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lence lay especially in funeral orations.

Pascal.

Bossuet may be

said to have applied to religion the teaching which Lewis inculcated in politics. With him all opposition was wrong, whether it took the form of Protestantism and absolute revolt from the Church, or the minor form of holding different views within her pale. Such a revolt was shown in Pascal, who, after displaying a precocious and extraordinary genius for mathematics, at an early age turned his attention to theology, and just before Lewis took up the reins of government, published his 'Provincial Letters,' a book which attacked the teaching and views of the Jesuits. Pascal belonged to a sect called the Jansenists, because its members held certain views first promulgated by a Bishop Jansenius on the subject of predestination. There was a fierce controversy between them and the Jesuits. But the latter having the ear of the Papal Court were enabled to procure from the Pope a Bull against their opponents. It was called from its first word, the Bull Unigenitus, dated September 1713, in which the Jansenists were condemned, and the king insisted on the acceptance of the Bull throughout France.

One of the leading theologians was Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambray. On account of the saintliness of his character he had been appointed tutor to

Fénélon.

the young Duke of Burgundy. Télémaque' is a book which he wrote for the use of his pupil, and, under veil of describing antiquity, it contains a strong condemnation of the Government, as well as a sort of programme for reform, which his pupil would probably have carried out if he had reached the throne.

Influence of French on

As a result of the age of Lewis XIV. the French language acquired a great ascendency in Europe. It became the language of diplomacy and of polite society. Its influence upon English

English literature.

literature is well worth notice. Pope, the leading poet of the time, shows many traces of a study of French writers. Addison spent a long time in France, and one can see the same influence in his polished and easy style.

French

literature inspired by England.

afterwards

After the Peace of Utrecht, the current of influence seemed to pass the other way. Many Frenchmen visited England and conceived the greatest admiration for the spirit of English politics, English laws, and English society. It would be hardly too much to say that some of the seeds of the French Revolution were sown in their minds and the admiration first acquired, of which they afterwards gave such practical expression, of the way in which the English treated their kings in general, and Charles I. in particular.

When Lewis XIV. died, Voltaire was a young man just of age, and Jean Jacques Rousseau was in the nursery. Though the former never quite shook off his feeling of reverence for the king, one cannot help feeling that it was opposition to the spirit of the French Government and knowledge of its results that led both these thinkers and writers to fan the spirit of liberty. So that here, also, the Revolution was being prepared, though there were years and years of weary misgovernment before its outbreak.

Section II.-English Literature.

Augustan
Age of

English
Literature.

The reign of Queen Anne, likewise, is usually called the Augustan Age of English Literature. It was a time when England was as great in literature as in war. Writers of deeper tone and weightier calibre have lived at other times; but there is probably no period so short in which so many famous books have been given to the world, or in which forces have had their roots destined so powerfully to influence

the future. There are many who regard the name as wholly inappropriate, for the Latin literature was fostered by the judicious patronage of Augustus. However great may be the affection of posterity for 'good Queen Anne,' it cannot be included amongst her virtues that she cared for or helped literature. But Augustus was assisted in the exercise of his patronage by the taste and discrimination of his great minister Mæcenas. Was there, then, a Mæcenas in Queen Anne's reign? Was there any influential subject who made it his pride and his pleasure to help men of letters? The only subject who could be compared in extent of power to Mæcenas was Marlborough; and he did not care for poetry, and was nervously sensitive to the least attack on himself.

Patronage with many patrons.

But if there was no one great patron standing out above the rest, alike prominent and anxious to make the assistance of literature his glory, it would yet be fair to say that the time of Queen Anne was, like the Augustan age, a time of patronage, a time, not of one, but of many patrons. There probably never was a time in which successful literature was so well rewarded: probably never a time in which the alliance was so close between politicians and literary men. Intimacy even must have been great when a poet like Prior, and a statesman like Bolingbroke, would write to and of each other as Matt and Harry.

Pope was the representative poet of the age, and he Connection is proud to boast of his friendly intercourse of literary with Bolingbroke (who supplied him with the men with statesmen. subject-matter of one of his greatest poems), and of the assistance that Peterborough gave him in gardening—

There my retreat the best companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul;

And he, whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines,
Now forms my quincunx, and now ranks my vines,
Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain,

Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.

No 'statesman out of place' probably ever had nobler eulogy passed upon him than that with which Pope honoured Harley

A soul supreme in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,
The rage of power, the blast of public breath,
The lust of lucre, and the dread of death.

Pope.

Alexander Pope was born in 1688, the year of the Revolution. His father was a London linen-draper, who, on retiring from business, went to live near Windsor. The boy was deformed, and almost a dwarf: throughout his life he suffered a great deal from disease. An undercurrent of unhappiness, caused by his bodily ailments, and a nervous irritability, which is not uncommon with very short men, can be traced through all his life. Unable to engage in the sports of boyhood, he showed poetical talents at a very early age:

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

So great was his reverence for Dryden, the poet of his boyhood, that, in the last year of the seventeenth century, when he was twelve years old, at his own express desire, he was taken up to London, to Wills' coffee-house, in order to see him. Dryden died in that very year. His mantle and a double portion of his spirit fell upon Pope.

The following are his most famous works, given in the order in which they were composed: 'Essay on Criticism,' 'Rape of the Lock,' 'Messiah,' Translation of Homer's Iliad and part of the Odyssey, 'Dunciad,' 'Essay on Man,' 'Imitations of Horace,' and 'Epistles.'

Most of these were written after the reign of Anne, at the time of whose death he was engaged in translating the Iliad.

The Essay on Criticism' may be said to be an imitation of the Ars Poetica' of Horace, but there is this difference between the writers: Horace was Essay on Criticism.' an experienced and practised poet, Pope a young man of twenty-three. Though the former may claim the palm for originality in the treatment of such a subject, honour must also be given to the genius of the young man, which enabled him to utter thoughts worthy of the wisdom of age.

Lock.'

The Rape of the Lock' is a playful poem, mock heroic. It has been called the true epic of the time. A Rape of the young cavalier of the Court cut a lock of hair from off the head of a beautiful maid of honour. The place that the gods occupy in epic poems, Pope supplies in this airy pleasantry with sylphs and gnomes, and the whole subject is treated in so graceful a style that the poem may serve as a model for this species of composition.

On Pope's Homer,' his best-known but not his greatest work, his contemporary Bentley, the greatest

'Homer.'

classical critic of all time, has passed a criti

cism to which, even now, we can add nothing. 'A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but please don't call it Homer.' The sonorous dignity of the original and its natural freedom have vanished, and been replaced by the stiffness of an artificial style. But it is the work of a true poet, and, if it does not reproduce Homer, is yet well worth reading for its own sake.

It is said that Lord Bolingbroke supplied Pope with Essay on the material out of which he composed the Man.' four epistles that form the 'Essay on Man,' a treatise on the relation of man to the universe, to

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