knowledge of English life under Charles II., the first is by John Evelyn, a writer of high repute in his own day, but of no quality that should preserve his literature by its intrinsic merit. One may, however, quote from his secret memoirs (only published in 1819) this account of his friend, who has outdone him by far in bringing to our eyes the scenes and personages of that day:

26th May 1703.- This day died Mr. Sam. Pepys, a very worthy, industrious, and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the Navy, in which he had passed through all the most considerable offices (clerk of the Acts, and secretary of the Admiralty), all which he performed with great integrity. When King James II. went out of England, he laid down his office, and would serve no more, but withdrawing himself from public affairs, he lived at Clapham with his partner Mr. Hewer, formerly his clerk, in a very noble house and sweet place, where he enjoyed the fruit of his labours in great prosperity. He was universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very great cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation. His library and collection of other curiosities were of the most considerable, the models of ships especially.

The gentleman thus described was a good official at a time when honesty in public service was very scarce. But our concern with him springs from the passionate zest for life which prompted him, as each day went by him, to write down an account of all that he saw, felt and did; living the hours, as it were, over again. There is no more extraordinary human document than this record in which Pepys set down his hopes, his fears, his pleasures (innocent and otherwise), with an unreserve which had no veil except that of a difficult cipher. Only in 1825 were they partially given to the world, and since then they have taken their place by the side of Boswell's Johnson. For Pepys, like Boswell, seems to prattle, and only upon study does

the reader realise how great an artist is at work although the art is unconscious. The impulse to describe was so strong upon him that it must be gratified, and it justifies itself in so great a mastery that every descriptive writer should go to school for a season to Pepys. He has a natural instinct for picture making; we have the general impression, the atmosphere and background upon which is flashed some telling detail. Take for instance his account of the great fire, which gives us no vague and remote view of the catastrophe, but brings us in among the very streets, with the hustle and hurry of folk bringing their goods out of doors:

Poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs, by the water-side, to another. And, among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they burned their wings, and fell down. . . . At last met my Lord Mayor in Fanning Street, like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck. To the King's message, he cried, like a fainting woman, "Lord, what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it." That he needed no more soldiers: and that, for himself, he must go and refresh himself, having been up all night. So he left me, and I him, and walked home; seeing people all almost distracted, and no manner of means used to quench the fire.

After a while of rest, during which he and his guests had "an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry as at this time we could be," Mr. Pepys took boat, and thus describes what he saw:

River full of lighters and boats taking in goods, and good goods swimming in the water: and only I observed that hardly one lighter or boat in three that had the goods of a house in, but there was a pair of virginals in it. Having seen as much as I could now, I away to Whitehall by appointment, and there walked to St. James's Park: and there met

my wife, and Creed, and Wood, and his wife, and walked to my boat; and there upon the water again, and to the fire up and down, it still increasing, and the wind great. So near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one's faces in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire drops. This is very true: so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire, three or four, nay, five or six houses, one from another. When we could endure no more upon the water, we to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against The Three Cranes, and there stayed till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more; and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the city, in a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire. Barbary and her husband away before us. We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire, and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruin. So home with a sad heart, and find everybody discoursing and lamenting the fire; and poor Tom Hater come with some few of his goods saved out of his house, which was burned upon Fish Street Hill.

Such a passage as this has an obvious historic interest. But on every page of his writings, no matter how trivial the subject, Mr. Pepys gives us what is at least one proper object of pure literature the very taste and colour of life. We recognise in him the forerunner of Defoe. But Defoe invented, and saw in the vision of his mind, all those details which Mr. Pepys beheld only with the sharp eyes of the flesh.

CHAPTER IX

DEFOE, ADDISON, AND STEELE

WHOEVER Visits Magdalen College at Oxford, passes from the gateway and outer court through a vaulted entrance which leads to a cloister, where, above the exquisite range of arches which frame the green enclosure, stand or crouch a multitude. of carved figures, some gracious and heavenly, some fantastically bestial; and over the whole, so rich and so varied, the beauty of conception and of execution broods like a visible presence, harmonising the devout and the lawless, the severe and the grotesque. From this cloister a narrow passage leads on to a broad trim-kept sward, and beyond that rises a long range of buildings, almost inornate, stately and restrained, yet in its classic beauty of proportion a match for the Gothic masterpiece. Not unlike this is the transition from Shakespeare and Milton to the writers of whom Joseph Addison, Magdalen's most famous alumnus, is perhaps the fittest representative.

Shakespeare stands between the two worlds, half mediaeval, half a modern; Milton is nearer by far to Dante than to Shelley or Wordsworth. Even Dryden keeps in his work some hint of the pro

fusion and riot which stamped the earlier imagination. But once the corner of the century is turned, literary architecture grows severely Palladian; logic and symmetry rule. And since the best poetry always transcends logic and goes fringed in mystery, fusing thought and expression into one, so that the same idea cannot be rendered in other words, it is only natural that the genius of that day should have found its completest expression in prose. Pope is in reality far less of a poet than Swift.

Further, as the newly-developed art of using prose with lightness and grace proved its power of attraction, we have a double phenomenon-two sides of one fact. The uses of verse become confined: the lyric disappears, dramatic poetry disappears; the best poetry written is written in avowed imitation of those parts of Horace concerning which Horace himself declared that they differed from prose only in the employment of a fixed metre. On the other hand, prose writing became more and more a vehicle, not only for the argumentative but the inventive faculties of the human mind. As the range of verse grew restricted, both in form and subject, so the range of prose correspondingly increased.

Yet, so fixed was still the ascendency of verse as the medium for pure literature, that the men who aspired to and attained the highest place in letters, looked first to poetry as their means of expression; they only fell back, as it were, on prose, at the suggestion, and after the example, of other and lesser men, who had a surer instinct for the popular form. We shall consider first the two discoverers who founded in reality the two main branches of popular prose literature in English - the periodical essay and the novel.