Now strike the golden lyre again: A louder yet, and yet a louder strain. And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder. Hark, hark, the horrid sound Has raised up his head! As awaked from the dead, And amazed, he stares around. See the snakes that they rear, And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Each a torch in his hand! Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain, To the valiant crew! Behold how they toss their torches on high, And glittering temples of their hostile gods!' And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy; To light him to his prey, And, like another Helen, fired another Troy. Chorus. And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy; Thais led the way Etc. etc. etc. Thus, long ago, Ere heaving bellows learned to blow, While organs yet were mute, Timotheus, to his breathing flute And sounding lyre, Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire. At last divine Cecilia came, Inventress of the vocal frame; The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store, And added length to solemn sounds, With Nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before. Or both divide the crown; Grand Chorus. At last divine Cecilia came, The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store, Enlarged the former narrow bounds, And added length to solemn sounds, With Nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before. Or both divide the crown; LESSON 37. THE PROSE LITERATURE. -"I have said that towards the end of Elizabeth's reign men settled down to think and inquire. Intellectual had succeeded to active life. We have seen this in the poetry of the time; and the great work of BACON, which was then begun, represents the same thing in prose. He worked at not only all subjects of inquiry but also at the right method of enquiry. The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum did not fulfil all he aimed at, but they did stir the whole of English intelligence into activity. In Science, the impulse he gave was only partly right, and the work of Science in England was behind that of the Continent. The religious and the political struggle absorbed the country, and it was not till after the Restoration, with two exceptions, that scientific discovery advanced so far as to claim recognition in a history of Literature. The Royal Society was embodied in 1662, and astronomy, experimental chemistry, medicine, mineralogy, zoology, botany, vegetable physiology were all founded as studies and their literature begun in the age of the Restoration. One man's work was so great in science as to merit his name's being mentioned among the literary men of England. In 1671 ISAAC NEWTON, 1642-1727, laid his Theory of Light before the Royal Society; in the year before the Revolution, his Principia established with its proof of the theory of gravitation the true system of the universe. It was in political and religious knowledge, however, that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active and adventurous in a people, the first thing they will think upon is the true method and grounds of government, both divine and human. Two sides will be taken, the side of Authority and the side of Reason in Religion; the side of Authority and the side of Individual Liberty in Politics. The Theological Literature of those who declared that reason was supreme as a test of truth, arose with some men who met at Lord Falkland's just before the civil war, and especially with JOHN HALES and WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. With them Jeremy Taylor pleaded, as we have seen, the cause of religious liberty and toleration, and of rightness of life as more important than a correct theology. After the Restoration and Revolution, their work was carried on by BISHOP BURNET, ROBERT BOYLE, the philosopher, ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON, and BISHOP BUTLER, whose Sermons and Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 1736, endeavor to make peace between Authority and Reason. Many other divines of the English Church took one side or another, or opposed the growing Deism. ISAAC BARROW is to be mentioned for his sedate, ROBERT SOUTH for his fierce and witty, eloquence, and in them and in men like EDWARD STILLINGFLEET and WILLIAM SHERLOCK, English theological prose took form. POLITICAL LITERATURE.-The resistance to authority in the opposition to the theory of the Divine Right of Kings did not enter into Literature till after it had been worked out practically in the Civil War. During the Commonwealth and after the Revolution, it took the form of a discussion on the abstract question of the Science of Government, and was mingled with an inquiry into the origin of society and the ground of social life. THOMAS HOBBES, 1588-1674, during the Commonwealth, was the first who dealt with the question from the side of reason alone, and he is also the first of all our prose writers whose style may be said to be uniform and correct, and adapted carefully to the subjects on which he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan, 1651, declared (1) that the origin of all power was in the people, and (2) the end of all power was for the common weal. It destroyed the theory of a Divine Right of Kings and Priests, but it created another kind of Divine Right when it said that the power lodged in rulers by the people could not be taken away by the people. SIR R. FILMER supported the side of Divine Right in his Patriarcha, published in 1680. HENRY NEVILE in his Dialogue concerning Government, and JAMES HARRINGTON in his romance, The Commonwealth of Oceana, published at the beginning of the Commonwealth, contended that all secure government was to be based on property, but Nevile supported a monarchy, and Harringtonwith whom I may class Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683,a democracy, on this basis. John Locke, 1632-1704, in his treatise on Civil Government followed, in 1689-1690, the two doctrines of Hobbes, but with these two important additions-(1) that the people have a right to take away the power given by them to the ruler, (2) that the ruler is responsible to the people for the trust reposed in him, and (3) that legislative assemblies are supreme as the voice of the people. This was the political philosophy of the Revolution. Locke carried the same spirit of free inquiry into the realm of religion, and in his three Letters on Toleration, 1689–90–92, laid down the philosophical grounds for liberty of religious thought. He finished by entering the realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 appeared his Essay concerning the Human Understanding, in which he investigated its limits and traced all ideas, and therefore all knowledge, to experience. In his clear statement of the way in which the understanding works, in the way in which he guarded it and language against their errors in the inquiry after truth, he did as much for the true method of thinking as Bacon had done for the science of nature. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart from the great movement of thought, a good deal of Miscellaneous Literature. SIR WILLIAM PETTY, in 1667, made the first effort after a science of political economy in his Treatise on Taxes. Characters, essays, letter-writing, memoirs, all came to the front. The painting of short characters' was carried on after the Restoration by Saml. Butler and W. Charleton. These 'characters' had no personality, but, as party spirit deepened, names thinly disguised were given to characters drawn of liv ing men, and Dryden and Pope in poetry and all the prose wits of the time of Queen Anne and George I. made personal, and often violent, sketches of their opponents a special element in literature. After the Restoration, Cowley's small volume, and Dryden, in the masterly criticism on his art which he prefixed to some of his dramas, gave richness to the Essay. These two writers began, with Hobbes, the second period of English prose, in which the style is easy, unaffected, moulded to the subject, and the proper words are put in their proper places. It is as different from the style that came before it as the easy manners of a gentleman are from those of a learned man unaccustomed to society. In William III's. time SIR W. TEMPLE'S |