1695. Congreve's Love for Love.

1697. Congreve's Mourning Bride; Dryden's Alexander's Feast. 1698. Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage; Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife.

1700. Congreve's Way of the World.

1704. Addison's Campaign; Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion (First Part), 33 years after his death; Swift's

Battle of the Books, and Tale of a Tub; Dennis's Grounds of
Criticism in Poetry.

1705. John Philips's Splendid Shilling.

1706. Farquhar's Recruiting Officer.

1707. Farquhar's Beaux' Stratagem; Prior's Poems.

1709. Berkeley's New Theory of Vision; Pope's Pastorals; 'The Tatler,' 1st No. on 12th April.

1710. Parnell's Hermit.

1711. Pope's Essay on Criticism; 'The Spectator,' 1st No. on 1st March; Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, &c.

1712. Pope's Rape of the Lock; Arbuthnot's History of John Bull. 1713. Addison's Cato; Pope's Windsor Forest; Rowe's Jane Shore. 1715. Pope's Translations of the Iliad (vol. i.).

1717. Cibber's Non-Juror; Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, and Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady.

1719. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (Part i.); Tickell's Elegy on Addison; Isaac Watt's Hymns; Young's Revenge.

1723. Pope's Odyssey (completed in 1725 Broome and Fenton

assisting).

1724. Burnet's History of My Own Times (vol. i.), 9 years after his death; Swift's Drapier's Letters.

1725. Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd.

1726. Butler's Sermons; Dyer's Grongar Hill; Thomson's Winter ; Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

1728. Pope's Dunciad (First Version); Gay's Beggars' Opera.

1730. Thomson's Seasons.

1732. Pope's Essay on Man, and Moral Essays (begun).

1733. Pope's Imitations of Horace (begun).

1735. Pope's Prologue to the Satires; Somerville's Chace.

1737. Glover's Leonidas; Green's Spleen; Shenstone's Schoolmistress. 1740. Richardson's Pamela.

1742. Young's Night Thoughts (First Part); Fielding's Joseph Andrews.

1743. Blair's Grave.

1744. Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination.

1746. Collins's Odes.

1748. Hume's Inquiry concerning Human Understanding; Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe; Smollett's Roderick Random; Thomson's Castle of Indolence.

1749. Fielding's Tom Jones.

1751. Fielding's Amelia; Gray's Elegy; Smollett's Peregrine Pickle. 1753. Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison.

1754. Hume's History of England (vol. i.).

1755. Johnson's Dictionary.

1756. Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful; Home's Tragedy

of Douglas.

1757. Gray's Odes (The Bard, &c.); Dyer's Fleece.

1759. Johnson's Rasselas; Robertson's History of Scotland; Sterne's Tristram Shandy (First Part).

1760. Goldsmith's Citizens of the World (begun, in 'The Ledger'). 1762. Macpherson's Ossian.

1763. Lady Mary Montagu's Letters.

1764. Churchill's Candidate; Walpole's Castle of Otranto.

1766. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield.

1768. Goldsmith's Good-natured Man; Sterne's Sentimental Journey. 1769. The Letters of "Junius" (begun on 21st Jan. in 'The Public Advertiser').

1770. Goldsmith's Deserted Village.

1771. Beattie's Minstrel (First Book); Mackenzie's Man of Feeling; Smollett's Humphrey Clinker.

1773. Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer.

1774. Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (completed in

1778).

1775. Sheridan's The Rivals.

1776. Gibbon's Decline and Fall; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

1777. Sheridan's School for Scandal.

1778. Fanny Burney's Evelina.

1779. Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Cowper and Newton's Olney Hymns.

1781. Crabbe's Library.

1782. Cowper's Table Talk, &c.

1783. Blair's Rhetoric; Crabbe's Village.

1784. Mitford's History of Greece (vol. i.).

1785. Cowper's Task.

1786. Burns's Poems.

1788. The Times' (1st No. on 1st Jan.). 1789. Blake's Songs of Innocence.

245

1789-1894.

FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE

PRESENT TIME.

THE range is over more than a century, and extends from the middle of the reign of George III. to the fifty-eighth year of the reign of Victoria. The succession of sovereigns in the period is as follows: George III., George IV., William IV., and Victoria. The chief events in British history, affecting more or less directly the literary growth of the period, are here presented as they occurred in the successive reigns :

Reign of George III., [1760-] 1789-1820.-Trial of Warren Hastings, lasting seven years, from 1788. War with France, more or less continuously from 1793 to 1815: Naval victories-battle of "The First of June," Cape St Vincent, Camperdown, The Nile, The Baltic, Trafalgar (with death of Nelson); Land victories—(in India) over Tippoo Sahib and his French auxiliaries; (in Ireland) over the "United Irishmen " and their French auxiliaries; (in the Peninsula, at Corunna, Talavera, Albuera, Salamanca, &c.) over the French; and final overthrow of Napoleon at Waterloo by Wellington. Union of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1800. Riots in England after the peace-the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.

Note.-At the time of the French Revolution England was prosperous, and by the use of inventions of machinery had become a great manufacturing country. During the war, in spite of heavy taxation to maintain it, trade and commerce flourished; after the war came commercial panics, and misery to the poor: corn was dear, work scarce, and there was great political discontent in the country.

Reign of George IV., 1820-1830.-The Cato Street Conspiracy. The Bill of Pains and Penalties; death of Queen Caroline. Commercial

speculations and panic (involving the ruin of Sir Walter Scott). British fleet sent to the aid of Greece-battle of Navarino (1825). Catholic Relief Bill, passed in 1829.

Note. In this reign the Criminal Laws were amended, and the first steps to Free Trade were taken.

Reign of William IV., 1830-1837.-Reform Act, 1832. Abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies, 1834. Other Reforms-relative to the relief of the poor, the employment of children, &c. Note. In this reign money grants in aid of elementary education were first given; and the first railway (between Liverpool and Manchester) was opened.

The

Reign of Victoria, 1837-1894-.-Rebellion in Lower Canada. Chartist Movement. Famine in Ireland; Free Trade in corn, 1849. The Great Exhibition of 1851. Death of Wellington, 1852. The Crimean War, 1854-56-battles of the Alma, Balaclava, and Inkermann, siege of Sebastopol. Mutiny in India, in 1857. "Cotton" Famine in Lancashire-an effect of the American Civil War of 1861-65. Fenian outrages; disestablishment of the Irish Church, 1869. Renewal of the Eastern Question; the Berlin Congress, 1878. War with Zulus; followed by war with Boers in South Africa. Bombardment of Alexandria, and battle of Tel-el-Kebir, 1882; death of Gordon, at Khartoum, 1885. The Home Rule Question of 1886; split of the Liberal party. The Queen's Jubilee. Free elementary education.

INTRODUCTION.

In the history of English literature the nineteenth century takes high rank,—indeed, all but the highest. It comes next in the value and importance of its literary productions to the century which lies between the youth of Shakespeare and the ripe age of Milton. "The literature of England," wrote Shelley, himself a prime factor in the age he described, "has arisen, as it were, from a new birth. . . . We live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty." The age is memorable, not only for the quality, but also for the quantity and

variety, of its literary work. There has been great activity in all departments of prose and verse composition, the drama for various reasons being the only exception. This activity has more especially manifested itself in poetry, fiction, history (including biography), and criticism. And a new and vigorous department has been created for science and scientific travel. The amount of literary matter produced is beyond. belief. Thousands of books are issued every year, and there has been enormous increase in the number of periodicals. The reading public now means the whole nation. Much of our best literature finds its way into the quarterly and monthly magazines, and the weekly, and even the daily, newspaper devotes a large part of its space to literary essays and criticism. Even our best authors are more or less connected with the periodical press. It is no exaggeration to say that literature and journalism have joined hands,—a union which dates from the establishment of The Edinburgh Review in 1802. They were only occasional companions before that.

The century, and especially the earlier part of it, is strong in poetry. Among its great poetical names are those of Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs Browning, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and Swinburne; to which might be added Hogg, as representing purely Scottish poetry, Moore, as representing the poetical genius of Ireland, and such notable American poet-names as Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, and Whitman. Fiction, which of all literary forms is now most largely cultivated, and which has special and peculiar attractions for female writers, is well represented by such names as Scott, Disraeli, Lytton, Thackeray, Dickens, Reade, Charlotte Brontë, "George Eliot," Meredith, Hardy, and Stevenson; to which might be added, as representative of America, Cooper, Hawthorne, Mrs Stowe, Howells, and Crawford.

In the