tendency to look only at upper and middle-class
life, to be conventional in its very indecorum, to be ironic, indirect,
parabolical. It admired the Dutch painters, it had dabbled in the
occult, it was Voltairian enough; but it had never dared to outvie
Teniers and Steen as in _The Jolly Beggars_, to blend naturalism and
_diablerie_ with the overwhelming _verve_ of _Tam o' Shanter_, to change
the jejune freethinking of two generations into an outspoken and
particular attack on personal hypocrisy in religion as in _Holy Willie's
Prayer_ and _The Holy Fair_. Even to Scotsmen, we may suspect (or rather
we pretty well know, from the way in which Robertson and Blair, Hume and
Mackenzie, write), this burst of genial racy humour from the _terrae
filius_ of Kilmarnock must have been somewhat startling; and it speaks
volumes for the amiable author of the _Man of Feeling_ that, in the very
periodical where he was wont to air his mild Addisonian hobbies, he
should have warmly commended the Ayrshire ploughman.

In a period where we have so many great or almost great names to notice,
it cannot be necessary to give the weakest writers of its weakest part
more than that summary mention which is at once necessary and sufficient
to complete the picture of the literary movement of the time. And this
is more especially the case with reference to the minor verse of the end
of the eighteenth century. The earliest work of the really great men who
re-created English poetry, though in some cases chronologically _in_, is
not in the least _of_ it. For the rest, it would be almost enough to say
that William Hayley, the preface to whose _Triumphs of Temper_ is dated
January 1781, and therefore synchronised very closely with the literary
appearance of Cowper, Crabbe, and Blake, was one of the most
conspicuous, and remains one of the most characteristic of them.
Hayley's personal relations with the first and last of these
poets--relations which have kept and will keep his name in some measure
alive long after the natural death of his verse--were in both cases
conditioned by circumstances in a rather trying way, but were not
otherwise than creditable to him. His verse itself is impossible and
intolerable to any but the student of literary history, who knows that
all things are possible, and finds the realisation of all in its measure
interesting. The heights, or at least the average levels, of Hayley may
be fairly taken from the following quotation:--