ined by literary
antecedents.

That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
typical, prose of Dryden. In Dryden, and his followers through the
eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
cognizable rather as bad taste. But such reaction was effective only
because an age had come--the age of a negative, or agnostic
philosophy--in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of
an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods
and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners
themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be
seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's Selections from Steele
(Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful "Life." The well-known
qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original work are a sufficient
guarantee of the taste and discrimination we may look for in a
collection like this, in which the random lightnings of the first of
the essayists are grouped under certain heads--"Character Sketches,"
"Tales and Incidents," "Manners and Fashions," and the like--so as to
diminish, for the general reader, the scattered effect of short essays
on a hundred various subjects, and give a connected, book-like
character to the specimens.

Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's literature
had his subjectivities--into books. What a survival of one long-past
day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to London"! What truth
to the surface of common things, to their direct claim on our interest!
yet with what originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he
writes, for instance:

"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the charge,
hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a link."

[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
common in some City churches. Among those who were come