ed by the
author of 'Rule Britannia,' is still very well satisfied with the
British Constitution and looks upon the Revolution of 1688 as the avatar
of the true goddess. 'Nature,' that is, has not yet come to condemn
civilisation in general as artificial and therefore corrupt. As in
practice, a lover of Nature did not profess to prefer the wilderness to
fields, and looked upon mountains rather as a background to the
nobleman's park than as a shelter for republics; so in politics it
reflected no revolutionary tendency but rather included the true British
system which has grown up under its protection. Nature has taken to
lecturing, but she only became frankly revolutionary with Rousseau and
misanthropic with Byron.

I must touch one more characteristic. Pope, I have said, represents the
aristocratic development of literature. Meanwhile the purely plebeian
society was growing, and the toe of the clown beginning to gall the kibe
of the courtier. Pope's 'war with the dunces' was the historical symptom
of this most important social development. The _Dunciad_, which,
whatever its occasional merits, one cannot read without spasms both of
disgust and moral disapproval, is the literary outcome. Pope's morbid
sensibility perverts his morals till he accepts the worst of
aristocratic prejudices and treats poverty as in itself criminal. It led
him, too, to attack some worthy people, and among others the 'earless'
Defoe. Defoe's position is most significant. A journalist of supreme
ability, he had an abnormally keen eye for the interesting. No one could
feel the pulse of his audience with greater quickness. He had already
learned by inference that nothing interests the ordinary reader so much
as a straightforward narrative of contemporary facts. He added the
remark that it did not in the least matter whether the facts had or had
not happened; and secondly, that it saved a great deal of trouble to
make your facts instead of finding them. The result was the inimitable
_Robinson Crusoe_, which was, in that sense, a simple application of
journalistic methods, not a conscious attempt to create a new variety of
novel. Alexander Selkirk had very little to tell about his remarkable
experience; and so Defoe, instead of confining himself like the ordinary
interviewer to facts, proceeded to tell a most circumstantial and
elaborate lie--for which we are all grateful. He was doing far more than
he meant. Defoe, as the most thorough type of the En