excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of
phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he
touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their
more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold
is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a
puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its
fictitious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of
a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer
passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity,
his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter,
his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's
fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would
startle the group in a modern drawing-room.

[Sidenote: The urbanity of Literature.]

But if deeper and grander themes were denied him the essayist had still
a world of his own. He felt little of the pressure of those spiritual
problems that had weighed on the temper of his fathers, but the removal
of the pressure left him a gay, light-hearted, good-humoured observer of
the social life about him, amused and glad to be amused by it all,
looking on with a leisurely and somewhat indolent interest, a quiet
enjoyment, a quiet scepticism, a shy reserved consciousness of their
beauty and poetry, at the lives of common men and common women. It is to
the essayist that we owe our sense of the infinite variety and
picturesqueness of the human world about us; it was he who for the first
time made every street and every house teem with living people for us,
who found a subtle interest in their bigotries and prejudice, their
inconsistencies, their eccentricities, their oddities, who gave to their
very dulness a charm. In a word it was he who first opened to men the
world of modern fiction. Nor does English literature owe less to him in
its form. Humour has always been an English quality, but with the
essayist humour for the first time severed itself from farce; it was no
longer forced, riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness,
adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate colouring of
playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with
passion; but it learned how to pass with more ease into pathos, into
love, into the reverence that touches us as we smile. And hand in hand
with this new deve