its handiness and flexibility, its variety and ease, fitted it far better for the work of popularization on which literature was now to enter. It fitted it for the work of journalism, and every day journalism was playing a larger part in the political education of Englishmen. It fitted it to express the life of towns. With the general extension of prosperity and trade the town was coming into greater prominence as an element of national life; and London above all was drawing to it the wealth and culture which had till now been diffused through the people at large. It was natural that this tendency should be reflected in literature; from the age of the Restoration indeed literature had been more and more becoming an expression of the life of towns; and it was town-life which was now giving to it its character and form. As cities ceased to be regarded simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes for the richer and more cultured ; as men woke to the pleasure and freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy, its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist.

What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk. The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped and colored by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest and entertain, he may not bore them ; and so his form must be short; essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist has to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man are denied to him; if he touches them it is superficially with a decorous dulness, or on their more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its fictitious earnestness as the humorist views it from the standpoint of a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspeare's humor and sublimity, his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter, his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would startle the group in a modern drawing-room.

But if deeper and grander themes were denied him the essayist had still a world of his own. He felt little of the pressure of those spiritual problems that had weighed on the temper of his fathers, but the removal of the pressure left him a gay, light-hearted, good-humored observer of the social life about him, amused and glad to be amused by it all, looking on with a leisurely and somewhat indolent interest, a quiet enjoyment, a quiet scepticism, a shy reserved consciousness of their beauty and poetry, at the lives of common men and common women. It is to the essayist that we owe our sense of the infinite variety and picturesqueness of the human world about us; it was he who for the first time made every street and every house teem with living people for us, who found a subtle interest in their bigotries and prejudice, their inconsistencies, their eccentricities, their oddities, who gave to their very dulness a charm. In a word it was he who first opened to men the world of modern fiction. Nor does English literature owe less to him in its form. Humor has always been an English quality, but with the essayist humor for the first time severed itself from farce; it was no longer forced, riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness, adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate coloring of playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with passion; but it learned how to pass with more ease into pathos, into love, into the reverence that touches us as we smile. And hand in hand with this new development of humor went a moderation won from humor, whether in matters of religion, of politics, or society, a literary courtesy and reserve, a well-bred temperance and modesty of tone and phrase. It was in the hands of the town-bred essayist that our literature first became urbane.

It is strange to contrast this urbanity of literature with the savage ferocity which characterized political controversy in the England of the Revolution and the Georges. Never has the strife of warring parties been carried on with so utter an absence of truth or fairness; never has the language of political opponents stooped to such depths of coarseness and scurrility. From the age of Bolingbroke to the age of Burke the gravest statesmen were not ashamed to revile one another with invective only worthy of the fish-market. And outside the legislature the tone of attack was even more brutal. Grub-street ransacked the whole vocabulary of abuse to find epithets for Walpole. Gay amid general applause set the statesmen of his day on the public stage in the guise of highwaymen and pickpockets. "It is difficult to determine," said the witty playwright, "whether the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen." Much of this virulence sprang, no doubt, from a real contempt of the selfishness and corruption which disgraced the politics of the time, but it was far from being wholly due to this. In selfishness and corruption indeed the statesmen of the Georgian era were no worse than their predecessors; while in fidelity to principles and a desire for the public good they stood immeasurably above them. The standard of political action had risen with the Revolution. Cynic as was Walpole, jobber as was Newcastle, it would be absurd to compare their conception of public duty, their conduct of public affairs, with that of the Danbys and Sunderlands of the Restoration.