ed,--a movement which Young's satires had ridiculed in the person
of a lady of fashion who gladly entertained the notion that the Deity
was too well-bred to call a lady to account for her offenses. Jenyns
versified this effeminization of Christianity, charged orthodoxy with
attributing cruelty to God, and asserted that faith in divine and human
kindness would banish all wrong and discord from the world. In 1735 a far
more important poet of sentimentalism arose in Henry Brooke, an
undeservedly neglected pioneer, who, likewise drawing his inspiration
from Shaftesbury, developed its theories with unusual consistency and
fullness. His _Universal Beauty_ voiced his sense of the divine immanence
in every part of the cosmos, and emphasized the doctrine that animals,
because they unhesitatingly follow the promptings of Nature, are more
lovely, happy, and moral than Man, who should learn from them the
individual and social virtues, abandon artificial civilization, and
follow instinct. Brooke, in the prologue of his _Gustavus Vasa_, shows
that he foresaw the political bearings of this theory; it is, in his
opinion, peculiarly a people "guiltless of courts, untainted, and unread"
that, illumined by Nature, understands and upholds freedom: but this was
a thought too advanced to be general at this time even among Brooke's
fellow-sentimentalists.

Though sentimental literature bore the seeds of revolution, its earliest
effect upon its devotees was to create, through flattery of human
character, a feeling of good-natured complacency. Against this optimism
the traditional school reacted in two ways,--derisive and hortatory.
Pope, Young, and Swift satirized with masterful skill the inherent
weaknesses and follies of mankind, the vigor of their strokes drawing
from the sentimentalist Whitehead the feeble but significant protest,
_On Ridicule_, deprecating satire as discouraging to benevolence. On the
other hand, Wesley's hymns fervently summoned to repentance and piety;
while Young's _Night Thoughts_, yielding to the new influence only in its
form (blank verse), reasserted the hollowness of earthly existence,
the justice of God's stern will, and the need of faith in heavenly
immortality as the only adequate satisfaction of the spiritual elements
in Man. The literary powers of Pope, Swift, and Young were far superior
to those of the opposed school, which might have been overborne had not a
second generation of sentimentalists arisen to voi