In all cases the texts are exact reprints of original editions or of editions revised by the author. In the latter case the facts about the edition chosen have been stated in the notes. The notes also give more exact references to quotations vaguely indicated in the texts, and such necessary facts as might be unfamiliar to the reader of average information. Neither they nor the introduction pretend to be exhaustive. The latter aims merely to suggest certain points of view from which the texts may well be read. In both cases editorial matter has been sacrificed to a greater body of text. It is intended that this volume shall be followed as soon as possible by a second which will cover the following quarter-century. This may later be supplemented by still another volume. It is also the editor's purpose to offer as a separate study a history of the development of literary criticism and popular taste in the eighteenth century. THE SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL, W. H. D. CONTENTS Remarks on the Fairy Queen [in part] (1715). 105 Large Account of the Taste in Poetry (1702) The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704). GEORGE FARQUHAR: Discourse upon Comedy (1702) 257 Spectator XL: Poetic Justice (1711) . Spectator CLX: The Nature of Genius (1711) Spectator DXCII: The Critics and the Rules 316 INTRODUCTION That period of English literature which is commonly styled with more regard for alliteration than accuracythe Age of Anne, is summarily dismissed by the average student of literary history. Here, if anywhere, he is undisturbed by critical doubts. He may question the absolute merit of the minor Elizabethans; he may have misgivings as to his estimate of the Victorians; but in dealing with the Augustans he is happily certain. Especially is this true of Augustan ideals and tendencies. There was the 'Classical School'; one can trace the 'beginnings of Romanticism'; the former is fortunately dead, the latter grown into something of much greater importance. It is all perfectly clear. To the person, however, who takes pains to read what was written during this period, nothing is clearer than the falsity of such an opinion. The Age of Anne has suffered from adulation and from vituperation, from ignorant generalization and from scholarly misrepresentation, but from nothing so much as from being hastily pigeon-holed. It is possible to conceive how persons so unfortunate as to be blind to a certain type of literary merit might be eager to get this period off their hands. It is much more remarkable that they should suppose they had done so. Such ungrounded assumption is largely the product of indifference, an indifference fortunately lessening. The mere passage of time is transferring it to the Victorian period. It begins to appear, for example, as if Tennyson were succeeding to Pope's position as a phenomenon sufficiently considered by English critics and now definitely disposed of and laid away. Cowley was similarly treated by the mid-eighteenth century. It is no new thing, this curt dismissal of our literary greatgrandfathers; it is perhaps the original sin of criticism. The glory of the present or the immediate past has always cast a shadow backward. But, as the present becomes the past, the shadow moves. If the early eighteenth century seems to have emerged somewhat slowly, the fact is due, in part at least, to two causes: to the character of the period and to the character of those who have written about it. The critics of the nineteenth century to whose lot fell the disposition of the 'classical period' were men of unusual ability, men who wrote with such force that it has often been easier to remember their criticisms than the work they criticized. The period, on the other hand, was of such a sort that it could not be completely forgotten. Its writers had a way of making phrases which became first proverbial and then banal, so that people became prematurely bored by men whom they had not read. "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," "The proper study of mankind is man"-these, and a hundred others like them, are so familiar that it has been impossible to 'discover' Pope as the minor Elizabethans, for instance, were discovered. Similarly, the critical theory of the period has been presented to us in compact, easily digested, and—to many minds-disagreeable doses, so that familiarity could easily breed ignorance. Queen Anne critics are believed to have cherished a pathetic devotion to 'the Rules' and the couplet. Some of their best-known work bears out this belief. We scorned the rules and were easily wearied by the couplet, and we accepted this as sufficient. |