human brotherhood, and are expressed in the _Twa
Dogs_, the _First Epistle to Davie_, and _A Man's a Man for a' that_.
His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of
ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French
Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his
superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect,
but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century,
and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his
constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.

1. T. S. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century.

2. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.

3. The Poems of Thomas Gray.

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4. William Collins. Odes.

5. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Edited by
Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.

6. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878.

7. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe.

8. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.

9. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker.

10. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy.

11. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village.

12. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin.

13. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.

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CHAPTER VII.

FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.

1789-1832.

The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but
one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar
flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elisabeth and the
first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets,
like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no _Hamlet_ and no _Paradise
Lost_; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher
average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work
than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley,
and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De
Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller
mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation,
selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter,
accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not
only the most important, but the most representative of the various
tendencies of their time.

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The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost und