d biographers and
letter-writers of the eighteenth century. His enthusiasm weaves spells
about even the least of them. He does not merely remind us of the genius
of Pope and Swift, of Fielding and Johnson and Walpole. He also summons us
to Armory's _John Buncle_ and to the Reverend Richard Graves's _Spiritual
Quixote_ as to a feast. Of the latter novel he declares that "for a book
that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being
ponderous, _The Spiritual Quixote_ may, perhaps, be commended above all
its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Four
themselves." That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered
through _The Peace of the Augustans_. After reading the book, one can
scarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over Young's _Night
Thoughts_ and one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior than to
Shakespeare himself--Prior who, "with the eternal and almost unnecessary
exception of Shakespeare ... is about the first to bring out the true
English humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gently
at its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its own
laughter"--Prior, of whom it is further written that "no one, except
Thackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of
_Ecclesiastes_." It does not matter that in a later chapter of the book it
is _Rasselas_ which is put with _Ecclesiastes_, and, after _Rasselas_,
_The Vanity of Human Wishes_. One does not go to Mr. Saintsbury as an
inspector of literary weights and measures. His estimates of authors are
the impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his method is the method
of exaggeration rather than of precise statement. How deficient he is in
the sense of proportion may be judged from the fact that he devotes
slightly more space to Collins than to Pope, unless the pages in which he
assails "Grub Street" as a malicious invention of Pope's are to be counted
to the credit of the latter. But Mr. Saintsbury's book is not so much a
thorough and balanced survey of eighteenth-century literature as a
confession, an almost garrulous monologue on the delights of that
literature. How pleasant and unexpected it is to see a critic in his
seventies as incautious, as pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate!
It is seldom that we find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the same
breast with the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the present
book.

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