s, but make use of the new motives and materials which
are beginning to interest readers, and which will in time call for
different methods of treatment.

I must briefly indicate one other point. The society of which Garrick
was a member, and which was both reading Shakespeare and seeing his
plays revived, might well seem fitted to maintain a drama. Goldsmith
complains of the decay of the stage, which he attributes partly to the
exclusion of new pieces by the old Shakespearian drama. On that point he
agrees as far as he dares with Voltaire. He ridiculed Home's _Douglas_,
one of the last tragedies which made even a temporary success, and which
certainly showed that the true impulse was extinct. But Goldsmith and
his younger contemporary Sheridan succeeded for a time in restoring
vigour to comedy. Their triumph over the sentimentalists Kelly and
Cumberland showed, as Johnson put it, that they could fill the aim of
the comedian, namely, making an audience merry. _She Stoops to Conquer_
and _The School for Scandal_ remain among genuine literary masterpieces.
They are revivals of the old Congreve method, and imply the growth of a
society more decent and free from the hard cynical brutality which
disgraced the earlier writers. I certainly cannot give a sufficient
reason why the society of Johnson and Reynolds, full of shrewd common
sense, enjoying humour, and with a literary social tradition, should not
have found other writers capable of holding up the comic mirror. I am
upon the verge of a discussion which seems to be endless, the causes of
the decay of the British stage. I must give it a wide berth, and only
note that, as a fact, Sheridan took to politics, and his mantle fell on
no worthy successor. The next craze (for which he was partly
responsible) was the German theatre of Kotzebue, which represented the
intrusion of new influences and the production of a great quantity of
rubbish. After Goldsmith the poetic impulse seems to have decayed
entirely. After the _Deserted Village_ (1770) no striking work appeared
till Crabbe published his first volume (1781), and was followed by his
senior Cowper in 1782. Both of them employed the metre of Pope, though
Cowper took to blank verse; and Crabbe, though he had read and admired
Spenser, was to the end of his career a thorough disciple of Pope.
Johnson read and revised his _Village_, which was thoroughly in harmony
with the old gentleman's poetic creed. Yet both Cowper and Crabbe