I. AUGUSTAN OR CLASSIC AGE
History of the Period. The Revolution of 1688, which banished1 the last of the Stuart kings and called William of Orange to the throne, marks the end of the long struggle for political freedom in England. Thereafter the Englishman spent his tremendous energy, which his forbears had largely spent in fighting for freedom, in endless political discussions and in efforts to improve his government. In order to bring about reforms, votes were now necessary; and to get votes the people of England must be approached with ideas, facts, arguments, information. So the newspaper was born,[182] and literature in its widest sense, including the book, the newspaper, and the magazine, became the chief instrument of a nation's progress.
Social DevelopmentThe first half of the eighteenth century is remarkable3 for the rapid social development in England. Hitherto men had been more or less governed by the narrow, isolated4 standards of the Middle Ages, and when they differed they fell speedily to blows. Now for the first time they set themselves to the task of learning the art of living together, while still holding different opinions. In a single generation nearly two thousand public coffeehouses, each a center of sociability5, sprang up in London alone, and the number of private clubs is quite as astonishing.[183] This new social life had a marked effect in polishing men's words and manners. The typical Londoner of Queen Anne's day was still rude, and a little vulgar in his tastes; the city was still very filthy6, the streets unlighted and infested7 at night by bands of rowdies and "Mohawks"; but outwardly men sought to refine their manners according to prevailing9 standards; and to be elegant, to have "good form," was a man's first duty, whether he entered society or wrote literature. One can hardly read a book or poem of the age without feeling this superficial elegance10. Government still had its opposing Tory and Whig parties, and the Church was divided into Catholics, Anglicans, and Dissenters11; but the growing social life offset13 many antagonisms14, producing at least the outward impression of peace and unity15. Nearly every writer of the age busied himself with religion as well as with party politics, the scientist Newton as sincerely as the churchman Barrow, the philosophical16 Locke no less earnestly than the evangelical Wesley; but nearly all tempered their zeal17 with moderation, and argued from reason and Scripture18, or used delicate satire19 upon their opponents, instead of denouncing them as followers20 of Satan. There were exceptions, of course; but the general tendency of the age was toward toleration. Man had found himself in the long struggle for personal liberty; now he turned to the task of discovering his neighbor, of finding in Whig and Tory, in Catholic and Protestant, in Anglican and Dissenter12, the same general human characteristics that he found in himself. This good work was helped, moreover, by the spread of education and by the growth of the national spfrit, following the victories of Marlborough on the Continent. In the midst of heated argument it needed only a word--Gibraltar, Blenheim, Ramillies, Malplaquet--or a poem of victory written in a garret[184] to tell a patriotic22 people that under their many differences they were all alike Englishmen.
In the latter half of the century the political and social progress is almost bewildering. The modern form of cabinet government responsible to Parliament and the people had been established under George I; and in 1757 the cynical24 and corrupt25 practices of Walpole, premier26 of the first Tory cabinet, were replaced by the more enlightened policies of Pitt. Schools were established; clubs and coffeehouses increased; books and magazines multiplied until the press was the greatest visible power in England; the modern great dailies, the Chronicle, Post, and Times, began their career of public education. Religiously, all the churches of England felt the quickening power of that tremendous spiritual revival27 known as Methodism, under the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield. Outside her own borders three great men--Clive in India, Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, Cook in Australia and the islands of the Pacific--were unfurling the banner of St. George over the untold28 wealth of new lands, and spreading the world-wide empire of the Anglo-Saxons.
An Age of ProseLiterary Characteristics. In every preceding age we have noted29 especially the poetical31 works, which constitute, according to Matthew Arnold, the glory of English literature. Now for the first time we must chronicle the triumph of English prose. A multitude of practical interests arising from the new social and political conditions demanded expression, not simply in books, but more especially in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers. Poetry was inadequate32 for such a task; hence the development of prose, of the "unfettered word," as Dante calls it,--a development which astonishes us by its rapidity and excellence34. The graceful35 elegance of Addison's essays, the terse36 vigor37 of Swift's satires38, the artistic39 finish of Fielding's novels, the sonorous40 eloquence41 of Gibbon's history and of Burke's orations42,--these have no parallel in the poetry of the age. Indeed, poetry itself became prosaic43 in this respect, that it was used not for creative works of imagination, but for essays, for satire, for criticism,--for exactly the same practical ends as was prose. The poetry of the first half of the century, as typified in the work of Pope, is polished and witty44 enough, but artificial; it lacks fire, fine feeling, enthusiasm, the glow of the Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of Puritanism. In a word, it interests us as a study of life, rather than delights or inspires us by its appeal to the imagination. The variety and excellence of prose works, and the development of a serviceable prose style, which had been begun by Dryden, until it served to express clearly every human interest and emotion,--these are the chief literary glories of the eighteenth century.
SatireIn the literature of the preceding age we noted two marked tendencies,--the tendency to realism in subject-matter, and the tendency to polish and refinement46 of expression. Both these tendencies were continued in the Augustan Age, and are seen clearly in the poetry of Pope, who brought the couplet to perfection, and in the prose of Addison. A third tendency is shown in the prevalence of satire, resulting from the unfortunate union of politics with literature. We have already noted the power of the press in this age, and the perpetual strife47 of political parties. Nearly every writer of the first half of the century was used and rewarded by Whigs or Tories for satirizing48 their enemies and for advancing their special political interests. Pope was a marked exception, but he nevertheless followed the prose writers in using satire too largely in his poetry. Now satire--that is, a literary work which searches out the faults of men or institutions in order to hold them up to ridicule49--is at best a destructive kind of criticism. A satirist50 is like a laborer52 who clears away the ruins and rubbish of an old house before the architect and builders begin on a new and beautiful structure. The work may sometimes be necessary, but it rarely arouses our enthusiasm. While the satires of Pope, Swift, and Addison are doubtless the best in our language, we hardly place them with our great literature, which is always constructive53 in spirit; and we have the feeling that all these men were capable of better things than they ever wrote.
The Classic Age. The period we are studying is known to us by various names. It is often called the Age of Queen Anne; but, unlike Elizabeth, this "meekly54 stupid" queen had practically no influence upon our literature. The name Classic Age is more often heard; but in using it we should remember clearly these three different ways in which the word "classic" is applied55 to literature: (1) the term "classic" refers, in general, to writers of the highest rank in any nation. As used in our literature, it was first applied to the works of the great Greek and Roman writers, like Homer and Virgil; and any English book which followed the simple and noble method of these writers was said to have a classic style. Later the term was enlarged to cover the great literary works of other ancient nations; so that the Bible and the Avestas, as well as the Iliad and the Aeneid, are called classics. (2) Every national literature has at least one period in which an unusual number of great writers are producing books, and this is called the classic period of a nation's literature. Thus the reign56 of Augustus is the classic or golden age of Rome; the generation of Dante is the classic age of Italian literature; the age of Louis XIV is the French classic age; and the age of Queen Anne is often called the classic age of England. (3) The word "classic" acquired an entirely57 different meaning in the period we are studying; and we shall better understand this by reference to the preceding ages. The Elizabethan writers were led by patriotism58, by enthusiasm, and, in general, by romantic emotions. They wrote in a natural style, without regard to rules; and though they exaggerated and used too many words, their works are delightful59 because of their vigor and freshness and fine feeling. In the following age patriotism had largely disappeared from politics and enthusiasm from literature. Poets no longer wrote naturally, but artificially, with strange and fantastic verse forms to give effect, since fine feeling was wanting. And this is the general character of the poetry of the Puritan Age.[185] Gradually our writers rebelled against the exaggerations of both the natural and the fantastic style. They demanded that poetry should follow exact rules; and in this they were influenced by French writers, especially by Boileau and Rapin, who insisted on precise methods of writing poetry, and who professed60 to have discovered their rules in the classics of Horace and Aristotle. In our study of the Elizabethan drama we noted the good influence of the classic movement in insisting upon that beauty of form and definiteness of expression which characterize the dramas of Greece and Rome; and in the work of Dryden and his followers we see a revival of classicism in the effort to make English literature conform to rules established by the great writers of other nations. At first the results were excellent, especially in prose; but as the creative vigor of the Elizabethans was lacking in this age, writing by rule soon developed a kind of elegant formalism, which suggests the elaborate social code of the time. Just as a gentleman might not act naturally, but must follow exact rules in doffing61 his hat, or addressing a lady, or entering a room, or wearing a wig62, or offering his snuffbox to a friend, so our writers lost individuality and became formal and artificial. The general tendency of literature was to look at life critically, to emphasize intellect rather than imagination, the form rather than the content of a sentence. Writers strove to repress all emotion and enthusiasm, and to use only precise and elegant methods of expression. This is what is often meant by the "classicism" of the ages of Pope and Johnson. It refers to the critical, intellectual spirit of many writers, to the fine polish of their heroic couplets or the elegance of their prose, and not to any resemblance which their work bears to true classic literature. In a word, the classic movement had become pseudo-classic, i.e. a false or sham63 classicism; and the latter term is now often used to designate a considerable part of eighteenth-century literature.[186] To avoid this critical difficulty we have adopted the term Augustan Age, a name chosen by the writers themselves, who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson, and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and all that brilliant company who made Roman literature famous in the days of Augustus.
ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)
Pope is in many respects a unique figure. In the first place, he was for a generation "the poet" of a great nation. To be sure, poetry was limited in the early eighteenth century; there were few lyrics66, little or no love poetry, no epics67, no dramas or songs of nature worth considering; but in the narrow field of satiric69 and didactic verse Pope was the undisputed master. His influence completely dominated the poetry of his age, and many foreign writers, as well as the majority of English poets, looked to him as their model. Second, he was a remarkably70 clear and adequate reflection of the spirit of the age in which he lived. There is hardly an ideal, a belief, a doubt, a fashion, a whim71 of Queen Anne's time, that is not neatly72 expressed in his poetry. Third, he was the only important writer of that age who gave his whole life to letters. Swift was a clergyman and politician; Addison was secretary of state; other writers depended on patrons or politics or pensions for fame and a livelihood74; but Pope was independent, and had no profession but literature. And fourth, by the sheer force of his ambition he won his place, and held it, in spite of religious prejudice, and in the face of physical and temperamental obstacles that would have discouraged a stronger man. For Pope was deformed76 and sickly, dwarfish77 in soul and body. He knew little of the world of nature or of the world of the human heart. He was lacking, apparently79, in noble feeling, and instinctively80 chose a lie when the truth had manifestly more advantages. Yet this jealous, peevish81, waspish little man became the most famous poet of his age and the acknowledged leader of English literature. We record the fact with wonder and admiration82; but we do not attempt to explain it.
Life. Pope was born in London in 1688, the year of the Revolution. His parents were both Catholics, who presently removed from London and settled in Binfield, near Windsor, where the poet's childhood was passed. Partly because of an unfortunate prejudice against Catholics in the public schools, partly because of his own weakness and deformity, Pope received very little school education, but browsed83 for himself among English books and picked up a smattering of the classics. Very early he began to write poetry, and records the fact with his usual vanity:
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.
Being debarred by his religion from many desirable employments, he resolved to make literature his life work; and in this he resembled Dryden, who, he tells us, was his only master, though much of his work seems to depend on Boileau, the French poet and critic.[187] When only sixteen years old he had written his "Pastorals"; a few years later appeared his "Essay on Criticism," which made him famous. With the publication of the Rape84 of the Lock, in 1712, Pope's name was known and honored all over England, and this dwarf78 of twenty-four years, by the sheer force of his own ambition, had jumped to the foremost place in English letters. It was soon after this that Voltaire called him "the best poet of England and, at present, of all the world,"--which is about as near the truth as Voltaire generally gets in his numerous universal judgments86. For the next twelve years Pope was busy with poetry, especially with his translations of Homer; and his work was so successful financially that he bought a villa87 at Twickenham, on the Thames, and remained happily independent of wealthy patrons for a livelihood.
Led by his success, Pope returned to London and for a time endeavored to live the gay and dissolute life which was supposed to be suitable for a literary genius; but he was utterly88 unfitted for it, mentally and physically89, and soon retired90 to Twickenham. There he gave himself up to poetry, manufactured a little garden more artificial than his verses, and cultivated his friendship with Martha Blount, with whom for many years he spent a good part of each day, and who remained faithful to him to the end of his life. At Twickenham he wrote his Moral Epistles (poetical satires modeled after Horace) and revenged himself upon all his critics in the bitter abuse of the Dunciad. He died in 1744 and was buried at Twickenham, his religion preventing him from the honor, which was certainly his due, of a resting place in Westminster Abbey.
Works of Pope. For convenience we may separate Pope's work into three groups, corresponding to the early, middle, and later period of his life. In the first he wrote his "Pastorals," "Windsor Forest," "Messiah," "Essay on Criticism," "Eloise to Abelard," and the Rape of the Lock; in the second, his translations of Homer; in the third the Dunciad and the Epistles, the latter containing the famous "Essay on Man" and the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," which is in truth his "Apologia," and in which alone we see Pope's life from his own view point.
Essay on CriticismThe "Essay on Criticism" sums up the art of poetry as taught first by Horace, then by Boileau and the eighteenth-century classicists. Though written in heroic couplets, we hardly consider this as a poem but rather as a storehouse of critical maxims91. "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread"; "To err92 is human, to forgive divine"; "A little learning is a dangerous thing,"--these lines, and many more like them from the same source, have found their way into our common speech, and are used, without thinking of the author, whenever we need an apt quotation93.
Rape of the LockThe Rape of the Lock is a masterpiece of its kind, and comes nearer to being a "creation" than anything else that Pope has written. The occasion of the famous poem was trivial enough. A fop at the court of Queen Anne, one Lord Petre, snipped94 a lock of hair from the abundant curls of a pretty maid of honor named Arabella Fermor. The young lady resented it, and the two families were plunged95 into a quarrel which was the talk of London. Pope, being appealed to, seized the occasion to construct, not a ballad97, as the Cavaliers would have done, nor an epigram, as French poets love to do, but a long poem in which all the mannerisms of society are pictured in minutest detail and satirized98 with the most delicate wit. The first edition, consisting of two cantos, was published in 1712; and it is amazing now to read of the trivial character of London court life at the time when English soldiers were battling for a great continent in the French and Indian wars. Its instant success caused Pope to lengthen100 the poem by three more cantos; and in order to make a more perfect burlesque101 of an epic68 poem, he introduces gnomes102, sprites, sylphs, and salamanders,[188] instead of the gods of the great epics, with which his readers were familiar. The poem is modeled after two foreign satires: Boileau's Le Lutrin (reading desk), a satire on the French clergy73, who raised a huge quarrel over the location of a lectern; and La Secchia Rapita (stolen bucket), a famous Italian satire on the petty causes of the endless Italian wars. Pope, however, went far ahead of his masters in style and in delicacy103 of handling a mock-heroic theme, and during his lifetime the Rape of the Lock was considered as the greatest poem of its kind in all literature. The poem is still well worth reading; for as an expression of the artificial life of the age--of its cards, parties, toilettes, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking, and idle vanities--it is as perfect in its way as Tamburlaine, which reflects the boundless105 ambition of the Elizabethans.
Pope's TranslationsThe fame of Pope's Iliad, which was financially the most successful of his books, was due to the fact that he interpreted Homer in the elegant, artificial language of his own age. Not only do his words follow literary fashions but even the Homeric characters lose their strength and become fashionable men of the court. So the criticism of the scholar Bentley was most appropriate when he said, "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." Pope translated the entire Iliad and half of the Odyssey107; and the latter work was finished by two Cambridge scholars, Elijah Fenton and William Broome, who imitated the mechanical couplets so perfectly108 that it is difficult to distinguish their work from that of the greatest poet of the age. A single selection is given to show how, in the nobler passages, even Pope may faintly suggest the elemental grandeur109 of Homer:
The troops exulting110 sat in order round,
And beaming fires illumined all the ground.
As when the moon, refulgent111 lamp of night,
O'er Heaven's clear azure112 spreads her sacred light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene113,
And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene;
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumbered gild114 the glowing pole,
O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,
And tip with silver every mountain's head.
Essay on ManThe "Essay" is the best known and the most quoted of all Pope's works. Except in form it is not poetry, and when one considers it as an essay and reduces it to plain prose, it is found to consist of numerous literary ornaments116 without any very solid structure of thought to rest upon. The purpose of the essay is, in Pope's words, to "vindicate117 the ways of God to Man"; and as there are no unanswered problems in Pope's philosophy, the vindication118 is perfectly accomplished119 in four poetical epistles, concerning man's relations to the universe, to himself, to society, and to happiness. The final result is summed up in a few well-known lines:
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord120, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring121 reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
Like the "Essay on Criticism," the poem abounds122 in quotable lines, such as the following, which make the entire work well worth reading:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
The same ambition can destroy or save,
And makes a patriot23 as it makes a knave124.
Honor and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.
Vice45 is a monster of so frightful125 mien126,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Behold127 the child, by Nature's kindly128 law,
Pleased with a rattle129, tickled130 with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads132 and prayer books are the toys of age:
Pleased with this bauble133 still, as that before;
Till tired he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er.[189]
Miscellaneous WorksThe Dunciad (i.e. the "Iliad of the Dunces") began originally as a controversy134 concerning Shakespeare, but turned out to be a coarse and revengeful satire upon all the literary men of the age who had aroused Pope's anger by their criticism or lack of appreciation135 of his genius. Though brilliantly written and immensely popular at one time, its present effect on the reader is to arouse a sense of pity that a man of such acknowledged power and position should abuse both by devoting his talents to personal spite and petty quarrels. Among the rest of his numerous works the reader will find Pope's estimate of himself best set forth136 in his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," and it will be well to close our study of this strange mixture of vanity and greatness with "The Universal Prayer," which shows at least that Pope had considered, and judged himself, and that all further judgment85 is consequently superfluous137.
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)
In each of Marlowe's tragedies we have the picture of a man dominated by a single passion, the lust138 of power for its own sake. In each we see that a powerful man without self-control is like a dangerous instrument in the hands of a child; and the tragedy ends in the destruction of the man by the ungoverned power which he possesses. The life of Swift is just such a living tragedy. He had the power of gaining wealth, like the hero of the Jew of Malta; yet he used it scornfully, and in sad irony139 left what remained to him of a large property to found a hospital for lunatics. By hard work he won enormous literary power, and used it to satirize99 our common humanity. He wrested140 political power from the hands of the Tories, and used it to insult the very men who had helped him, and who held his fate in their hands. By his dominant142 personality he exercised a curious power over women, and used it brutally144 to make them feel their inferiority. Being loved supremely146 by two good women, he brought sorrow and death to both, and endless misery147 to himself. So his power brought always tragedy in its wake. It is only when we remember his life of struggle and disappointment and bitterness that we can appreciate the personal quality in his satire, and perhaps find some sympathy for this greatest genius of all the Augustan writers.
Illustration: JONATHAN SWIFT
JONATHAN SWIFT
Life. Swift was born in Dublin, of English parents, in 1667. His father died before he was born; his mother was poor, and Swift, though proud as Lucifer, was compelled to accept aid from relatives, who gave it grudgingly149. At the Kilkenny school, and especially at Dublin University, he detested150 the curriculum, reading only what appealed to his own nature; but, since a degree was necessary to his success, he was compelled to accept it as a favor from the examiners, whom he despised in his heart. After graduation the only position open to him was with a distant relative, Sir William Temple, who gave him the position of private secretary largely on account of the unwelcome relationship.
Temple was a statesman and an excellent diplomatist; but he thought himself to be a great writer as well, and he entered into a literary controversy concerning the relative merits of the classics and modern literature. Swift's first notable work, The Battle of the Books, written at this time but not published, is a keen satire upon both parties in the controversy. The first touch of bitterness shows itself here; for Swift was in a galling151 position for a man of his pride, knowing his intellectual superiority to the man who employed him, and yet being looked upon as a servant and eating at the servants' table. Thus he spent ten of the best years of his life in the pretty Moor152 Park, Surrey, growing more bitter each year and steadily153 cursing his fate. Nevertheless he read and studied widely, and, after his position with Temple grew unbearable154, quarreled with his patron, took orders, and entered the Church of England. Some years later we find him settled in the little church of Laracor, Ireland,--a country which he disliked intensely, but whither he went because no other "living" was open to him.
In Ireland, faithful to his church duties, Swift labored155 to better the condition of the unhappy people around him. Never before had the poor of his parishes been so well cared for; but Swift chafed156 under his yoke157, growing more and more irritated as he saw small men advanced to large positions, while he remained unnoticed in a little country church,--largely because he was too proud and too blunt with those who might have advanced him. While at Laracor he finished his Tale of a Tub, a satire on the various churches of the day, which was published in London with the Battle of the Books in 1704. The work brought him into notice as the most powerful satirist of the age, and he soon gave up his church to enter the strife of party politics. The cheap pamphlet was then the most powerful political weapon known; and as Swift had no equal at pamphlet writing, he soon became a veritable dictator. For several years, especially from 1710 to 1713, Swift was one of the most important figures in London. The Whigs feared the lash159 of his satire; the Tories feared to lose his support. He was courted, flattered, cajoled on every side; but the use he made of his new power is sad to contemplate160. An unbearable arrogance161 took possession of him. Lords, statesmen, even ladies were compelled to sue for his favor and to apologize for every fancied slight to his egoism. It is at this time that he writes in his Journal to Stella:
Mr. Secretary told me the Duke of Buckingham had been talking much about me and desired my acquaintance. I answered it could not be, for he had not yet made sufficient advances; then Shrewsbury said he thought the Duke was not used to make advances. I said I could not help that, for I always expected advances in proportion to men's quality, and more from a Duke than any other man.
Illustration: TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN
TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN
Writing to the Duchess of Queensberry he says:
I am glad you know your duty; for it has been a known and established rule above twenty years in England that the first advances have been constantly made me by all ladies who aspire162 to my acquaintance, and the greater their quality the greater were their advances.
When the Tories went out of power Swift's position became uncertain. He expected and had probably been promised a bishopric in England, with a seat among the peers of the realm; but the Tories offered him instead the place of dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. It was galling to a man of his proud spirit; but after his merciless satire on religion, in The Tale of a Tub, any ecclesiastical position in England was rendered impossible. Dublin was the best he could get, and he accepted it bitterly, once more cursing the fate which he had brought upon himself.
With his return to Ireland begins the last act in the tragedy of his life. His best known literary work, Gulliver's Travels, was done here; but the bitterness of life grew slowly to insanity164, and a frightful personal sorrow, of which he never spoke165, reached its climax166 in the death of Esther Johnson, a beautiful young woman, who had loved Swift ever since the two had met in Temple's household, and to whom he had written his Journal to Stella. During the last years of his life a brain disease, of which he had shown frequent symptoms, fastened its terrible hold upon Swift, and he became by turns an idiot and a madman. He died in 1745, and when his will was opened it was found that he had left all his property to found St. Patrick's Asylum167 for lunatics and incurables168. It stands to-day as the most suggestive monument of his peculiar169 genius.
The Works of Swift. From Swift's life one can readily foresee the kind of literature he will produce. Taken together his works are a monstrous170 satire on humanity; and the spirit of that satire is shown clearly in a little incident of his first days in London. There was in the city at that time a certain astrologer named Partridge, who duped the public by calculating nativities from the stars, and by selling a yearly almanac predicting future events. Swift, who hated all shams171, wrote, with a great show of learning, his famous Bickerstaff Almanac, containing "Predictions for the Year 1708, as Determined172 by the Unerring Stars." As Swift rarely signed his name to any literary work, letting it stand or fall on its own merits, his burlesque appeared over the pseudonym173 of Isaac Bickerstaff, a name afterwards made famous by Steele in The Tatler. Among the predictions was the following:
My first prediction is but a trifle; yet I will mention it to show how ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns: it relates to Partridge the almanack maker175; I have consulted the star of his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.
On March 30, the day after the prediction was to be fulfilled, there appeared in the newspapers a letter from a revenue officer giving the details of Partridge's death, with the doings of the bailiff and the coffin176 maker; and on the following morning appeared an elaborate "Elegy177 of Mr. Partridge." When poor Partridge, who suddenly found himself without customers, published a denial of the burial, Swift answered with an elaborate "Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff," in which he proved by astrological rules that Partridge was dead, and that the man now in his place was an impostor trying to cheat the heirs out of their inheritance.
Character of Swift's SatireThis ferocious178 joke is suggestive of all Swift's satires. Against any case of hypocrisy179 or injustice180 he sets up a remedy of precisely181 the same kind, only more atrocious, and defends his plan with such seriousness that the satire overwhelms the reader with a sense of monstrous falsity. Thus his solemn "Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity may be attended with Some Inconveniences" is such a frightful satire upon the abuses of Christianity by its professed followers that it is impossible for us to say whether Swift intended to point out needed reforms, or to satisfy his conscience,[190] or to perpetrate a joke on the Church, as he had done on poor Partridge. So also with his "Modest Proposal," concerning the children of Ireland, which sets up the proposition that poor Irish farmers ought to raise children as dainties, to be eaten, like roast pigs, on the tables of prosperous Englishmen. In this most characteristic work it is impossible to find Swift or his motive183. The injustice under which Ireland suffered, her perversity184 in raising large families to certain poverty, and the indifference185 of English politicians to her suffering and protests are all mercilessly portrayed187; but why? That is still the unanswered problem of Swift's life and writings.
Tale of a TubSwift's two greatest satires are his Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels. The Tale began as a grim exposure of the alleged188 weaknesses of three principal forms of religious belief, Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist, as opposed to the Anglican; but it ended in a satire upon all science and philosophy.
Swift explains his whimsical title by the custom of mariners190 in throwing out a tub to a whale, in order to occupy the monster's attention and divert it from an attack upon the ship,--which only proves how little Swift knew of whales or sailors. But let that pass. His book is a tub thrown out to the enemies of Church and State to keep them occupied from further attacks or criticism; and the substance of the argument is that all churches, and indeed all religion and science and statesmanship, are arrant191 hypocrisy. The best known part of the book is the allegory of the old man who died and left a coat (which is Christian182 Truth) to each of his three sons, Peter, Martin, and Jack192, with minute directions for its care and use. These three names stand for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists; and the way in which the sons evade193 their father's will and change the fashion of their garment is part of the bitter satire upon all religious sects194. Though it professes195 to defend the Anglican Church, that institution fares perhaps worse than the others; for nothing is left to her but a thin cloak of custom under which to hide her alleged hypocrisy.
Gulliver's TravelsIn Gulliver's Travels the satire grows more unbearable. Strangely enough, this book, upon which Swift's literary fame generally rests, was not written from any literary motive, but rather as an outlet196 for the author's own bitterness against fate and human society. It is still read with pleasure, as Robinson Crusoe is read, for the interesting adventures of the hero; and fortunately those who read it generally overlook its degrading influence and motive.
Gulliver's Travels records the pretended four voyages of one Lemuel Gulliver, and his adventures in four astounding197 countries. The first book tells of his voyage and shipwreck198 in Lilliput, where the inhabitants are about as tall as one's thumb, and all their acts and motives200 are on the same dwarfish scale. In the petty quarrels of these dwarfs201 we are supposed to see the littleness of humanity. The statesmen who obtain place and favor by cutting monkey capers202 on the tight rope before their sovereign, and the two great parties, the Littleendians and Bigendians, who plunge96 the country into civil war over the momentous203 question of whether an egg should be broken on its big or on its little end, are satires on the politics of Swift's own day and generation. The style is simple and convincing; the surprising situations and adventures are as absorbing as those of Defoe's masterpiece; and altogether it is the most interesting of Swift's satires.
On the second voyage Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are giants, and everything is done upon an enormous scale. The meanness of humanity seems all the more detestable in view of the greatness of these superior beings. When Gulliver tells about his own people, their ambitions and wars and conquests, the giants can only wonder that such great venom206 could exist in such little insects.
In the third voyage Gulliver continues his adventures in Laputa, and this is a satire upon all the scientists and philosophers. Laputa is a flying island, held up in the air by a loadstone; and all the professors of the famous academy at Lagado are of the same airy constitution. The philosopher who worked eight years to extract sunshine from cucumbers is typical of Swift's satiric treatment of all scientific problems. It is in this voyage that we hear of the Struldbrugs, a ghastly race of men who are doomed207 to live upon earth after losing hope and the desire for life. The picture is all the more terrible in view of the last years of Swift's own life, in which he was compelled to live on, a burden to himself and his friends.
In these three voyages the evident purpose is to strip off the veil of habit and custom, with which men deceive themselves, and show the crude vices208 of humanity as Swift fancies he sees them. In the fourth voyage the merciless satire is carried out to its logical conclusion. This brings us to the land of the Houyhnhnms, in which horses, superior and intelligent creatures, are the ruling animals. All our interest, however, is centered on the Yahoos, a frightful race, having the form and appearance of men, but living in unspeakable degradation209.
Miscellaneous WorksThe Journal to Stella, written chiefly in the years 1710-1713 for the benefit of Esther Johnson, is interesting to us for two reasons. It is, first, an excellent commentary on contemporary characters and political events, by one of the most powerful and original minds of the age; and second, in its love passages and purely210 personal descriptions it gives us the best picture we possess of Swift himself at the summit of his power and influence. As we read now its words of tenderness for the woman who loved him, and who brought almost the only ray of sunlight into his life, we can only wonder and be silent. Entirely different are his Drapier's Letters, a model of political harangue211 and of popular argument, which roused an unthinking English public and did much benefit to Ireland by preventing the politicians' plan of debasing the Irish coinage. Swift's poems, though vigorous and original (like Defoe's, of the same period), are generally satirical, often coarse, and seldom rise above doggerel212. Unlike his friend Addison, Swift saw, in the growing polish and decency213 of society, only a mask for hypocrisy; and he often used his verse to shock the new-born modesty214 by pointing out some native ugliness which his diseased mind discovered under every beautiful exterior215.
Character of Swift's ProseThat Swift is the most original writer of his time, and one of the greatest masters of English prose, is undeniable. Directness, vigor, simplicity216, mark every page. Among writers of that age he stands almost alone in his disdain217 of literary effects. Keeping his object steadily before him, he drives straight on to the end, with a convincing power that has never been surpassed in our language. Even in his most grotesque218 creations, the reader never loses the sense of reality, of being present as an eyewitness219 of the most impossible events, so powerful and convincing is Swift's prose. Defoe had the same power; but in writing Robinson Crusoe, for instance, his task was comparatively easy, since his hero and his adventures were both natural; while Swift gives reality to pygmies, giants, and the most impossible situations, as easily as if he were writing of facts. Notwithstanding these excellent qualities, the ordinary reader will do well to confine himself to Gulliver's Travels and a book of well-chosen selections. For, it must be confessed, the bulk of Swift's work is not wholesome220 reading. It is too terribly satiric and destructive; it emphasizes the faults and failings of humanity; and so runs counter to the general course of our literature, which from Cynewulf to Tennyson follows the Ideal, as Merlin followed the Gleam,[191] and is not satisfied till the hidden beauty of man's soul and the divine purpose of his struggle are manifest.
JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719)
In the pleasant art of living with one's fellows, Addison is easily a master. It is due to his perfect expression of that art, of that new social life which, as we have noted, was characteristic of the Age of Anne, that Addison occupies such a large place in the history of literature. Of less power and originality221 than Swift, he nevertheless wields223, and deserves to wield222, a more lasting224 influence. Swift is the storm, roaring against the ice and frost of the late spring of English life. Addison is the sunshine, which melts the ice and dries the mud and makes the earth thrill with light and hope. Like Swift, he despised shams, but unlike him, he never lost faith in humanity; and in all his satires there is a gentle kindliness225 which makes one think better of his fellow-men, even while he laughs at their little vanities.
Illustration: JOSEPH ADDISON
JOSEPH ADDISON
Addison's InfluenceTwo things Addison did for our literature which are of inestimable value. First, he overcame a certain corrupt tendency bequeathed by Restoration literature. It was the apparent aim of the low drama, and even of much of the poetry of that age, to make virtue226 ridiculous and vice attractive. Addison set himself squarely against this unworthy tendency. To strip off the mask of vice, to show its ugliness and deformity, but to reveal virtue in its own native loveliness,--that was Addison's purpose; and he succeeded so well that never, since his day, has our English literature seriously followed after false gods. As Macaulay says, "So effectually did he retort on vice the mockery which had recently been directed against virtue, that since his time the open violation229 of decency has always been considered amongst us a sure mark of a fool." And second, prompted and aided by the more original genius of his friend Steele, Addison seized upon the new social life of the clubs and made it the subject of endless pleasant essays upon types of men and manners. The Tatler and The Spectator are the beginning of the modern essay; and their studies of human character, as exemplified in Sir Roger de Coverley, are a preparation for the modern novel.
Life. Addison's life, like his writings, is in marked contrast to that of Swift. He was born in Milston, Wiltshire, in 1672. His father was a scholarly English clergyman, and all his life Addison followed naturally the quiet and cultured ways to which he was early accustomed. At the famous Charterhouse School, in London, and in his university life at Oxford230, he excelled in character and scholarship and became known as a writer of graceful verses. He had some intention, at one time, of entering the Church, but was easily persuaded by his friends to take up the government service instead. Unlike Swift, who abused his political superiors, Addison took the more tactful way of winning the friendship of men in large places. His lines to Dryden won that literary leader's instant favor, and one of his Latin poems, "The Peace of Ryswick" (1697), with its kindly appreciation of King William's statesmen, brought him into favorable political notice. It brought him also a pension of three hundred pounds a year, with a suggestion that he travel abroad and cultivate the art of diplomacy231; which he promptly232 did to his own great advantage.
From a literary view point the most interesting work of Addison's early life is his Account of the Greatest English Poets (1693), written while he was a fellow of Oxford University. One rubs his eyes to find Dryden lavishly233 praised, Spenser excused or patronized, while Shakespeare is not even mentioned. But Addison was writing under Boileau's "classic" rules; and the poet, like the age, was perhaps too artificial to appreciate natural genius.
While he was traveling abroad, the death of William and the loss of power by the Whigs suddenly stopped Addison's pension; necessity brought him home, and for a time he lived in poverty and obscurity. Then occurred the battle of Blenheim, and in the effort to find a poet to celebrate the event, Addison was brought to the Tories' attention. His poem, "The Campaign," celebrating the victory, took the country by storm. Instead of making the hero slay234 his thousands and ten thousands, like the old epic heroes, Addison had some sense of what is required in a modern general, and so made Marlborough direct the battle from the outside, comparing him to an angel riding on the whirlwind:
'T was then great Marlbro's mighty235 soul was proved,
That, in the shock of charging hosts unmoved,
Amidst confusion, horror, and despair,
Examined all the dreadful scenes of war;
In peaceful thought the field of death surveyed,
To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,
Inspired repulsed237 battalions238 to engage,
And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.
So when an angel by divine command
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
(Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past,)
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.
That one doubtful simile239 made Addison's fortune. Never before or since was a poet's mechanical work so well rewarded. It was called the finest thing ever written, and from that day Addison rose steadily in political favor and office. He became in turn Undersecretary, member of Parliament, Secretary for Ireland, and finally Secretary of State. Probably no other literary man, aided by his pen alone, ever rose so rapidly and so high in office.
The rest of Addison's life was divided between political duties and literature. His essays for the Tatler and Spectator, which we still cherish, were written between 1709 and 1714; but he won more literary fame by his classic tragedy Cato, which we have almost forgotten. In 1716 he married a widow, the Countess of Warwick, and went to live at her home, the famous Holland House. His married life lasted only three years, and was probably not a happy one. Certainly he never wrote of women except with gentle satire, and he became more and more a clubman, spending most of his time in the clubs and coffeehouses of London. Up to this time his life had been singularly peaceful; but his last years were shadowed by quarrels, first with Pope, then with Swift, and finally with his lifelong friend Steele. The first quarrel was on literary grounds, and was largely the result of Pope's jealousy240. The latter's venomous caricature of Addison as Atticus shows how he took his petty revenge on a great and good man who had been his friend. The other quarrels with Swift, and especially with his old friend Steele, were the unfortunate result of political differences, and show how impossible it is to mingle241 literary ideals with party politics. He died serenely242 in 1719. A brief description from Thackeray's English Humorists is his best epitaph:
A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death; an immense fame and affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.
The EssaysWorks of Addison. The most enduring of Addison's works are his famous Essays, collected from the Tatler and Spectator. We have spoken of him as a master of the art of gentle living, and these essays are a perpetual inducement to others to know and to practice the same fine art. To an age of fundamental coarseness and artificiality he came with a wholesome message of refinement and simplicity, much as Ruskin and Arnold spoke to a later age of materialism244; only Addison's success was greater than theirs because of his greater knowledge of life and his greater faith in men. He attacks all the little vanities and all the big vices of his time, not in Swift's terrible way, which makes us feel hopeless of humanity, but with a kindly ridicule and gentle humor which takes speedy improvement for granted. To read Swift's brutal143 "Letters to a Young Lady," and then to read Addison's "Dissection245 of a Beau's Head" and his "Dissection of a Coquette's Heart," is to know at once the secret of the latter's more enduring influence.
Three other results of these delightful essays are worthy227 of attention: first, they are the best picture we possess of the new social life of England, with its many new interests; second, they advanced the art of literary criticism to a much higher stage than it had ever before reached, and however much we differ from their judgment and their interpretation246 of such a man as Milton, they certainly led Englishmen to a better knowledge and appreciation of their own literature; and finally, in Ned Softly the literary dabbler247, Will Wimble the poor relation, Sir Andrew Freeport the merchant, Will Honeycomb the fop, and Sir Roger the country gentleman, they give us characters that live forever as part of that goodly company which extends from Chaucer's country parson to Kipling's Mulvaney. Addison and Steele not only introduced the modern essay, but in such characters as these they herald248 the dawn of the modern novel. Of all his essays the best known and loved are those which introduce us to Sir Roger de Coverley, the genial249 dictator of life and manners in the quiet English country.
Addison's StyleIn style these essays are remarkable as showing the growing perfection of the English language. Johnson says, "Whoever wishes to attain250 an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." And again he says, "Give nights and days, sir, to the study of Addison if you mean to be a good writer, or, what is more worth, an honest man." That was good criticism for its day, and even at the present time critics are agreed that Addison's Essays are well worth reading once for their own sake, and many times for their influence in shaping a clear and graceful style of writing.
PoemsAddison's poems, which were enormously popular in his day, are now seldom read. His Cato, with its classic unities251 and lack of dramatic power, must be regarded as a failure, if we study it as tragedy; but it offers an excellent example of the rhetoric252 and fine sentiment which were then considered the essentials of good writing. The best scene from this tragedy is in the fifth act, where Cato soliloquizes, with Plato's Immortality253 of the Soul open in his hand, and a drawn255 sword on the table before him:
It must be so--Plato, thou reason'st well!--
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing256 after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread236, and inward horror,
Of falling into nought257? why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity258 to man.
Many readers make frequent use of one portion of Addison's poetry without knowing to whom they are indebted. His devout259 nature found expression in many hymns260, a few of which are still used and loved in our churches. Many a congregation thrills, as Thackeray did, to the splendid sweep of his "God in Nature," beginning, "The spacious262 firmament263 on high." Almost as well known and loved are his "Traveler's Hymn261," and his "Continued Help," beginning, "When all thy mercies, O my God." The latter hymn--written in a storm at sea off the Italian coast, when the captain and crew were demoralized by terror--shows that poetry, especially a good hymn that one can sing in the same spirit as one would say his prayers, is sometimes the most practical and helpful thing in the world.
Richard Steele (1672-1729). Steele was in almost every respect the antithesis264 of his friend and fellow-worker,--a rollicking, good-hearted, emotional, lovable Irishman. At the Charterhouse School and at Oxford he shared everything with Addison, asking nothing but love in return. Unlike Addison, he studied but little, and left the university to enter the Horse Guards. He was in turn soldier, captain, poet, playwright265, essayist, member of Parliament, manager of a theater, publisher of a newspaper, and twenty other things,--all of which he began joyously266 and then abandoned, sometimes against his will, as when he was expelled from Parliament, and again because some other interest of the moment had more attraction. His poems and plays are now little known; but the reader who searches them out will find one or two suggestive things about Steele himself. For instance, he loves children; and he is one of the few writers of his time who show a sincere and unswerving respect for womanhood. Even more than Addison he ridicules267 vice and makes virtue lovely. He is the originator of the Tatler, and joins with Addison in creating the Spectator,--the two periodicals which, in the short space of less than four years, did more to influence subsequent literature than all other magazines of the century combined. Moreover, he is the original genius of Sir Roger, and of many other characters and essays for which Addison usually receives the whole credit. It is often impossible in the Tatler essays to separate the work of the two men; but the majority of critics hold that the more original parts, the characters, the thought, the overflowing268 kindliness, are largely Steele's creation; while to Addison fell the work of polishing and perfecting the essays, and of adding that touch of humor which made them the most welcome literary visitors that England had ever received.
The Tatler and The Spectator. On account of his talent in writing political pamphlets, Steele was awarded the position of official gazetteer269. While in this position, and writing for several small newspapers, the idea occurred to Steele to publish a paper which should contain not only the political news, but also the gossip of the clubs and coffeehouses, with some light essays on the life and manners of the age. The immediate270 result--for Steele never let an idea remain idle--was the famous Tatler, the first number of which appeared April 12, 1709. It was a small folio sheet, appearing on post days, three times a week, and it sold for a penny a copy. That it had a serious purpose is evident from this dedication271 to the first volume of collected Tatler essays:
The general purpose of this paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse273, and our behavior.
The success of this unheard-of combination of news, gossip, and essay was instantaneous. Not a club or a coffeehouse in London could afford to be without it, and over it's pages began the first general interest in contemporary English life as expressed in literature. Steele at first wrote the entire paper and signed his essays with the name of Isaac Bickerstaff, which had been made famous by Swift a few years before. Addison is said to have soon recognized one of his own remarks to Steele, and the secret of the Authorship was out. From that time Addison was a regular contributor, and occasionally other writers added essays on the new social life of England.[192]
Steele lost his position as gazetteer, and the Tatler was discontinued after less than two years' life, but not till it won an astonishing popularity and made ready the way for its successor. Two months later, on March 1, 1711, appeared the first number of the Spectator. In the new magazine politics and news, as such, were ignored; it was a literary magazine, pure and simple, and its entire contents consisted of a single light essay. It was considered a crazy venture at the time, but its instant success proved that men were eager for some literary expression of the new social ideals. The following whimsical letter to the editor may serve to indicate the part played by the Spectator in the daily life of London:
Mr. Spectator,--Your paper is a part of my tea equipage; and my servant knows my humor so well, that in calling for my breakfast this morning (it being past my usual hour) she answered, the Spectator was not yet come in, but the teakettle boiled, and she expected it every moment.
It is in the incomparable Spectator papers that Addison shows himself most "worthy to be remembered." He contributed the majority of its essays, and in its first number appears this description of the Spectator, by which name Addison is now generally known:
There is no place of general resort wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of politicians at Will's [Coffeehouse] and listening with great attention to the narratives276 that are made in those little circular audiences. Sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child's, and, whilst I seem attentive277 to nothing but The Postman, overhear the conversation of every table in the room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James's, and sometimes join the little committee of politics in the inner room, as one who comes to hear and improve. My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa Tree, and in the theaters both of Drury Lane and the Haymarket. I have been taken for a merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years; and sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stock jobbers278 at Jonathan's.... Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species,... which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper.
The large place which these two little magazines hold in our literature seems most disproportionate to their short span of days. In the short space of four years in which Addison and Steele worked together the light essay was established as one of the most important forms of modern literature, and the literary magazine won its place as the expression of the social life of a nation.
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)
Illustration: Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
The reader of Boswell's Johnson, after listening to endless grumblings and watching the clumsy actions of the hero, often finds himself wondering why he should end his reading with a profound respect for this "old bear" who is the object of Boswell's groveling attention. Here is a man who was certainly not the greatest writer of his age, perhaps not even a great writer at all, but who was nevertheless the dictator of English letters, and who still looms279 across the centuries of a magnificent literature as its most striking and original figure. Here, moreover, is a huge, fat, awkward man, of vulgar manners and appearance, who monopolizes280 conversation, argues violently, abuses everybody, clubs down opposition281,--"Madam" (speaking to his cultivated hostess at table), "talk no more nonsense"; "Sir" (turning to a distinguished282 guest), "I perceive you are a vile283 Whig." While talking he makes curious animal sounds, "sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes clucking like a hen"; and when he has concluded a violent dispute and laid his opponents low by dogmatism or ridicule, he leans back to "blow out his breath like a whale" and gulp284 down numberless cups of hot tea. Yet this curious dictator of an elegant age was a veritable lion, much sought after by society; and around him in his own poor house gathered the foremost artists, scholars, actors, and literary men of London,--all honoring the man, loving him, and listening to his dogmatism as the Greeks listened to the voice of their oracle285.
What is the secret of this astounding spectacle? If the reader turns naturally to Johnson's works for an explanation, he will be disappointed. Reading his verses, we find nothing to delight or inspire us, but rather gloom and pessimism286, with a few moral observations in rimed couplets:
But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
Fall in the general massacre288 of gold;
Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfined,
And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heaped on wealth nor truth nor safety buys;
The dangers gather as the treasures rise.[193]
That is excellent common sense, but it is not poetry; and it is not necessary to hunt through Johnson's bulky volumes for the information, since any moralist can give us offhand289 the same doctrine290. As for his Rambler essays, once so successful, though we marvel291 at the big words, the carefully balanced sentences, the classical allusions292, one might as well try to get interested in an old-fashioned, three-hour sermon. We read a few pages listlessly, yawn, and go to bed.
Since the man's work fails to account for his leadership and influence, we examine his personality; and here everything is interesting. Because of a few oft-quoted passages from Boswell's biography, Johnson appears to us as an eccentric bear, who amuses us by his growlings and clumsy antics. But there is another Johnson, a brave, patient, kindly, religious soul, who, as Goldsmith said, had "nothing of the bear but his skin"; a man who battled like a hero against poverty and pain and melancholy294 and the awful fear of death, and who overcame them manfully. "That trouble passed away; so will this," sang the sorrowing Deor in the first old Anglo-Saxon lyric65; and that expresses the great and suffering spirit of Johnson, who in the face of enormous obstacles never lost faith in God or in himself. Though he was a reactionary295 in politics, upholding the arbitrary power of kings and opposing the growing liberty of the people, yet his political theories, like his manners, were no deeper than his skin; for in all London there was none more kind to the wretched, and none more ready to extend an open hand to every struggling man and woman who crossed his path. When he passed poor homeless Arabs sleeping in the streets he would slip a coin into their hands, in order that they might have a happy awakening297; for he himself knew well what it meant to be hungry. Such was Johnson,--a "mass of genuine manhood," as Carlyle called him, and as such, men loved and honored him.[194]
Life of Johnson. Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709. He was the son of a small bookseller, a poor man, but intelligent and fond of literature, as booksellers invariably were in the good days when every town had its bookshop. From his childhood Johnson had to struggle against physical deformity and disease and the consequent disinclination to hard work. He prepared for the university, partly in the schools, but largely by omnivorous298 reading in his father's shop, and when he entered Oxford he had read more classical authors than had most of the graduates. Before finishing his course he had to leave the university on account of his poverty, and at once he began his long struggle as a hack243 writer to earn his living.
At twenty-five years he married a woman old enough to be his mother,--a genuine love match, he called it,--and with her dowry of £800 they started a private school together, which was a dismal299 failure. Then, without money or influential300 friends, he left his home and wife in Lichfield and tramped to London, accompanied only by David Garrick, afterwards the famous actor, who had been one of his pupils. Here, led by old associations, Johnson made himself known to the booksellers, and now and then earned a penny by writing prefaces, reviews, and translations.
It was a dog's life, indeed, that he led there with his literary brethren. Many of the writers of the day, who are ridiculed301 in Pope's heartless Dunciad, having no wealthy patrons to support them, lived largely in the streets and taverns303, sleeping on an ash heap or under a wharf304, like rats; glad of a crust, and happy over a single meal which enabled them to work for a while without the reminder305 of hunger. A few favored ones lived in wretched lodgings307 in Grub Street, which has since become a synonym308 for the fortunes of struggling writers.[195] Often, Johnson tells us, he walked the streets all night long, in dreary309 weather, when it was too cold to sleep, without food or shelter. But he wrote steadily for the booksellers and for the Gentleman's Magazine, and presently he became known in London and received enough work to earn a bare living.
The works which occasioned this small success were his poem, "London," and his Life of the Poet Savage310, a wretched life, at best, which were perhaps better left without a biographer. But his success was genuine, though small, and presently the booksellers of London are coming to him to ask him to write a dictionary of the English language. It was an enormous work, taking nearly eight years of his time, and long before he had finished it he had eaten up the money which he received for his labor51. In the leisure intervals311 of this work he wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and other poems, and finished his classic tragedy of Irene.
Led by the great success of the Spectator, Johnson started two magazines, The Rambler (1750--1752) and The Idler (1758--1760). Later the Rambler essays were published in book form and ran rapidly through ten editions; but the financial returns were small, and Johnson spent a large part of his earnings312 in charity. When his mother died, in 1759, Johnson, although one of the best known men in London, had no money, and hurriedly finished Rasselas, his only romance, in order, it is said, to pay for his mother's burial.
It was not till 1762, when Johnson was fifty-three years old, that his literary labors313 were rewarded in the usual way by royalty314, and he received from George III a yearly pension of three hundred pounds. Then began a little sunshine in his life. With Joshua Reynolds, the artist, he founded the famous Literary Club, of which Burke, Pitt, Fox, Gibbon, Goldsmith, and indeed all the great literary men and politicians of the time, were members. This is the period of Johnson's famous conversations, which were caught in minutest detail by Boswell and given to the world. His idea of conversation, as shown in a hundred places in Boswell, is to overcome your adversary315 at any cost; to knock him down by arguments, or, when these fail, by personal ridicule; to dogmatize on every possible question, pronounce a few oracles316, and then desist with the air of victory. Concerning the philosopher Hume's view of death he says: "Sir, if he really thinks so, his perceptions are disturbed, he is mad. If he does not think so, he lies." Exit opposition. There is nothing more to be said. Curiously317 enough, it is often the palpable blunders of these monologues318 that now attract us, as if we were enjoying a good joke at the dictator's expense. Once a lady asked him, "Dr. Johnson, why did you define pastern as the knee of a horse?" "Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance," thundered the great authority.
When seventy years of age, Johnson was visited by several booksellers of the city, who were about to bring out a new edition of the English poets, and who wanted Johnson, as the leading literary man of London, to write the prefaces to the several volumes. The result was his Lives of the Poets, as it is now known, and this is his last literary work. He died in his poor Fleet Street house, in 1784, and was buried among England's honored poets in Westminster Abbey.
The English DictionaryJohnson's Works. "A book," says Dr. Johnson, "should help us either to enjoy life or to endure it." Judged by this standard, one is puzzled what to recommend among Johnson's numerous books. The two things which belong among the things "worthy to be remembered" are his Dictionary and his Lives of the Poets, though both these are valuable, not as literature, but rather as a study of literature. The Dictionary, as the first ambitious attempt at an English lexicon319, is extremely valuable, notwithstanding the fact that his derivations are often faulty, and that he frequently exercises his humor or prejudice in his curious definitions. In defining "oats," for example, as a grain given in England to horses and in Scotland to the people, he indulges his prejudice against the Scotch320, whom he never understood, just as, in his definition of "pension," he takes occasion to rap the writers who had flattered their patrons since the days of Elizabeth; though he afterwards accepted a comfortable pension for himself. With characteristic honesty he refused to alter his definition in subsequent editions of the Dictionary.
Lives of the PoetsThe Lives of the Poets are the simplest and most readable of his literary works. For ten years before beginning these biographies he had given himself up to conversation, and the ponderous321 style of his Rambler essays here gives way to a lighter322 and more natural expression. As criticisms they are often misleading, giving praise to artificial poets, like Cowley and Pope, and doing scant323 justice or abundant injustice to nobler poets like Gray and Milton; and they are not to be compared with those found in Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry, which was published in the same generation. As biographies, however, they are excellent reading, and we owe to them some of our best known pictures of the early English poets.
Poems and EssaysOf Johnson's poems the reader will have enough if he glance over "The Vanity of Human Wishes." His only story, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, is a matter of rhetoric rather than of romance, but is interesting still to the reader who wants to hear Johnson's personal views of society, philosophy, and religion. Any one of his Essays, like that on "Reading," or "The Pernicious Effects of Revery," will be enough to acquaint the reader with the Johnsonese style, which was once much admired and copied by orators326, but which happily has been replaced by a more natural way of speaking. Most of his works, it must be confessed, are rather tiresome327. It is not to his books, but rather to the picture of the man himself, as given by Boswell, that Johnson owes his great place in our literature.
BOSWELL'S "LIFE OF JOHNSON"
In James Boswell (1740-1795) we have another extraordinary figure,--a shallow little Scotch barrister, who trots328 about like a dog at the heels of his big master, frantic329 at a caress330 and groveling at a cuff331, and abundantly contented332 if only he can be near him and record his oracles. All his life long Boswell's one ambition seems to have been to shine in the reflected glory of great men, and his chief task to record their sayings and doings. When he came to London, at twenty-two years of age, Johnson, then at the beginning of his great fame, was to this insatiable little glory-seeker like a Silver Doctor to a hungry trout333. He sought an introduction as a man seeks gold, haunted every place where Johnson declaimed, until in Davies's bookstore the supreme145 opportunity came. This is his record of the great event:
I was much agitated334 [says Boswell] and recollecting335 his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell him where I come from." "From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly. "Mr. Johnson," said I, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."... "That, sir" [cried Johnson], "I find is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help." This stroke stunned336 me a good deal; and when we had sat down I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive337 of what might come next.
Then for several years, with a persistency338 that no rebuffs could abate339, and with a thick skin that no amount of ridicule could render sensitive, he follows Johnson; forces his way into the Literary Club, where he is not welcome, in order to be near his idol340; carries him off on a visit to the Hebrides; talks with him on every possible occasion; and, when he is not invited to a feast, waits outside the house or tavern302 in order to walk home with his master in the thick fog of the early morning. And the moment the oracle is out of sight and in bed, Boswell patters home to record in detail all that he has seen and heard. It is to his minute record that we owe our only perfect picture of a great man; all his vanity as well as his greatness, his prejudices, superstitions341, and even the details of his personal appearance:
There is the gigantic body, the huge face seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched342 foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches343; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing344; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"[196]
To Boswell's record we are indebted also for our knowledge of those famous conversations, those wordy, knockdown battles, which made Johnson famous in his time and which still move us to wonder. Here is a specimen345 conversation, taken almost at random346 from a hundred such in Boswell's incomparable biography. After listening to Johnson's prejudice against Scotland, and his dogmatic utterances347 on Voltaire, Robertson, and twenty others, an unfortunate theorist brings up a recent essay on the possible future life of brutes348, quoting some possible authority from the sacred scriptures349:
Johnson, who did not like to hear anything concerning a future state which was not authorized350 by the regular canons of orthodoxy, discouraged this talk; and being offended at its continuation, he watched an opportunity to give the gentleman a blow of reprehension351. So when the poor speculatist, with a serious, metaphysical, pensive352 face, addressed him, "But really, sir, when we see a very sensible dog, we don't know what to think of him"; Johnson, rolling with joy at the thought which beamed in his eye, turned quickly round and replied, "True, sir; and when we see a very foolish fellow, we don't know what to think of him." He then rose up, strided to the fire, and stood for some time laughing and exulting.
Then the oracle proceeds to talk of scorpions353 and natural history, denying facts, and demanding proofs which nobody could possibly furnish:
He seemed pleased to talk of natural philosophy. "That woodcocks," said he, "fly over the northern countries is proved, because they have been observed at sea. Swallows certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a river." He told us one of his first essays was a Latin poem upon the glowworm: I am sorry I did not ask where it was to be found.
Then follows an astonishing array of subjects and opinions. He catalogues libraries, settles affairs in China, pronounces judgment on men who marry women superior to themselves, flouts354 popular liberty, hammers Swift unmercifully, and adds a few miscellaneous oracles, most of which are about as reliable as his knowledge of the hibernation355 of swallows.
When I called upon Dr. Johnson next morning I found him highly satisfied with his colloquial356 prowess the preceding evening. "Well," said he, "we had good talk." "Yes, sir" [says I], "you tossed and gored357 several persons."
Far from resenting this curious mental dictatorship, his auditors358 never seem to weary. They hang upon his words, praise him, flatter him, repeat his judgments all over London the next day, and return in the evening hungry for more. Whenever the conversation begins to flag, Boswell is like a woman with a parrot, or like a man with a dancing bear. He must excite the creature, make him talk or dance for the edification of the company. He sidles obsequiously359 towards his hero and, with utter irrelevancy360, propounds361 a question of theology, a social theory, a fashion of dress or marriage, a philosophical conundrum362: "Do you think, sir, that natural affections are born with us?" or, "Sir, if you were shut up in a castle and a newborn babe with you, what would you do?" Then follow more Johnsonian laws, judgments, oracles; the insatiable audience clusters around him and applauds; while Boswell listens, with shining face, and presently goes home to write the wonder down. It is an astonishing spectacle; one does not know whether to laugh or grieve over it. But we know the man, and the audience, almost as well as if we had been there; and that, unconsciously, is the superb art of this matchless biographer.
When Johnson died the opportunity came for which Boswell had been watching and waiting some twenty years. He would shine in the world now, not by reflection, but by his own luminosity. He gathered together his endless notes and records, and began to write his biography; but he did not hurry. Several biographies of Johnson appeared, in the four years after his death, without disturbing Boswell's perfect complacency. After seven years' labor he gave the world his Life of Johnson. It is an immortal254 work; praise is superfluous; it must be read to be appreciated. Like the Greek sculptors363, the little slave produced a more enduring work than the great master. The man who reads it will know Johnson as he knows no other man who dwells across the border; and he will lack sensitiveness, indeed, if he lay down the work without a greater love and appreciation of all good literature.
Later Augustan Writers. With Johnson, who succeeded Dryden and Pope in the chief place of English letters, the classic movement had largely spent its force; and the latter half of the eighteenth century gives us an imposing364 array of writers who differ so widely that it is almost impossible to classify them. In general, three schools of writers are noticeable: first, the classicists, who, under Johnson's lead, insisted upon elegance and regularity365 of style; second, the romantic poets, like Collins, Gray, Thomson, and Burns, who revolted from Pope's artificial couplets and wrote of nature and the human heart[197]; third, the early novelists, like Defoe and Fielding, who introduced a new type of literature. The romantic poets and the novelists are reserved for special chapters; and of the other writers--Berkeley and Hume in philosophy; Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon in history; Chesterfield and Lady Montagu in letter writing; Adam Smith in economics; Pitt, Burke, Fox, and a score of lesser366 writers in politics--we select only two, Burke and Gibbon, whose works are most typical of the Augustan, i.e. the elegant, classic style of prose writing.
EDMUND BURKE (1729--1797)
To read all of Burke's collected works, and so to understand him thoroughly367, is something of a task. Few are equal to it. On the other hand, to read selections here and there, as most of us do, is to get a wrong idea of the man and to join either in fulsome368 praise of his brilliant oratory369, or in honest confession370 that his periods are ponderous and his ideas often buried under Johnsonian verbiage371. Such are the contrasts to be found on successive pages of Burke's twelve volumes, which cover the enormous range of the political and economic thought of the age, and which mingle fact and fancy, philosophy, statistics, and brilliant flights of the imagination, to a degree never before seen in English literature. For Burke belongs in spirit to the new romantic school, while in style he is a model for the formal classicists. We can only glance at the life of this marvelous Irishman, and then consider his place in our literature.
Life. Burke was born in Dublin, the son of an Irish barrister, in 1729. After his university course in Trinity College he came to London to study law, but soon gave up the idea to follow literature, which in turn led him to politics. He had the soul, the imagination of a poet, and the law was only a clog372 to his progress. His two first works, A Vindication of Natural Society and The Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime373 and the Beautiful, brought him political as well as literary recognition, and several small offices were in turn given to him. When thirty-six years old he was elected to Parliament as member from Wendover; and for the next thirty years he was the foremost figure in the House of Commons and the most eloquent374 orator325 which that body has ever known. Pure and incorruptible in his politics as in his personal life, no more learned or devoted375 servant of the Commonwealth376 ever pleaded for justice and human liberty. He was at the summit of his influence at the time when the colonies were struggling for independence; and the fact that he championed their cause in one of his greatest speeches, "On Conciliation377 with America," gives him an added interest in the eyes of American readers. His championship of America is all the more remarkable from the fact that, in other matters, Burke was far from liberal. He set himself squarely against the teachings of the romantic writers, who were enthusiastic over the French Revolution; he denounced the principles of the Revolutionists, broke with the liberal Whig party to join the Tories, and was largely instrumental in bringing on the terrible war with France, which resulted in the downfall of Napoleon.
It is good to remember that, in all the strife and bitterness of party politics, Burke held steadily to the noblest personal ideals of truth and honesty; and that in all his work, whether opposing the slave trade, or pleading for justice for America, or protecting the poor natives of India from the greed of corporations, or setting himself against the popular sympathy for France in her desperate struggle, he aimed solely378 at the welfare of humanity. When he retired on a pension in 1794, he had won, and he deserved, the gratitude379 and affection of the whole nation.
Works. There are three distinctly marked periods in Burke's career, and these correspond closely to the years in which he was busied with the affairs of America, India, and France successively. The first period was one of prophecy. He had studied the history and temper of the American colonies, and he warned England of the disaster which must follow her persistence380 in ignoring the American demands, and especially the American spirit. His great speeches, "On American Taxation381" and "On Conciliation with America," were delivered in 1774 and 1775, preceding the Declaration of Independence. In this period Burke's labor seemed all in vain; he lost his cause, and England her greatest colony.
Illustration: Edmund Burke--From an old print
Edmund Burke--From an old print
The second period is one of denunciation rather than of prophecy. England had won India; but when Burke studied the methods of her victory and understood the soulless way in which millions of poor natives were made to serve the interests of an English monopoly, his soul rose in revolt, and again he was the champion of an oppressed people. His two greatest speeches of this period are "The Nabob of Arcot's Debts" and his tremendous "Impeachment382 of Warren Hastings." Again he apparently lost his cause, though he was still fighting on the side of right. Hastings was acquitted383, and the spoliation of India went on; but the seeds of reform were sown, and grew and bore fruit long after Burke's labors were ended.
The third period is, curiously enough, one of reaction. Whether because the horrors of the French Revolution had frightened him with the danger of popular liberty, or because his own advance in office and power had made him side unconsciously with the upper classes, is unknown. That he was as sincere and noble now as in all his previous life is not questioned. He broke with the liberal Whigs and joined forces with the reactionary Tories. He opposed the romantic writers, who were on fire with enthusiasm over the French Revolution, and thundered against the dangers which the revolutionary spirit must breed, forgetting that it was a revolution which had made modern England possible. Here, where we must judge him to have been mistaken in his cause, he succeeded for the first time. It was due largely to Burke's influence that the growing sympathy for the French people was checked in England, and war was declared, which ended in the frightful victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo.
Burke's best known work of this period is his Reflections on the French Revolution, which he polished and revised again Essay on and again before it was finally printed. This ambitious literary essay, though it met with remarkable success, is a disappointment to the reader. Though of Celtic blood, Burke did not understand the French, or the principles for which the common people were fighting in their own way[198]; and his denunciations and apostrophes to France suggest a preacher without humor, hammering away at sinners who are not present in his congregation. The essay has few illuminating384 ideas, but a great deal of Johnsonian rhetoric, which make its periods tiresome, notwithstanding our admiration for the brilliancy of its author. More significant is one of Burke's first essays, A Philosophical Inquiry385 Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which is sometimes read in order to show the contrast in style with Addison's Spectator essays on the "Pleasures of the Imagination."
Burke's OrationsBurke's best known speeches, "On Conciliation with America," "American Taxation," and the "Impeachment of Warren Hastings," are still much studied in our schools as models of English prose; and this fact tends to give them an exaggerated literary importance. Viewed purely as literature, they have faults enough; and the first of these, so characteristic of the Classic Age, is that they abound123 in fine rhetoric but lack simplicity.[199] In a strict sense, these eloquent speeches are not literature, to delight the reader and to suggest ideas, but studies in rhetoric and in mental concentration. All this, however, is on the surface. A careful study of any of these three famous speeches reveals certain admirable qualities which account for the important place they are given in the study of English. First, as showing the stateliness and the rhetorical power of our language, these speeches are almost unrivaled. Second, though Burke speaks in prose, he is essentially386 a poet, whose imagery, like that of Milton's prose works, is more remarkable than that of many of our writers of verse. He speaks in figures, images, symbols; and the musical cadence387 of his sentences reflects the influence of his wide reading of poetry. Not only in figurative expression, but much more in spirit, he belongs with the poets of the revival. At times his language is pseudo-classic, reflecting the influence of Johnson and his school; but his thought is always romantic; he is governed by ideal rather than by practical interests, and a profound sympathy for humanity is perhaps his most marked characteristic.
Third, the supreme object of these orations, so different from the majority of political speeches, is not to win approval or to gain votes, but to establish the truth. Like our own Lincoln, Burke had a superb faith in the compelling power of the truth, a faith in men also, who, if the history of our race means anything, will not willingly follow a lie. The methods of these two great leaders are strikingly similar in this respect, that each repeats his idea in many ways, presenting the truth from different view points, so that it will appeal to men of widely different experiences. Otherwise the two men are in marked contrast. The uneducated Lincoln speaks in simple, homely388 words, draws his illustrations from the farm, and often adds a humorous story, so apt and "telling" that his hearers can never forget the point of his argument. The scholarly Burke speaks in ornate, majestic389 periods, and searches all history and all literature for his illustrations. His wealth of imagery and allusions, together with his rare combination of poetic30 and logical reasoning, make these orations remarkable, entirely apart from their subject and purpose.
Fourth (and perhaps most significant of the man and his work), Burke takes his stand squarely upon the principle of justice. He has studied history, and he finds that to establish justice, between man and man and between nation and nation, has been the supreme object of every reformer since the world began. No small or merely temporary success attracts him; only the truth will suffice for an argument; and nothing less than justice will ever settle a question permanently391. Such is his platform, simple as the Golden Rule, unshakable as the moral law. Hence, though he apparently fails of his immediate desire in each of these three orations, the principle for which he contends cannot fail. As a modern writer says of Lincoln, "The full, rich flood of his life through the nation's pulse is yet beating"; and his words are still potent392 in shaping the course of English politics in the way of justice.
EDWARD GIBBON (1737-1794)
To understand Burke or Johnson, one must read a multitude of books and be wary393 in his judgment; but with Gibbon the task is comparatively easy, for one has only to consider two books, his Memoirs395 and the first volume of his History, to understand the author. In his Memoirs we have an interesting reflection of Gibbon's own personality,--a man who looks with satisfaction on the material side of things, who seeks always the easiest path for himself, and avoids life's difficulties and responsibilities. "I sighed as a lover; but I obeyed as a son," he says, when, to save his inheritance, he gave up the woman he loved and came home to enjoy the paternal396 loaves and fishes. That is suggestive of the man's whole life. His History, on the other hand, is a remarkable work. It was the first in our language to be written on scientific principles, and with a solid basis of fact; and the style is the very climax of that classicism which had ruled England for an entire century. Its combination of historical fact and literary style makes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the one thing of Gibbon's life that is "worthy to be remembered."
Gibbon's History. For many years Gibbon had meditated397, like Milton, upon an immortal work, and had tried several historical subjects, only to give them up idly. In his Journal he tells us how his vague resolutions were brought to a focus:
It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing398 amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
Twelve years later, in 1776, Gibbon published the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and the enormous success of the work encouraged him to go on with the other five volumes, which were published at intervals during the next twelve years. The History begins with the reign of Trajan, in A.D. 98, and "builds a straight Roman road" through the confused histories of thirteen centuries, ending with the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The scope of the History is enormous. It includes not only the decline of the Roman Empire, but such movements as the descent of the northern barbarians399, the spread of Christianity, the reorganization of the European nations, the establishment of the great Eastern Empire, the rise of Mohammedanism, and the splendor400 of the Crusades. On the one hand it lacks philosophical insight, being satisfied with facts without comprehending the causes; and, as Gibbon seems lacking in ability to understand spiritual and religious movements, it is utterly inadequate in its treatment of the tremendous influence of Christianity. On the other hand, Gibbon's scholarship leaves little to criticise401; he read enormously, sifted403 his facts out of multitudes of books and records, and then marshaled them in the imposing array with which we have grown familiar. Moreover, he is singularly just and discriminating404 in the use of all documents and authorities at his command. Hence he has given us the first history in English that has borne successfully the test of modern research and scholarship.
The style of the work is as imposing as his great subject. Indeed, with almost any other subject the sonorous roll of his majestic sentences would be out of place. While it deserves all the adjectives that have been applied to it by enthusiastic admirers,--finished, elegant, splendid, rounded, massive, sonorous, copious405, elaborate, ornate, exhaustive,--it must be confessed, though one whispers the confession, that the style sometimes obscures our interest in the narrative275. As he sifted his facts from a multitude of sources, so he often hides them again in endless periods, and one must often sift402 them out again in order to be quite sure of even the simple facts. Another drawback is that Gibbon is hopelessly worldly in his point of view; he loves pageants406 and crowds rather than individuals, and he is lacking in enthusiasm and in spiritual insight. The result is so frankly407 material at times that one wonders if he is not reading of forces or machines, rather than of human beings. A little reading of his History here and there is an excellent thing, leaving one impressed with the elegant classical style and the scholarship; but a continued reading is very apt to leave us longing for simplicity, for naturalness, and, above all, for the glow of enthusiasm which makes the dead heroes live once more in the written pages.
This judgment, however, must not obscure the fact that the book had a remarkably large sale; and that this, of itself, is an evidence that multitudes of readers found it not only erudite, but readable and interesting.
II. THE REVIVAL OF ROMANTIC POETRY
The old order changeth, yielding place to new;
And God fulfills408 Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Tennyson's "The Passing of Arthur."
The Meaning of Romanticism. While Dryden, Pope, and Johnson were successively the dictators of English letters, and while, under their leadership, the heroic couplet became the fashion of poetry, and literature in general became satiric or critical in spirit, and formal in expression, a new romantic movement quietly made its appearance. Thomson's The Seasons (1730) was the first noteworthy poem of the romantic revival; and the poems and the poets increased steadily in number and importance till, in the age of Wordsworth and Scott, the spirit of Romanticism dominated our literature more completely than Classicism had ever done. This romantic movement--which Victor Hugo calls "liberalism in literature"--is simply the expression of life as seen by imagination, rather than by prosaic "common sense," which was the central doctrine of English philosophy in the eighteenth century. It has six prominent characteristics which distinguish it from the so-called classic literature which we have just studied:
1. The romantic movement was marked, and is always marked, by a strong reaction and protest against the bondage409 of rule and custom, which, in science and theology, as well as in literature, generally tend to fetter33 the free human spirit.
2. Romanticism returned to nature and to plain humanity for its material, and so is in marked contrast to Classicism, which had confined itself largely to the clubs and drawing-rooms, and to the social and political life of London. Thomson's Seasons, whatever its defects, was a revelation of the natural wealth and beauty which, for nearly a century, had been hardly noticed by the great writers of England.
3. It brought again the dream of a golden age[200] in which the stern realities of life were forgotten and the ideals of youth were established as the only permanent realities. "For the dreamer lives forever, but the toiler410 dies in a day," expresses, perhaps, only the wild fancy of a modern poet; but, when we think of it seriously, the dreams and ideals of a people are cherished possessions long after their stone monuments have crumbled411 away and their battles are forgotten. The romantic movement emphasized these eternal ideals of youth, and appealed to the human heart as the classic elegance of Dryden and Pope could never do.
4. Romanticism was marked by intense human sympathy, and by a consequent understanding of the human heart. Not to intellect or to science does the heart unlock its treasures, but rather to the touch of a sympathetic nature; and things that are hidden from the wise and prudent412 are revealed unto children. Pope had no appreciable413 humanity; Swift's work is a frightful satire; Addison delighted polite society, but had no message for plain people; while even Johnson, with all his kindness, had no feeling for men in the mass, but supported Sir Robert Walpole in his policy of letting evils alone until forced by a revolution to take notice of humanity's appeal. With the romantic revival all this was changed. While Howard was working heroically for prison reform, and Wilberforce for the liberation of the slaves, Gray wrote his "short and simple annals of the poor," and Goldsmith his Deserted414 Village, and Cowper sang,
My ear is pained,
My soul is sick with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage415 with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate416 heart,
It does not feel for man.[201]
This sympathy for the poor, and this cry against oppression, grew stronger and stronger till it culminated417 in "Bobby" Burns, who, more than any other writer in any language, is the poet of the unlettered human heart.
5. The romantic movement was the expression of individual genius rather than of established rules. In consequence, the literature of the revival is as varied418 as the characters and moods of the different writers. When we read Pope, for instance, we have a general impression of sameness, as if all his polished poems were made in the same machine; but in the work of the best romanticists there is endless variety. To read them is like passing through a new village, meeting a score of different human types, and finding in each one something to love or to remember. Nature and the heart of man are as new as if we had never studied them. Hence, in reading the romanticists, who went to these sources for their material, we are seldom wearied but often surprised; and the surprise is like that of the sunrise, or the sea, which always offers some new beauty and stirs us deeply, as if we had never seen it before.
6. The romantic movement, while it followed its own genius, was not altogether unguided. Strictly419 speaking, there is no new movement either in history or in literature; each grows out of some good thing which has preceded it, and looks back with reverence420 to past masters. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were the inspiration of the romantic revival; and we can hardly read a poem of the early romanticists without finding a suggestion of the influence of one of these great leaders.[202]
There are various other characteristics of Romanticism, but these six--the protest against the bondage of rules, the return to nature and the human heart, the interest in old sagas421 and medi?val romances as suggestive of a heroic age, the sympathy for the toilers of the world, the emphasis upon individual genius, and the return to Milton and the Elizabethans, instead of to Pope and Dryden, for literary models--are the most noticeable and the most interesting. Remembering them, we shall better appreciate the work of the following writers who, in varying degree, illustrate422 the revival of romantic poetry in the eighteenth century.
THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)
The curfew tolls423 the knell424 of parting day;
The lowing herd425 wind slowly o'er the lea;
The plowman homeward plods427 his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering428 landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle429 wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy430 tinklings lull431 the distant folds.
So begins "the best known poem in the English language," a poem full of the gentle melancholy which marks all early romantic poetry. It should be read entire, as a perfect model of its kind. Not even Milton's "Il Penseroso," which it strongly suggests, excels it in beauty and suggestiveness.
Life of Gray. The author of the famous "Elegy" is the most scholarly and well-balanced of all the early romantic poets. In his youth he was a weakling, the only one of twelve children who survived infancy432; and his unhappy childhood, the tyranny of his father, and the separation from his loved mother, gave to his whole life the stamp of melancholy which is noticeable in all his poems. At the famous Eton school and again at Cambridge, he seems to have followed his own scholarly tastes rather than the curriculum, and was shocked, like Gibbon, at the general idleness and aimlessness of university life. One happy result of his school life was his friendship for Horace Walpole, who took him abroad for a three years' tour of the Continent.
Illustration: THOMAS GRAY
THOMAS GRAY
No better index of the essential difference between the classical and the new romantic school can be imagined than that which is revealed in the letters of Gray and Addison, as they record their impressions of foreign travel. Thus, when Addison crossed the Alps, some twenty-five years before, in good weather, he wrote: "A very troublesome journey.... You cannot imagine how I am pleased with the sight of a plain." Gray crossed the Alps in the beginning of winter, "wrapped in muffs, hoods433 and masks of beaver434, fur boots, and bearskins," but wrote ecstatically, "Not a precipice435, not a torrent436, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry."
On his return to England, Gray lived for a short time at Stoke Poges, where he wrote his "Ode on Eton," and probably sketched437 his "Elegy," which, however, was not finished till 1750, eight years later. During the latter years of his shy and scholarly life he was Professor of Modern History and Languages at Cambridge, without any troublesome work of lecturing to students. Here he gave himself up to study and to poetry, varying his work by "prowlings" among the manuscripts of the new British Museum, and by his "Lilliputian" travels in England and Scotland. He died in his rooms at Pembroke College in 1771, and was buried in the little churchyard of Stoke Poges.
Illustration: CHURCH AT STOKE POGES
CHURCH AT STOKE POGES
Works of Gray. Gray's Letters, published in 1775, are excellent reading, and his Journal is still a model of natural description; but it is to a single small volume of poems that he owes his fame and his place in literature. These poems divide themselves naturally into three periods, in which we may trace the progress of Gray's emancipation438 from the classic rules which had so long governed English literature. In the first period he wrote several minor439 poems, of which the best are his "Hymn to Adversity" and the odes "To Spring" and "On a Distant Prospect440 of Eton College." These early poems reveal two suggestive things: first, the appearance of that melancholy which characterizes all the poetry of the period; and second, the study of nature, not for its own beauty or truth, but rather as a suitable background for the play of human emotions.
The second period shows the same tendencies more strongly developed. The "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750), the most perfect poem of the age, belongs to this period. To read Milton's "Il Penseroso" and Gray's "Elegy" is to see the beginning and the perfection of that "literature of melancholy" which largely occupied English poets for more than a century. Two other well-known poems of this second period are the Pindaric odes, "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard441." The first is strongly suggestive of Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," but shows Milton's influence in a greater melody and variety of expression. "The Bard" is, in every way, more romantic and original. An old minstrel, the last of the Welsh singers, halts King Edward and his army in a wild mountain pass, and with fine poetic frenzy442 prophesies443 the terror and desolation which must ever follow the tyrant444. From its first line, "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!" to the end, when the old bard plunges445 from his lofty crag and disappears in the river's flood, the poem thrills with the fire of an ancient and noble race of men. It breaks absolutely with the classical school and proclaims a literary declaration of independence.
In the third period Gray turns momentarily from his Welsh material and reveals a new field of romantic interest in two Norse poems, "The Fatal Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin" (1761). Gray translated his material from the Latin, and though these two poems lack much of the elemental strength and grandeur of the Norse sagas, they are remarkable for calling attention to the unused wealth of literary material that was hidden in Northern mythologv. To Gray and to Percy (who published his Northern Antiquities446 in 1770) is due in large measure the profound interest in the old Norse sagas which has continued to our own day.
Taken together, Gray's works form a most interesting commentary on the varied life of the eighteenth century. He was a scholar, familiar with all the intellectual interests of his age, and his work has much of the precision and polish of the classical school; but he shares also the reawakened interest in nature, in common man, and in medi?val culture, and his work is generally romantic both in style and in spirit. The same conflict between the classic and romantic schools, and the triumph of Romanticism, is shown clearly in the most versatile448 of Gray's contemporaries, Oliver Goldsmith.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774)
Illustration: OLIVER GOLDSMITH
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Because The Deserted Village is one of the most familiar poems in our language, Goldsmith is generally given a high place among the poets of the romantic dawn. But the Village, when we read it carefully, turns out to be a rimed essay in the style of Pope's famous Essay on Man; it owes its popularity to the sympathetic memories which it awakens449, rather than to its poetic excellence. It is as a prose writer that Goldsmith excels. He is an essayist, with Addison's fine polish but with more sympathy for human life; he is a dramatist, one of the very few who have ever written a comedy that can keep its popularity unchanged while a century rolls over its head; but greater, perhaps, than the poet and essayist and dramatist is Goldsmith the novelist, who set himself to the important work of purifying the early novel of its brutal and indecent tendencies, and who has given us, in The Vicar of Wakefield, one of the most enduring characters in English fiction. In his manner, especially in his poetry, Goldsmith was too much influenced by his friend Johnson and the classicists; but in his matter, in his sympathy for nature and human life, he belongs unmistakably to the new romantic school. Altogether he is the most versatile, the most charming, the most inconsistent, and the most lovable genius of all the literary men who made famous the age of Johnson.
Life. Goldsmith's career is that of an irresponsible, unbalanced genius, which would make one despair if the man himself did not remain so lovable in all his inconsistencies. He was born in the village of Pallas, Ireland, the son of a poor Irish curate whose noble character is portrayed in Dr. Primrose450, of The Vicar of Wakefield, and in the country parson of The Deserted Village. After an unsatisfactory course in various schools, where he was regarded as hopelessly stupid, Goldsmith entered Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar, i.e. a student who pays with labor for his tuition. By his escapades he was brought into disfavor with the authorities, but that troubled him little. He was also wretchedly poor, which troubled him less; for when he earned a few shillings by writing ballads451 for street singers, his money went oftener to idle beggars than to the paying of his honest debts. After three years of university life he ran away, in dime452-novel fashion, and nearly starved to death before he was found and brought back in disgrace. Then he worked a little, and obtained his degree in 1749.
Strange that such an idle and irresponsible youth should have been urged by his family to take holy orders; but such was the fact. For two years more Goldsmith labored with theology, only to be rejected when he presented himself as a candidate for the ministry453. He tried teaching, and failed. Then his fancy turned to America, and, provided with money and a good horse, he started off for Cork454, where he was to embark455 for the New World. He loafed along the pleasant Irish ways, missed his ship, and presently turned up cheerfully amongst his relatives, minus all his money, and riding a sorry nag205 called Fiddleback, for which he had traded his own on the way.[203] He borrowed fifty pounds more, and started for London to study law, but speedily lost his money at cards, and again appeared, amiable456 and irresponsible as ever, among his despairing relatives. The next year they sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine. Here for a couple of years he became popular as a singer of songs and a teller457 of tales, to whom medicine was only a troublesome affliction. Suddenly the Wanderlust seized him and he started abroad, ostensibly to complete his medical education, but in reality to wander like a cheerful beggar over Europe, singing and playing his flute458 for food and lodging306. He may have studied a little at Leyden and at Padua, but that was only incidental. After a year or more of vagabondage he returned to London with an alleged medical degree, said to have been obtained at Louvain or Padua.
The next few years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor, apothecary's assistant, comedian459, usher460 in a country school, and finally as a physician in Southwark. Gradually he drifted into literature, and lived from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers. Some of his essays and his Citizen of the World (1760-1761) brought him to the attention of Johnson, who looked him up, was attracted first by his poverty and then by his genius, and presently declared him to be "one of the first men we now have as an author." Johnson's friendship proved invaluable461, and presently Goldsmith found himself a member of the exclusive Literary Club. He promptly justified462 Johnson's confidence by publishing The Traveller (1764), which was hailed as one of the finest poems of the century. Money now came to him liberally, with orders from the booksellers; he took new quarters in Fleet Street and furnished them gorgeously; but he had an inordinate463 vanity for bright-colored clothes, and faster than he earned money he spent it on velvet464 cloaks and in indiscriminate charity. For a time he resumed his practice as a physician, but his fine clothes did not bring patients, as he expected; and presently he turned to writing again, to pay his debts to the booksellers. He produced several superficial and grossly inaccurate465 schoolbooks,--like his Animated466 Nature and his histories of England, Greece, and Rome,--which brought him bread and more fine clothes, and his Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer, which brought him undying fame.
After meeting with Johnson, Goldsmith became the object of Boswell's magpie467 curiosity; and to Boswell's Life of Johnson we are indebted for many of the details of Goldsmith's life,--his homeliness468, his awkward ways, his drolleries and absurdities469, which made him alternately the butt470 and the wit of the famous Literary Club. Boswell disliked Goldsmith, and so draws an unflattering Portrait, but even this does not disguise the contagious471 good humor which made men love him. When in his forty-seventh year, he fell sick of a fever, and with childish confidence turned to a quack472 medicine to cure himself. He died in 1774, and Johnson placed a tablet, with a sonorous Latin epitaph, in Westminster Abbey, though Goldsmith was buried elsewhere. "Let not his frailties473 be remembered; he was a very great man," said Johnson; and the literary world--which, like that old dictator, is kind enough at heart, though often rough in its methods--is glad to accept and record the verdict.
Works of Goldsmith. Of Goldsmith's early essays and his later school histories little need be said. They have settled into their own place, far out of sight of the ordinary reader. Perhaps the most interesting of these is a series of letters for the Public Ledger475 (afterwards published as The Citizen of the World), written from the view point of an alleged Chinese traveler, and giving the latter's comments on English civilization.[204] The following five works are those upon which Goldsmith's fame chiefly rests:
The Traveller (1764) made Goldsmith's reputation among his contemporaries, but is now seldom read, except by students who would understand how Goldsmith was, at one time, dominated by Johnson and his pseudo-classic ideals. It is a long poem, in rimed couplets, giving a survey and criticism of the social life of various countries in Europe, and reflects many of Goldsmith's own wanderings and impressions.
The Deserted VillageThe Deserted Village (1770), though written in the same mechanical style, is so permeated476 with honest human sympathy, and voices so perfectly the revolt of the individual man against institutions, that a multitude of common people heard it gladly, without consulting the critics as to whether they should call it good poetry. Notwithstanding its faults, to which Matthew Arnold has called sufficient attention, it has become one of our best known poems, though we cannot help wishing that the monotony of its couplets had been broken by some of the Irish folk songs and ballads that charmed street audiences in Dublin, and that brought Goldsmith a welcome from the French peasants wherever he stopped to sing. In the village parson and the schoolmaster, Goldsmith has increased Chaucer's list by two lovable characters that will endure as long as the English language. The criticism that the picture of prosperous "Sweet Auburn" never applied to any village in Ireland is just, no doubt, but it is outside the question. Goldsmith was a hopeless dreamer, bound to see everything, as he saw his debts and his gay clothes, in a purely idealistic way.
The Good-Natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer are Goldsmith's two comedies. The former, a comedy of character, though it has some laughable scenes and one laughable character, Croaker, met with failure on the stage, and has never been revived with any success. The latter, a comedy of intrigue477, is one of the few plays that has never lost its popularity. Its lively, bustling478 scenes, and its pleasantly absurd characters, Marlowe, the Hardcastles, and Tony Lumpkin, still hold the attention of modern theater goers; and nearly every amateur dramatic club sooner or later places She Stoops to Conquer on its list of attractions.
The Vicar of WakefieldThe Vicar of Wakefield is Goldsmith's only novel, and the first in any language that gives to home life an enduring romantic interest. However much we admire the beginnings of the English novel, to which we shall presently refer, we are nevertheless shocked by its frequent brutalities and indecencies. Goldsmith like Steele, had the Irish reverence for pure womanhood, and this reverence made him shun479 as a pest the vulgarity and coarseness in which contemporary novelists, like Smollett and Sterne, seemed to delight. So he did for the novel what Addison and Steele had done for the satire and the essay; he refined and elevated it, making it worthy of the old Anglo-Saxon ideals which are our best literary heritage.
Briefly480, The Vicar of Wakefield is the story of a simple English clergyman, Dr. Primrose, and his family, who pass from happiness through great tribulation481. Misfortunes, which are said never to come singly, appear in this case in flocks; but through poverty, sorrow, imprisonment482, and the unspeakable loss of his daughters, the Vicar's faith in God and man emerges triumphant483. To the very end he is like one of the old martyrs484, who sings Alleluia while the lions roar about him and his children in the arena485. Goldsmith's optimism, it must be confessed, is here stretched to the breaking point. The reader is sometimes offered fine Johnsonian phrases where he would naturally expect homely and vigorous language; and he is continually haunted by the suspicion that, even in this best of all possible worlds, the Vicar's clouds of affliction were somewhat too easily converted into showers of blessing486; yet he is forced to read on, and at the end he confesses gladly that Goldsmith has succeeded in making a most interesting story out of material that, in other hands, would have developed either a burlesque or a brutal tragedy. Laying aside all romantic passion, intrigue, and adventure, upon which other novelists depended, Goldsmith, in this simple story of common life, has accomplished three noteworthy results: he has made human fatherhood almost a divine thing; he has glorified487 the moral sentiments which cluster about the family life as the center of civilization; and he has given us, in Dr. Primrose, a striking and enduring figure, which seems more like a personal acquaintance than a character in a book.
WILLIAM COWPER (1731--1800)
In Cowper we have another interesting poet, who, like Gray and Goldsmith, shows the struggle between romantic and classic ideals. In his first volume of poems, Cowper is more hampered489 by literary fashions than was Goldsmith in his Traveller and his Deserted Village. In his second period, however, Cowper uses blank verse freely; and his delight in nature and in homely characters, like the teamster and the mail carrier of The Task, shows that his classicism is being rapidly thawed491 out by romantic feeling. In his later work, especially his immortal "John Gilpin," Cowper flings fashions aside, gives Pegasus the reins492, takes to the open road, and so proves himself a worthy predecessor493 of Burns, who is the most spontaneous and the most interesting of all the early romanticists.
Illustration: WILLIAM COWPER
WILLIAM COWPER
Life. Cowper's life is a pathetic story of a shy and timid genius, who found the world of men too rough, and who withdrew to nature like a wounded animal. He was born at Great Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, in 1731, the son of an English clergyman. He was a delicate, sensitive child, whose early life was saddened by the death of his mother and by his neglect at home. At six years he was sent away to a boys' school, where he was terrified by young barbarians who made his life miserable494. There was one atrocious bully495 into whose face Cowper could never look; he recognized his enemy by his shoe buckles496, and shivered at his approach. The fierce invectives of his "Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools" (1784), shows how these school experiences had affected497 his mind and health. For twelve years he studied law, but at the approach of a public examination for an office he was so terrified that he attempted suicide. The experience unsettled his reason, and the next twelve months were spent in an asylum at St. Alban's. The death of his father, in 1756, had brought the poet a small patrimony498, which placed him above the necessity of struggling, like Goldsmith, for his daily bread. Upon his recovery he boarded for years at the house of the Unwins, cultured people who recognized the genius hidden in this shy and melancholy yet quaintly499 humorous man. Mrs. Unwin, in particular, cared for him as a son; and whatever happiness he experienced in his poor life was the result of the devotion of this good woman, who is the "Mary" of all his poems.
A second attack of insanity was brought on by Cowper's morbid500 interest in religion, influenced, perhaps, by the untempered zeal of one John Newton, a curate, with whom Cowper worked in the small parish of Olney, and with whom he compiled the famous Olney Hymns. The rest of his life, between intervals of melancholia or insanity, was spent in gardening, in the care of his numerous pets, and in writing his poems, his translation of Homer, and his charming letters. His two best known poems were suggested by a lively and cultivated widow, Lady Austen, who told him the story of John Gilpin and called for a ballad on the subject. She also urged him to write a long poem in blank verse; and when he demanded a subject, she whimsically suggested the sofa, which was a new article of furniture at that time. Cowper immediately wrote "The Sofa," and, influenced by the poetic possibilities that lie in unexpected places, he added to this poem from time to time, and called his completed work The Task. This was published in 1785, and the author was instantly recognized as one of the chief poets of his age. The last years of his life were a long battle with insanity, until death mercifully ended the struggle in 1800. His last poem, "The Castaway," is a cry of despair, in which, under guise272 of a man washed overboard in a storm, he describes himself perishing in the sight of friends who are powerless to help.
Cowper's Works. Cowper's first volume of poems, containing "The Progress of Error," "Truth," "Table Talk," etc., is interesting chiefly as showing how the poet was bound by the classical rules of his age. These poems are dreary, on the whole, but a certain gentleness, and especially a vein501 of pure humor, occasionally rewards the reader. For Cowper was a humorist, and only the constant shadow of insanity kept him from becoming famous in that line alone.
The TaskThe Task, written in blank verse, and published in 1785, is Cowper's longest poem. Used as we are to the natural poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, it is hard for us to appreciate the striking originality of this work. Much of it is conventional and "wooden," to be sure, like much of Wordsworth's poetry; but when, after reading the rimed essays and the artificial couplets of Johnson's age, we turn suddenly to Cowper's description of homely scenes, of woods and brooks502, of plowmen and teamsters and the letter carrier on his rounds, we realize that we are at the dawn of a better day in poetry:
He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
With spatter'd boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks:
News from all nations lumbering503 at his back.
True to his charge, the close-packed load behind,
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destined504 inn,
And, having dropped the expected bag, pass on.
He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch296,
Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief
Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
To him indifferent whether grief or joy.
Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,
Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet
With tears that trickled505 down the writer's cheeks
Fast as the periods from his fluent quill506,
Or charged with amorous507 sighs of absent swains,
Or nymphs responsive, equally affect
His horse and him, unconscious of them all.
Miscellaneous WorksCowper's most laborious508 work, the translation of Homer in blank verse, was published in 1791. Its stately, Milton-like movement, and its better rendering509 of the Greek, make this translation far superior to Pope's artificial couplets. It is also better, in many respects, than Chapman's more famous and more fanciful rendering; but for some reason it was not successful, and has never received the recognition which it deserves. Entirely different in spirit are the poet's numerous hymns, which were published in the Olney Collection in 1779 and which are still used in our churches. It is only necessary to mention a few first lines--"God moves in a mysterious way," "Oh, for a closer walk with God," "Sometimes a light surprises"--to show how his gentle and devout spirit has left its impress upon thousands who now hardly know his name. With Cowper's charming Letters, published in 1803, we reach the end of his important works, and the student who enjoys reading letters will find that these rank among the best of their kind. It is not, however, for his ambitious works that Cowper is remembered, but rather for his minor poems, which have found their own way into so many homes. Among these, the one that brings quickest response from hearts that understand is his little poem, "On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture." beginning with the striking line, "Oh, that those lips had language." Another, called "Alexander Selkirk," beginning, "I am monarch510 of all I survey," suggests how Selkirk's experiences as a castaway (which gave Defoe his inspiration for Robinson Crusoe) affected the poet's timid nature and imagination. Last and most famous of all is his immortal "John Gilpin." Cowper was in a terrible fit of melancholy when Lady Austen told him the story, which proved to be better than medicine, for all night long chuckles511 and suppressed laughter were heard in the poet's bedroom. Next morning at breakfast he recited the ballad that had afforded its author so much delight in the making. The student should read it, even if he reads nothing else by Cowper; and he will be lacking in humor or appreciation if he is not ready to echo heartily512 the last stanza513:
Now let us sing, Long live the King,
And Gilpin, long live he!
And when he next doth ride abroad
May I be there to see.
ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796)
After a century and more of Classicism, we noted with interest the work of three men, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, whose poetry, like the chorus of awakening birds, suggests the dawn of another day. Two other poets of the same age suggest the sunrise. The first is the plowman Burns, who speaks straight from the heart to the primitive514 emotions of the race; the second is the mystic Blake, who only half understands his own thoughts, and whose words stir a sensitive nature as music does, or the moon in midheaven, rousing in the soul those vague desires and aspirations515 which ordinarily sleep, and which can never be expressed because they have no names. Blake lived his shy, mystic, spiritual life in the crowded city, and his message is to the few who can understand. Burns lived his sad, toilsome, erring life in the open air, with the sun and the rain, and his songs touch all the world. The latter's poetry, so far as it has a philosophy, rests upon two principles which the classic school never understood,--that common people are at heart romantic and lovers of the ideal, and that simple human emotions furnish the elements of true poetry. Largely because he follows these two principles, Burns is probably the greatest song writer of the world. His poetic creed516 may be summed up in one of his own stanzas517:
Give me ae spark o' Nature's fire,
That's a' the learning I desire;
Then, though I trudge518 thro' dub148 an' mire324
At pleugh or cart,
My Muse131, though hamely in attire519,
May touch the heart.
Illustration: ROBERT BURNS
ROBERT BURNS
Life.[205] Burns's life is "a life of fragments," as Carlyle called it; and the different fragments are as unlike as the noble "Cotter's Saturday Night" and the rant174 and riot of "The Jolly Beggars." The details of this sad and disjointed life were better, perhaps, forgotten. We call attention only to the facts which help us to understand the man and his poetry.
Burns was born in a clay cottage at Alloway, Scotland, in the bleak520 winter of 1759. His father was an excellent type of the Scotch peasant of those days,--a poor, honest, God-fearing man, who toiled521 from dawn till dark to wrest141 a living for his family from the stubborn soil. His tall figure was bent106 with unceasing labor; his hair was thin and gray, and in his eyes was the careworn522, hunted look of a peasant driven by poverty and unpaid523 rents from one poor farm to another. The family often fasted of necessity, and lived in solitude524 to avoid the temptation of spending their hard-earned money. The children went barefoot and bareheaded in all weathers, and shared the parents' toil104 and their anxiety over the rents. At thirteen Bobby, the eldest525, was doing a peasant's full day's labor; at sixteen he was chief laborer on his father's farm; and he describes the life as "the cheerless gloom of a hermit526, and the unceasing moil of a galley527 slave." In 1784 the father, after a lifetime of toil, was saved from a debtor's prison by consumption and death. To rescue something from the wreck199 of the home, and to win a poor chance of bread for the family, the two older boys set up a claim for arrears528 of wages that had never been paid. With the small sum allowed them, they buried their father, took another farm, Mossgiel, in Mauchline, and began again the long struggle with poverty.
Such, in outline, is Burns's own story of his early life, taken mostly from his letters. There is another and more pleasing side to the picture, of which we have glimpses in his poems and in his Common-place Book. Here we see the boy at school; for like most Scotch peasants, the father gave his boys the best education he possibly could. We see him following the plow426, not like a slave, but like a free man, crooning over an old Scotch song and making a better one to match the melody. We see him stop the plow to listen to what the wind is saying, or turn aside lest he disturb the birds at their singing and nest making. At supper we see the family about the table, happy notwithstanding their scant fare, each child with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other. We hear Betty Davidson reciting, from her great store, some heroic ballad that fired the young hearts to enthusiasm and made them forget the day's toil. And in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" we have a glimpse of Scotch peasant life that makes us almost reverence these heroic men and women, who kept their faith and their self-respect in the face of poverty, and whose hearts, under their rough exteriors529, were tender and true as steel.
A most unfortunate change in Burns's life began when he left the farm, at seventeen, and went to Kirkoswald to study surveying. The town was the haunt of smugglers, rough-living, hard-drinking men; and Burns speedily found his way into those scenes of "riot and roaring dissipation" which were his bane ever afterwards. For a little while he studied diligently530, but one day, while taking the altitude of the sun, he saw a pretty girl in the neighboring garden, and love put trigonometry to flight. Soon he gave up his work and wandered back to the farm and poverty again.
Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF BURNS
BIRTHPLACE OF BURNS
When twenty-seven years of age Burns first attracted literary attention, and in the same moment sprang to the first place in Scottish letters. In despair over his poverty and personal habits, he resolved to emigrate to Jamaica, and gathered together a few of his early poems, hoping to sell them for enough to pay the expenses of his journey. The result was the famous Kilmarnock edition of Burns, published in 1786, for which he was offered twenty pounds. It is said that he even bought his ticket, and on the night before the ship sailed wrote his "Farewell to Scotland," beginning, "The gloomy night is gathering531 fast," which he intended to be his last song on Scottish soil.
In the morning he changed his mind, led partly by some dim foreshadowing of the result of his literary adventure; for the little book took all Scotland by storm. Not only scholars and literary men, but "even plowboys and maid servants," says a contemporary, eagerly spent their hard-earned shillings for the new book. Instead of going to Jamaica, the young poet hurried to Edinburgh to arrange for another edition of his work. His journey was a constant ovation532, and in the capital he was welcomed and feasted by the best of Scottish society. This inexpected triumph lasted only one winter. Burns's fondness for taverns and riotous533 living shocked his cultured entertainers, and when he returned to Edinburgh next winter, after a pleasure jaunt534 through the Highlands, he received scant attention. He left the city in anger and disappointment, and went back to the soil where he was more at home.
The last few years of Burns's life are a sad tragedy, and we pass over them hurriedly. He bought the farm Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, and married the faithful Jean Armour536, in 1788, That he could write of her,
I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair;
I hear her in the tunefu' birds,
I hear her charm the air:
There's not a bonie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green;
There's not a bonie bird that sings,
But minds me o' my Jean,
is enough for us to remember. The next year he was appointed exciseman, i.e. collector of liquor revenues, and the small salary, with the return from his poems, would have been sufficient to keep his family in modest comfort, had he but kept away from taverns. For a few years his life of alternate toil and dissipation was occasionally illumined by his splendid lyric genius, and he produced many songs--"Bonnie Doon," "My Love's like a Red, Red Rose," "Auld537 Lang Syne," "Highland535 Mary," and the soul-stirring "Scots wha hae," composed while galloping538 over the moor in a storm--which have made the name of Burns known wherever the English language is spoken, and honored wherever Scotchmen gather together. He died miserably539 in 1796, when only thirty-seven years old. His last letter was an appeal to a friend for money to stave off the bailiff, and one of his last poems a tribute to Jessie Lewars, a kind lassie who helped to care for him in his illness. This last exquisite540 lyric, "O wert thou in the cauld blast," set to Mendelssohn's music, is one of our best known songs, though its history is seldom suspected by those who sing it.
The Poetry of Burns. The publication of the Kilmarnock Burns, with the title Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), marks an epoch541 in the history of English Literature, like the publication of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar. After a century of cold and formal poetry, relieved only by the romanticism of Gray and Cowper, these fresh inspired songs went straight to the heart, like the music of returning birds in springtime. It was a little volume, but a great book; and we think of Marlowe's line, "Infinite riches in a little room," in connection with it. Such poems as "The Cotter's Saturday Night," "To a Mouse," "To Mountain Daisy," "Man was Made To Mourn," "The Twa Dogs," "Address to the Deil," and "Halloween," suggest that the whole spirit of the romantic revival is embodied542 in this obscure plowman. Love, humor, pathos543, the response to nature,--all the poetic qualities that touch the human heart are here; and the heart was touched as it had not been since the days of Elizabeth. If the reader will note again the six characteristics of the romantic movement, and then read six poems of Burns, he will see at once how perfectly this one man expresses the new idea. Or take a single suggestion,--
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever158!
Ae farewell, and then forever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans544 I'll wage thee.
Who shall say that Fortune grieves him
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me;
Dark despair around benights me.
I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy;
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love forever.
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met--or never parted--
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
The "essence of a thousand love tales" is in that one little song. Because he embodies545 the new spirit of romanticism, critics give him a high place in the history of our literature; and because his songs go straight to the heart, he is the poet of common men.
Songs for MusicOf Burns's many songs for music little need be said. They have found their way into the hearts of a whole people, and there they speak for themselves. They range from the exquisite "O wert thou in the cauld blast," to the tremendous appeal to Scottish patriotism in "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," which, Carlyle said, should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. Many of these songs were composed in his best days, when following the plow or resting after his work, while the music of some old Scotch song was ringing in his head. It is largely because he thought of music while he composed that so many of his poems have the singing quality, suggesting a melody as we read them.
Among his poems of nature, "To a Mouse" and "To a Mountain Daisy" are unquestionably the best, suggesting the poetical possibilities that daily pass unnoticed under our feet. These two poems are as near as Burns ever comes to appreciating nature for its own sake. The majority of his poems, like "Winter" and "Ye banks and braes o' bonie Doon," regard nature in the same way that Gray regarded it, as a background for the play of human emotions.
Of his poems of emotion there is an immense number. It is a curious fact that the world is always laughing and crying at the same moment; and we can hardly read a page of Burns without finding this natural juxtaposition546 of smiles and tears. It is noteworthy also that all strong emotions, when expressed naturally, lend themselves to poetry; and Burns, more than any other writer, has an astonishing faculty547 of describing his own emotions with vividness and simplicity, so that they appeal instantly to our own. One cannot read, "I love my Jean," for instance, without being in love with some idealized woman; or "To Mary in Heaven," without sharing the personal grief of one who has loved and lost.
Illustration: THE AULD BRIG, AYR (AYR BRIDGE)
THE AULD BRIG, AYR (AYR BRIDGE)
Miscellaneous PoemsBesides the songs of nature and of human emotion, Burns has given us a large number of poems for which no general title can be given. Noteworthy among these are "A man's a man for a' that," which voices the new romantic estimate of humanity; "The Vision," from which we get a strong impression of Burns's early ideals; the "Epistle to a Young Friend," from which, rather than from his satires, we learn Burns's personal views of religion and honor; the "Address to the Unco Guid," which is the poet's plea for mercy in judgment; and "A Bard's Epitaph," which, as a summary of his own life, might well be written at the end of his poems. "Halloween," a picture of rustic548 merrymaking, and "The Twa Dogs" a contrast between the rich and poor, are generally classed among the poet's best works; but one unfamiliar549 with the Scotch dialect will find them rather difficult.
Of Burns's longer poems the two best worth reading are "The Cotter's Saturday Night" and "Tam o' Shanter,"--the one giving the most perfect picture we possess of a noble poverty; the other being the most lively and the least objectionable of his humorous works. It would be difficult to find elsewhere such a combination of the grewsome and the ridiculous as is packed up in "Tam o' Shanter." With the exception of these two, the longer poems add little to the author's fame or to our own enjoyment550. It is better for the beginner to read Burns's exquisite songs and gladly to recognize his place in the hearts of a people, and forget the rest, since they only sadden us and obscure the poet's better nature.
WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a lamb;"
So I piped with merry cheer.
"Piper, pipe that song again;"
So I piped:, he wept to hear.
"Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read;"
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.[206]
Of all the romantic poets of the eighteenth century, Blake is the most independent and the most original. In his earliest work, written when he was scarcely more than a child, he seems to go back to the Elizabethan song writers for his models; but for the greater part of his life he was the poet of inspiration alone, following no man's lead, and obeying no voice but that which he heard in his own mystic soul. Though the most extraordinary literary genius of his age, he had practically no influence upon it. Indeed, we hardly yet understand this poet of pure fancy, this mystic this transcendental madman, who remained to the end of his busy life an incomprehensible child.
Life. Blake, the son of a London tradesman, was a strange, imaginative child, whose soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than with the crowd of the city streets. Beyond learning to read and write, he received education; but he began, at ten years, to copy prints and to write verses. He also began a long course of art study, which resulted in his publishing his own books, adorned551 with marginal engravings colored by hand,--an unusual setting, worthy of the strong artistic sense that shows itself in many of his early verses. As a child he had visions of God and the angels looking in at his window; and as a man he thought he received visits from the souls of the great dead, Moses, Virgil, Homer, Dante, Milton,--"majestic shadows, gray but luminous," he calls them. He seems never to have asked himself the question how far these visions were pure illusions, but believed and trusted them implicitly553. To him all nature was a vast spiritual symbolism, wherein he saw elves, fairies, devils, angels,--all looking at him in friendship or enmity through the eyes of flowers and stars:
With the blue sky spread over with wings,
And the mild sun that mounts and sings;
With trees and fields full of fairy elves,
And little devils who fight for themselves;
With angels planted in hawthorne bowers554,
And God himself in the passing hours.
And this curious, pantheistic conception of nature was not a matter of creed, but the very essence of Blake's life. Strangely enough, he made no attempt to found a new religious cult64, but followed his own way, singing cheerfully, working patiently, in the face of discouragement and failure. That writers of far less genius were exalted556 to favor, while he remained poor and obscure, does not seem to have troubled him in the least. For over forty years he labored diligently at book engraving552, guided in his art by Michael Angelo. but inventing his own curious designs, at which we still wonder. The illustrations for Young's "Night Thoughts," for Blair's "Grave," and the "Inventions to the Book of Job," show the peculiarity557 of Blake's mind quite as clearly as his poems. While he worked at his trade he flung off--for he never seemed to compose--disjointed visions and incomprehensible rhapsodies, with an occasional little gem555 that still sets our hearts to singing:
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;
Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin558 shrouded559 in snow,
Rise from their graves, and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go!
That is a curious flower to find growing in the London street; but it suggests Blake's own life, which was outwardly busy and quiet, but inwardly full of adventure and excitement. His last huge prophetic works, like Jerusalem and Milton (1804), were dictated560 to him, he declares, by supernatural means, and even against his own will. They are only half intelligible561, but here and there one sees flashes of the same poetic beauty that marks his little poems. Critics generally dismiss Blake with the word "madman"; but that is only an evasion562. At best, he is the writer of exquisite lyrics; at worst, he is mad only "north-northwest," like Hamlet; and the puzzle is to find the method in his madness. The most amazing thing about him is the perfectly sane563 and cheerful way in which he moved through poverty and obscurity, flinging out exquisite poems or senseless rhapsodies, as a child might play with gems564 or straws or sunbeams indifferently. He was a gentle, kindly, most unworldly little man, with extraordinary eyes, which seem even in the lifeless portraits to reflect some unusual hypnotic power. He died obscurely, smiling at a vision of Paradise, in 1827. That was nearly a century ago, yet he still remains565 one of the most incomprehensible figures in our literature.
Works of Blake. The Poetical Sketches566, published in 1783, is a collection of Blake's earliest poetry, much of it written in boyhood. It contains much crude and incoherent work, but also a few lyrics of striking originality. Two later and better known volumes are Songs of Innocence567 and Songs of Experience, reflecting two widely different views of the human soul. As in all his works, there is an abundance of apparently worthless stuff in these songs; but, in the language of miners, it is all "pay dirt"; it shows gleams of golden grains that await our sifting568, and now and then we find a nugget unexpectedly:
My lord was like a flower upon the brows
Of lusty May; ah life as frail474 as flower!
My lord was like a star in highest heaven
Drawn down to earth by spells and wickedness;
My lord was like the opening eye of day;
But he is darkened; like the summer moon
Clouded; fall'n like the stately tree, cut down;
The breath of heaven dwelt among his leaves.
On account of the chaotic569 character of most of Blake's work, it is well to begin our reading with a short book of selections, containing the best songs of these three little volumes. Swinburne calls Blake the only poet of "supreme and simple poetic genius" of the eighteenth century, the one man of that age fit, on all accounts, to rank with the old great masters.[207] The praise is doubtless extravagant570, and the criticism somewhat intemperate571; but when we have read "The Evening Star," "Memory," "Night," "Love," "To the Muses293," "Spring," "Summer," "The Tiger," "The Lamb," "The Clod and the Pebble," we may possibly share Swinburne's enthusiasm. Certainly, in these three volumes we have some of the most perfect and the most original songs in our language.
Of Blake's longer poems, his titanic572 prophecies and apocalyptic573 splendors574, it is impossible to write justly in such a brief work as this. Outwardly they suggest a huge chaff575 pile, and the scattered576 grains of wheat hardly warrant the labor of winnowing577. The curious reader will get an idea of Blake's amazing mysticism by dipping into any of the works of his middle life,--Urizen, Gates of Paradise, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America, The French Revolution, or The Vision of the Daughters of Albion. His latest works, like Jerusalem and Milton, are too obscure to have any literary value. To read any of these works casually578 is to call the author a madman; to study them, remembering Blake's songs and his genius, is to quote softly his own answer to the child who asked about the land of dreams:
"O what land is the land of dreams,
What are its mountains and what are its streams?
--O father, I saw my mother there,
Among the lilies by waters fair."
"Dear child, I also by pleasant streams
Have wandered all night in the land of dreams;
But though calm and warm the waters wide,
I could not get to the other side."
MINOR POETS OF THE REVIVAL
We have chosen the five preceding poets, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and Blake, as the most typical and the most interesting of the writers who proclaimed the dawn of Romanticism in the eighteenth century. With them we associate a group of minor writers, whose works were immensely popular in their own day. The ordinary reader will pass them by, but to the student they are all significant as expressions of very different phases of the romantic revival.
James Thomson (1700-1748). Thomson belongs among the pioneers of Romanticism. Like Gray and Goldsmith, he wavered between Pseudo-classic and the new romantic ideals, and for this reason, if for no other, his early work is interesting, like the uncertainty579 of a child who hesitates whether to creep safely on all fours or risk a fall by walking. He is "worthy to be remembered" for three poems,--"Rule Britannia," which is still one of the national songs of England The Castle of Indolence, and The Seasons. The dreamy and romantic Castle (1748), occupied by enchanter Indolence and his willing captives in the land of Drowsyhed, is purely Spenserian in its imagery, and is written in the Spenserian stanza. The Seasons (1726-1730), written in blank verse, describes the sights and sounds of the changing year and the poet's own feelings in the presence of nature. These two poems, though rather dull to a modern reader, were significant of the early romantic revival in three ways: they abandoned the prevailing heroic couplet; they went back to the Elizabethans, instead of to Pope, for their models; and they called attention to the long-neglected life of nature as a subject for poetry.
William Collins (1721-1759). Collins, the friend and disciple580 of Thomson, was of a delicate, nervous temperament75, like Cowper; and over him also brooded the awful shadow of insanity. His first work, Oriental Eclogues (1742), is romantic in feeling, but is written in the prevailing mechanical couplets. All his later work is romantic in both thought and expression. His "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands" (1750) is an interesting event in the romantic revival, for it introduced a new world, of witches, pygmies, fairies, and medi?val kings, for the imagination to play in. Collins's best known poems are the odes "To Simplicity," "To Fear," "To the Passions," the little unnamed lyric beginning "How sleep the brave," and the exquisite "Ode to Evening." In reading the latter, one is scarcely aware that the lines are so delicately balanced that they have no need of rime287 to accentuate581 their melody.
George Crabbe (1754-1832). Crabbe is an interesting combination of realism and romanticism, his work of depicting582 common life being, at times, vaguely583 suggestive of Fielding's novels. The Village (1783), a poem without a rival as a picture of the workingmen of his age, is sometimes like Fielding in its coarse vigor, and again like Dryden in its precise versification. The poem was not successful at first, and Crabbe abandoned his literary dreams. For over twenty years he settled down as a clergyman in a country parish, observing keenly the common life about him. Then he published more poems, exactly like The Village, which immediately brought him fame and money. They brought him also the friendship of Walter Scott, who, like others, regarded Crabbe as one of the first poets of the age. These later poems, The Parish Register (1807), The Borough21 (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), are in the same strain. They are written in couplets; they are reflections of nature and of country life; they contain much that is sordid584 and dull, but are nevertheless real pictures of real men and women, just as Crabbe saw them, and as such they are still interesting. Goldsmith and Burns had idealized the poor, and we admire them for their sympathy and insight. It remained for Crabbe to show that in wretched fishing villages, in the lives of hardworking men and women, children, laborers585, smugglers, paupers,--all sorts and conditions of common men,--there is abundant romantic without exaggerating or idealizing their vices and virtues586.
James Macpherson (1736-1796). In Macpherson we have an unusual figure, who catered587 to the new romantic interest in the old epic heroes, and won immense though momentary588 fame, by a series of literary forgeries589. Macpherson was a Scotch schoolmaster, an educated man, but evidently not over-tender of conscience, whose imagination had been stirred by certain old poems which he may have heard in Gaelic among the Highlanders. In 1760 he published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands, and alleged that his work was but a translation of Gaelic manuscripts. Whether the work of itself would have attracted attention is doubtful; but the fact that an abundance of literary material might be awaiting discovery led to an interest such as now attends the opening of an Egyptian tomb, and a subscription590 was promptly raised in Edinburgh to send Macpherson through the Highlands to collect more "manuscripts." The result was the epic Fingal (1762), "that lank490 and lamentable591 counterfeit592 of poetry," as Swinburne calls it, which the author professed to have translated from the Gaelic of the poet Ossian. Its success was astonishing, and Macpherson followed it up with Temora (1763), another epic in the same strain. In both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal593 grandeur to his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times magnificent; the language is a kind of chanting, bombastic594 prose:
Now Fingal arose in his might and thrice he reared his voice. Cromla answered around, and the sons of the desert stood still. They bent their red faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of Fingal. He came like a cloud of rain in the days of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields expect the shower. Swaran beheld595 the terrible king of Morven, and stopped in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear rolling his red eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed as an oak on the banks of Lubar, which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. His thousands pour around the hero, and the darkness of battle gathers on the hill.[208]
The publication of this gloomy, imaginative work produced a literary storm. A few critics, led by Dr. Johnson, demanded to see the original manuscripts, and when Macpherson refused to produce them,[209] the Ossianic poems were branded as a forgery596; nevertheless they had enormous success. Macpherson was honored as a literary explorer; he was given an official position, carrying a salary for life; and at his death, in 1796, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Blake, Burns, and indeed most of the poets of the age were influenced by this sham poetry. Even the scholarly Gray was deceived and delighted with "Ossian"; and men as far apart as Goethe and Napoleon praised it immoderately.
Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770). This "marvelous boy," to whom Keats dedicated597 his "Endymion," and who is celebrated598 in Shelley's "Adonais," is one of the saddest and most interesting figures of the romantic revival. During his childhood he haunted the old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, in Bristol, where he was fascinated by the medi?val air of the place, and especially by one old chest, known as Canynge's coffer, containing musty documents which had been preserved for three hundred years. With strange, uncanny intentness the child pored over these relics599 of the past, copying them instead of his writing book, until he could imitate not only the spelling and language but even the handwriting of the original. Soon after the "Ossian" forgeries appeared, Chatterton began to produce documents, apparently very old, containing medi?val poems, legends, and family histories, centering around two characters,--Thomas Rowley, priest and poet, and William Canynge, merchant of Bristol in the days of Henry VI. It seems incredible that the whole design of these medi?val romances should have been worked out by a child of eleven, and that he could reproduce the style and the writing of Caxton's day so well that the printers were deceived; but such is the fact. More and more Rowley Papers, as they were called, were produced by Chatterton,--apparently from the archives of the old church; in reality from his own imagination,--delighting a large circle of readers, and deceiving all but Gray and a few scholars who recognized the occasional misuse600 of fifteenth-century English words. All this work was carefully finished, and bore the unmistakable stamp of literary genius. Reading now his "?lla," or the "Ballad of Charite," or the long poem in ballad style called "Bristowe Tragedie," it is hard to realize that it is a boy's work. At seventeen years of age Chatterton went for a literary career to London, where he soon afterwards took poison and killed himself in a fit of childish despondency, brought on by poverty and hunger.
Thomas Percy (1729-1811). To Percy, bishop163 of the Irish church, in Dromore, we are indebted for the first attempt at a systematic601 collection of the folk songs and ballads which are counted among the treasures of a nation's literature.[210] In 1765 he published, in three volumes, his famous Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The most valuable part of this work is the remarkable collection of old English and Scottish Ballads, such as "Chevy Chase," the "Nut Brown Mayde," "Children of the Wood," "Battle of Otterburn," and many more, which but for his labor might easily have perished. We have now much better and more reliable editions of these same ballads; for Percy garbled602 his materials, adding and subtracting freely, and even inventing a few ballads of his own. Two motives probably influenced him in this. First, the different versions of the same ballad varied greatly; and Percy, in changing them to suit himself, took the same liberty as had many other writers in dealing603 with the same material. Second; Percy was under the influence of Johnson and his school, and thought it necessary to add a few elegant ballads "to atone604 for the rudeness of the more obsolete605 poems." That sounds queer now, used as we are to exactness in dealing with historical and literary material; but it expresses the general spirit of the age in which he lived.
Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Percy's Reliques marks an epoch in the history of Romanticism, and it is difficult to measure its influence on the whole romantic movement. Scott says of it, "The first time I could scrape a few shillings together, I bought myself a copy of these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm." Scott's own poetry is strongly modeled upon these early ballads, and his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is due chiefly to the influence of Percy's work.
Besides the Reliques, Percy has given us another good work in his Northern Antiquities (1770) translated from the French of Mallet's History of Denmark. This also was of immense influence, since it introduced to English readers a new and fascinating mythology606, more rugged607 and primitive than that of the Greeks; and we are still, in music as in letters, under the spell of Thor and Odin, of Frea and the Valkyr maidens609, and of that stupendous drama of passion and tragedy which ended in the "Twilight610 of the Gods." The literary world owes a debt of gratitude to Percy, who wrote nothing of importance himself, but who, by collecting and translating the works of other men, did much to hasten the triumph of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.
III. THE FIRST ENGLISH NOVELISTS
The chief literary phenomena611 of the complex eighteenth century are the reign of so-called Classicism, the revival of romantic poetry, and the discovery of the modern novel. Of these three, the last is probably the most important. Aside from the fact that the novel is the most modern, and at present the most widely read and influential type of literature, we have a certain pride in regarding it as England's original contribution to the world of letters. Other great types of literature, like the epic, the romance, and the drama, were first produced by other nations; but the idea of the modern novel seems to have been worked out largely on English soil;[211] and in the number and the fine quality of her novelists, England has hardly been rivaled by any other nation. Before we study the writers who developed this new type of literature, it is well to consider briefly its meaning and history.
The Story ElementMeaning of the Novel. Probably the most significant remark made by the ordinary reader concerning a work of fiction takes the form of a question: Is it a good story? For the reader of to-day is much like the child and the primitive man in this respect, that he must be attracted and held by the story element of a narrative before he learns to appreciate its style or moral significance. The story element is therefore essential to the novel; but where the story originates is impossible to say. As well might we seek for the origin of the race; for wherever primitive men are found, there we see them gathering eagerly about the story-teller. In the halls of our Saxon ancestors the scop and the tale-bringer were ever the most welcome guests; and in the bark wigwams of the American Indians the man who told the legends of Hiawatha had an audience quite as attentive as that which gathered at the Greek festivals to hear the story of Ulysses's wanderings. To man's instinct or innate612 love for a story we are indebted for all our literature; and the novel must in some degree satisfy this instinct, or fail of appreciation.
The RomanceThe second question which we ask concerning a work of fiction is, How far does the element of imagination enter into it? For upon the element of imagination depends, largely, our classification of works of fiction into novels, romances, and mere390 adventure stories. The divisions here are as indefinite as the border land between childhood and youth, between instinct and reason; but there are certain principles to guide us. We note, in the development of any normal child, that there comes a time when for his stories he desires knights614, giants, elves, fairies, witches, magic, and marvelous adventures which have no basis in experience. He tells extraordinary tales about himself, which may be only the vague remembrances of a dream or the creations of a dawning imagination,--both of which are as real to him as any other part of life. When we say that such a child "romances," we give exactly the right name to it; for this sudden interest in extraordinary beings and events marks the development of the human imagination,--running riot at first, because it is not guided by reason, which is a later development,--and to satisfy this new interest the romance[212] was invented. The romance is, originally, a work of fiction in which the imagination is given full play without being limited by facts or probabilities. It deals with extraordinary events, with heroes whose powers are exaggerated, and often adds the element of superhuman or supernatural characters. It is impossible to draw the line where romance ends; but this element of excessive imagination and of impossible heroes and incidents is its distinguishing mark in every literature.
The NovelWhere the novel begins it is likewise impossible to say; but again we have a suggestion in the experience of every reader. There comes a time, naturally and inevitably615, in the life of every youth when the romance no longer enthralls616 him. He lives in a world of facts; gets acquainted with men and women, some good, some bad, but all human; and he demands that literature shall express life as he knows it by experience. This is the stage of the awakened447 intellect, and in our stories the intellect as well as the imagination must now be satisfied. At the beginning of this stage we delight in Robinson Crusoe; we read eagerly a multitude of adventure narratives and a few so-called historical novels; but in each case we must be lured617 by a story, must find heroes and "moving accidents by flood and field" to appeal to our imagination; and though the hero and the adventure may be exaggerated, they must both be natural and within the bounds of probability. Gradually the element of adventure or surprising incident grows less and less important, as we learn that true life is not adventurous618, but a plain, heroic matter of work and duty, and the daily choice between good and evil. Life is the most real thing in the world now,--not the life of kings, or heroes, or superhuman creatures, but the individual life with its struggles and temptations and triumphs or failures, like our own; and any work that faithfully represents life becomes interesting. So we drop the adventure story and turn to the novel. For the novel is a work of fiction in which the imagination and the intellect combine to express life in the form of a story and the imagination is always directed and controlled by the intellect. It is interested chiefly, not in romance or adventure, but in men and women as they are; it aims to show the motives and influences which govern human life, and the effects of personal choice upon character and destiny. Such is the true novel,[213] and as such it opens a wider and more interesting field than any other type of literature.
Precursors619 of the Novel. Before the novel could reach its modern stage, of a more or less sincere attempt to express human life and character, it had to pass through several centuries of almost imperceptible development. Among the early precursors of the novel we must place a collection of tales known as the Greek Romances, dating from the second to the sixth centuries. These are imaginative and delightful stories of ideal love and marvelous adventure,[214] which profoundly affected romance writing for the next thousand years. A second group of predecessors620 is found in the Italian and Spanish pastoral romances, which were inspired by the Eclogues of Virgil. These were extremely popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and their influence is seen later in Sidney's Arcadia, which is the best of this type in English.
The third and most influential group of predecessors of the novel is made up of the romances of chivalry621, such as are found in Malory's Morte d'Arthur. It is noticeable, in reading these beautiful old romances in different languages, that each nation changes them somewhat, so as to make them more expressive622 of national traits and ideals. In a word, the old romance tends inevitably towards realism, especially in England, where the excessive imagination is curbed623 and the heroes become more human. In Malory, in the unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight613, and especially in Chaucer, we see the effect of the practical English mind in giving these old romances a more natural setting, and in making the heroes suggest, though faintly, the men and women of their own day. The Canterbury Tales, with their story interest and their characters delightfully624 true to nature, have in them the suggestion, at least, of a connected story whose chief aim is to reflect life as it is.
In the Elizabethan Age the idea of the novel grows more definite. In Sidney's Arcadia (1580), a romance of chivalry, the pastoral setting at least is generally true to nature; our credulity is not taxed, as in the old romances, by the continual appearance of magic or miracles; and the characters, though idealized till they become tiresome, occasionally give the impression of being real men and women. In Bacon's The New Atlantis (1627) we have the story of the discovery by mariners of an unknown country, inhabited by a superior race of men, more civilized625 than ourselves,--an idea which had been used by More in his Utopia in 1516. These two books are neither romances nor novels, in the strict sense, but studies of social institutions. They use the connected story as a means of teaching moral lessons, and of bringing about needed reforms; and this valuable suggestion has been adopted by many of our modern writers in the so-called problem novels and novels of purpose.
Nearer to the true novel is Lodge's romantic story of Rosalynde, which was used by Shakespeare in As You Like It. This was modeled upon the Italian novella, or short story, which became very popular in England during the Elizabethan Age. In the same age we have introduced into England the Spanish picaresque novel (from picaro, a knave or rascal), which at first was a kind of burlesque on the medi?val romance, and which took for its hero some low scoundrel or outcast, instead of a knight, and followed him through a long career of scandals and villainies. One of the earliest types of this picaresque novel in English is Nash's The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594), which is also a forerunner626 of the historical novel, since its action takes place during that gorgeous interview between Henry VIII and the king of France on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. In all these short stories and picaresque novels the emphasis was laid not so much on life and character as on the adventures of the hero; and the interest consisted largely in wondering what would happen next, and how the plot would end. The same method is employed in all trashy novels and it is especially the bane of many modern story-writers. This excessive interest in adventures or incidents for their own sake, and not for their effect on character, is what distinguishes the modern adventure story from the true novel.
In the Puritan Age we approach still nearer to the modern novel, especially in the work of Bunyan; and as the Puritan always laid emphasis on character, stories appeared having a definite moral purpose. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) differs from the Faery Queen, and from all other medi?val allegories, in this important respect,--that the characters, far from being bloodless abstractions, are but thinly disguised men and women. Indeed, many a modern man, reading the story of the Christian;--has found in it the reflection of his own life and experience. In The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1682) we have another and even more realistic study of a man as he was in Bunyan's day. These two striking figures, Christian and Mr. Badman, belong among the great characters of English fiction. Bunyan's good work,--his keen insight, his delineation627 of character, and his emphasis upon the moral effects of individual action,--was carried on by Addison and Steele some thirty years later. The character of Sir Roger de Coverley is a real reflection of English country life in the eighteenth century; and with Steele's domestic sketches in The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian628 (1709-1713), we definitely cross the border land that lies outside of romance, and enter the region of character study where the novel has its beginning.
The Discovery of the Modern Novel. Notwithstanding this long history of fiction, to which we have called attention, it is safe to say that, until the publication of Richardson's Pamela in 1740, no true novel had appeared in any literature. By a true novel we mean simply a work of fiction which relates the story of a plain human life, under stress of emotion, which depends for its interest not on incident or adventure, but on its truth to nature. A number of English novelists--Goldsmith, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne--all seem to have seized upon the idea of reflecting life as it is, in the form of a story, and to have developed it simultaneously629. The result was an extraordinary awakening of interest, especially among people who had never before been greatly concerned with literature. We are to remember that, in previous periods, the number of readers was comparatively small; and that, with the exception of a few writers like Langland and Bunyan, authors wrote largely for the upper classes. In the eighteenth century the spread of education and the appearance of newspapers and magazines led to an immense increase in the number of readers; and at the same time the middle-class people assumed a foremost place in English life and history. These new readers and this new, powerful middle class had no classic tradition to hamper488 them. They cared little for the opinions of Dr. Johnson and the famous Literary Club; and, so far as they read fiction at all, they apparently took little interest in the exaggerated romances, of impossible heroes and the picaresque stories of intrigue and villainy which had interested the upper classes. Some new type of literature was demanded, this new type must express the new ideal of the eighteenth century, namely, the value and the importance of the individual life. So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. The eagerness with which their chapters were read in England, and the rapidity with which their work was copied abroad, show how powerfully the new discovery appealed to readers everywhere.
Before we consider the work of these writers who first developed the modern novel, we must glance at the work of a pioneer, Daniel Defoe, whom we place among the early novelists for the simple reason that we do not know how else to classify him.
DANIEL DEFOE (1661(?)-1731)
To Defoe is often given the credit for the discovery of the modern novel; but whether or not he deserves that honor is an open question. Even a casual reading of Robinson Crusoe (1719), which generally heads the list of modern fiction, shows that this exciting tale is largely an adventure story, rather than the study of human character which Defoe probably intended it to be. Young people still read it as they might a dime novel, skipping its moralizing passages and hurrying on to more adventures; but they seldom appreciate the excellent mature reasons which banish2 the dime novel to a secret place in the haymow, while Crusoe hangs proudly on the Christmas tree or holds an honored place on the family bookshelf. Defoe's Apparition630 of Mrs. Veal228, Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Journal of the Plague Year are such mixtures of fact, fiction, and credulity that they defy classification; while other so-called "novels," like Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, are but, little better than picaresque stories, with a deal of unnatural631 moralizing and repentance632 added for puritanical633 effect. In Crusoe, Defoe brought the realistic adventure story to a very high stage of its development; but his works hardly deserve, to be classed as true novels, which must subordinate incident to the faithful portrayal634 of human life and character.
Illustration: DANIEL DEFOE
DANIEL DEFOE
Life. Defoe was the son of a London butcher named Foe204, and kept his family name until he was forty years of age, when he added the aristocratic prefix636 with which we have grown familiar. The events of his busy seventy years of life, in which he passed through all extremes, from poverty to wealth, from prosperous brickmaker to starveling journalist, from Newgate prison to immense popularity and royal favor, are obscure enough in details; but four facts stand out clearly, which help the reader to understand the character of his work. First, Defoe was a jack-at-all-trades, as well as a writer; his interest was largely with the working classes, and notwithstanding many questionable637 practices, he seems to have had some continued purpose of educating and uplifting the common people. This partially638 accounts for the enormous popularity of his works, and for the fact that they were criticised by literary men as being "fit only for the kitchen." Second, he was a radical639 Nonconformist in religion, and was intended by his father for the independent ministry. The Puritan zeal for reform possessed640 him, and he tried to do by his pen what Wesley was doing by his preaching, without, however, having any great measure of the latter's sincerity641 or singleness of purpose. This zeal for reform marks all his numerous works, and accounts for the moralizing to be found everywhere. Third, Defoe was a journalist and pamphleteer, with a reporter's eye for the picturesque642 and a newspaper man's instinct for making a "good story." He wrote an immense number of pamphlets, poems, and magazine articles; conducted several papers,--one of the most popular, the Review, being issued from prison,--and the fact that they often blew hot and cold upon the same question was hardly noticed. Indeed, so extraordinarily643 interesting and plausible644 were Defoe's articles that he generally managed to keep employed by the party in power, whether Whig or Tory. This long journalistic career, lasting half a century, accounts for his direct, simple, narrative style, which holds us even now by its intense reality. To Defoe's genius we are also indebted for two discoveries, the "interview" and the leading editorial, both of which are still in daily use in our best newspapers.
The fourth fact to remember is that Defoe knew prison life; and thereby645 hangs a tale. In 1702 Defoe published a remarkable pamphlet called "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," supporting the claims of the free churches against the "High Fliers," i.e. Tories and Anglicans. In a vein of grim humor which recalls Swift's "Modest Proposal," Defoe advocated hanging all dissenting646 ministers, and sending all members of the free churches into exile; and so ferociously647 realistic was the satire that both Dissenters and Tories took the author literally648. Defoe was tried, found guilty of seditious libel, and sentenced to be fined, to stand three days in the pillory649, and to be imprisoned650. Hardly had the sentence been pronounced when Defoe wrote his "Hymn to the Pillory,"--
Hail hieroglyphic651 state machine,
Contrived652 to punish fancy in,--
a set of doggerel verses ridiculing653 his prosecutors654, which Defoe, with a keen eye for advertising655, scattered all over London. Crowds flocked to cheer him in the pillory; and seeing that Defoe was making popularity out of persecution656, his enemies bundled him off to Newgate prison. He turned this experience also to account by publishing a popular newspaper, and by getting acquainted with rogues658, pirates, smugglers, and miscellaneous outcasts, each one with a "good story" to be used later. After his release from prison, in 1704, he turned his knowledge of criminals to further account, and entered the government employ as a kind of spy or secret-service agent. His prison experience, and the further knowledge of criminals gained in over twenty years as a spy, accounts for his numerous stories of thieves and pirates, Jonathan Wild and Captain Avery, and also for his later novels, which deal almost exclusively with villains659 and outcasts.
When Defoe was nearly sixty years of age he turned to fiction and wrote the great work by which he is remembered. Robinson Crusoe was an instant success, and the author became famous all over Europe. Other stories followed rapidly, and Defoe earned money enough to retire to Newington and live in comfort; but not idly, for his activity in producing fiction is rivaled only by that of Walter Scott. Thus, in 1720 appeared Captain Singleton, Duncan Campbell, and Memoirs of a Cavalier; in 1722, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and the amazingly realistic Journal of the Plague Year. So the list grows with astonishing rapidity, ending with the History of the Devil in 1726.
In the latter year Defoe's secret connection with the government became known, and a great howl of indignation rose against him in the public print, destroying in an hour the popularity which he had gained by a lifetime of intrigue and labor. He fled from his home to London, where he died obscurely, in 1731, while hiding from real or imaginary enemies.
Works of Defoe. At the head of the list stands Robinson Crusoe (1719-1720), one of the few books in any literature which has held its popularity undiminished for nearly two centuries. The story is based upon the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, or Selcraig, who had been marooned660 in the island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, and who had lived there in solitude for five years. On his return to England in 1709, Selkirk's experiences became known, and Steele published an account of them in The Englishman, without, however, attracting any wide attention. That Defoe used Selkirk's story is practically certain; but with his usual duplicity he claimed to have written Crusoe in 1708, a year before Selkirk's return. However that may be, the story itself is real enough to have come straight from a sailor's logbook. Defoe, as shown in his Journal of the Plague Year and his Memoirs of a Cavalier, had the art of describing things he had never seen with the accuracy of an eyewitness.
Robinson CrusoeThe charm of the story is its intense reality, in the succession of thoughts, feelings, incidents, which every reader recognizes to be absolutely true to life. At first glance it would seem that one man on a desert island could not possibly furnish the material for a long story; but as we read we realize with amazement661 that every slightest thought and action--the saving of the cargo662 of the shipwrecked vessel663, the preparation for defense664 against imaginary foes665, the intense agitation666 over the discovery of a footprint in the sand--is a record of what the reader himself would do and feel if he were alone in such a place. Defoe's long and varied experience now stood him in good stead; in fact, he "was the only man of letters in his time who might have been thrown on a desert island without finding himself at a loss what to do;"[215] and he puts himself so perfectly in his hero's place that he repeats his blunders as well as his triumphs. Thus, what reader ever followed Defoe's hero through weary, feverish667 months of building a huge boat, which was too big to be launched by one man, without recalling some boy who spent many stormy days in shed or cellar building a boat or dog house, and who, when the thing was painted and finished, found it a foot wider than the door, and had to knock it to pieces? This absolute naturalness characterizes the whole story. It is a study of the human will also,--of patience, fortitude668, and the indomitable Saxon spirit overcoming all obstacles; and it was this element which made Rousseau recommend Robinson Crusoe as a better treatise669 on education than anything which Aristotle or the moderns had ever written. And this suggests the most significant thing about Defoe's masterpiece, namely, that the hero represents the whole of human society, doing with his own hands all the things which, by the division of labor and the demands of modern civilization, are now done by many different workers. He is therefore the type of the whole civilized race of men.
In the remaining works of Defoe, more than two hundred in number, there is an astonishing variety; but all are marked by the same simple, narrative style, and the same intense realism. The best known of these are the Journal of the Plague Year, in which the horrors of a frightful plague are minutely recorded; the Memoirs of a Cavalier, so realistic that Chatham quoted it as history in Parliament; and several picaresque novels, like Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana. The last work is by some critics given a very high place in realistic fiction, but like the other three, and like Defoe's minor narratives of Jack Sheppard and Cartouche, it is a disagreeable study of vice, ending with a forced and unnatural repentance.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761)
To Richardson belongs the credit of writing the first modern novel. He was the son of a London joiner, who, for economy's sake, resided in some unknown town in Derbyshire, where Samuel was born in 1689. The boy received very little education, but he had a natural talent for writing letters, and even as a boy we find him frequently employed by working girls to write their love letters for them. This early experience, together with his fondness for the society of "his dearest ladies" rather than of men, gave him that intimate knowledge of the hearts of sentimental670 and uneducated women which is manifest in all his work. Moreover, he was a keen observer of manners, and his surprisingly accurate descriptions often compel us to listen, even when he is most tedious. At seventeen years of age he went to London and learned the printer's trade, which he followed to the end of his life. When fifty years of age he had a small reputation as a writer of elegant epistles, and this reputation led certain publishers to approach him with a proposal that he write a series of Familiar Letters, which could be used as models by people unused to writing. Richardson gladly accepted the proposal, and had the happy inspiration to make these letters tell the connected story of a girl's life. Defoe had told an adventure story of human life on a desert island, but Richardson would tell the story of a girl's inner life in the midst of English neighbors. That sounds simple enough now, but it marked an epoch in the history of literature. Like every other great and simple discovery, it makes us wonder why some one had not thought of it before.
Richardson's Novels. The result of Richardson's inspiration was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, an endless series of letters[216] telling of the trials, tribulations671, and the final happy marriage of a too sweet young maiden608, published in four volumes extending over the years 1740 and 1741. Its chief fame lies in the fact that it is our first novel in the modern sense. Aside from this important fact, and viewed solely as a novel, it is sentimental, grandiloquent672, and wearisome. Its success at the time was enormous, and Richardson began another series of letters (he could tell a story in no other way) which occupied his leisure hours for the next six years. The result was Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, published in eight volumes in 1747-1748. This was another, and somewhat better, sentimental novel; and it was received with immense enthusiasm. Of all Richardson's heroines Clarissa is the most human. In her doubts and scruples673 of conscience, and especially in her bitter grief and humiliation674, she is a real woman, in marked contrast with the mechanical hero, Lovelace, who simply illustrates675 the author's inability to portray186 a man's character. The dramatic element in this novel is strong, and is increased by means of the letters, which enable the reader to keep close to the characters of the story and to see life from their different view points. Macaulay, who was deeply impressed by Clarissa, is said to have made the remark that, were the novel lost, he could restore almost the whole of it from memory.
Richardson now turned from his middle-class heroines, and in five or six years completed another series of letters, in which he attempted to tell the story of a man and an aristocrat635. The result was Sir Charles Grandison (1754), a novel in seven volumes, whose hero was intended to be a model of aristocratic manners and virtues for the middle-class people, who largely constituted the novelist's readers. For Richardson, who began in Pamela with the purpose of teaching his hearers how to write, ended with the deliberate purpose of teaching them how to live; and in most of his work his chief object was, in his own words, to inculcate virtue and good deportment. His novels, therefore, suffer as much from his purpose as from his own limitations. Notwithstanding his tedious moralizing and his other defects, Richardson in these three books gave something entirely new to the literary world, and the world appreciated the gift. This was the story of human life, told from within, and depending for its interest not on incident or adventure, but on its truth to human nature. Reading his work is, on the whole, like examining the antiquated676 model of a stern-wheel steamer; it is interesting for its undeveloped possibilities rather than for its achievement.
HENRY FIELDING (1707-1754)
Life. Judged by his ability alone, Fielding was the greatest of this new group of novel writers, and one of the most artistic that our literature has produced. He was born in East Stour, Dorsetshire, in 1707. In contrast with Richardson, he was well educated, having spent several years at the famous Eton school, and taken a degree in letters at the University of Leyden in 1728. Moreover, he had a deeper knowledge of life, gained from his own varied and sometimes riotous experience. For several years after returning from Leyden he gained a precarious677 living by writing plays, farces678, and buffoneries for the stage. In 1735 he married an admirable woman, of whom we have glimpses in two of his characters, Amelia, and Sophia Western, and lived extravagantly679 on her little fortune at East Stour. Having used up all his money, he returned to London and studied law, gaining his living by occasional plays and by newspaper work. For ten years, or more, little is definitely known of him, save that he published his first novel, Joseph Andrews, in 1742, and that he was made justice of the peace for Westminster in 1748. The remaining years of his life, in which his best novels were written, were not given to literature, but rather to his duties as magistrate680, and especially to breaking up the gangs of thieves and cutthroats which infested the streets of London after nightfall. He died in Lisbon, whither he had gone for his health, in 1754, and lies buried there in the English cemetery681. The pathetic account of this last journey, together with an inkling of the generosity682 and kind-heartedness of the man, notwithstanding the scandals and irregularities of his life, are found in his last work, the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon.
Fielding's Work. Fielding's first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), was inspired by the success of Pamela, and began as a burlesque of the false sentimentality and the conventional virtues of Richardson's heroine. He took for his hero the alleged brother of Pamela, who was exposed to the same kind of temptations, but who, instead of being rewarded for his virtue, was unceremoniously turned out of doors by his mistress. There the burlesque ends; the hero takes to the open road, and Fielding forgets all about Pamela in telling the adventures of Joseph and his companion, Parson Adams. Unlike Richardson, who has no humor, who minces683 words, and moralizes, and dotes on the sentimental woes684 of his heroines, Fielding is direct, vigorous, hilarious685, and coarse to the point of vulgarity. He is full of animal spirits, and he tells the story of a vagabond life, not for the sake of moralizing, like Richardson, or for emphasizing a forced repentance, like Defoe, but simply because it interests him, and his only concern is "to laugh men out of their follies686." So his story, though it abounds in unpleasant incidents, generally leaves the reader with the strong impression of reality.
Fielding's later novels are Jonathan Wild, the story of a rogue657, which suggests Defoe's narrative; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), his best work; and Amelia (1751), the story of a good wife in contrast with an unworthy husband. His strength in all these works is in the vigorous but coarse figures, like those of Jan Steen's pictures, which fill most of his pages; his weakness is in lack of taste, and in barrenness of imagination or invention, which leads him to repeat his plots and incidents with slight variations. In all his work sincerity is perhaps the most marked characteristic. Fielding likes virile687 men, just as they are, good and bad, but detests688 shams of every sort. His satire has none of Swift's bitterness, but is subtle as that of Chaucer, and good-natured as that of Steele. He never moralizes, though some of his powerfully drawn scenes suggest a deeper moral lesson than anything in Defoe or Richardson; and he never judges even the worst of his characters without remembering his own frailty689 and tempering justice with mercy. On the whole, though much of his work is perhaps in bad taste and is too coarse for pleasant or profitable reading, Fielding must be regarded as an artist, a very great artist, in realistic fiction; and the advanced student who reads him will probably concur690 in the judgment of a modern critic that, by giving us genuine pictures of men and women of his own age, without moralizing over their vices and virtues, he became the real founder691 of the modern novel.
SMOLLETT AND STERNE
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) apparently tried to carry on Fielding's work; but he lacked Fielding's genius, as well as his humor and inherent kindness, and so crowded his pages with the horrors and brutalities which are sometimes mistaken for realism. Smollett was a physician, of eccentric manners and ferocious instincts, who developed his unnatural peculiarities692 by going as a surgeon on a battleship, where he seems to have picked up all the evils of the navy and of the medical profession to use later in his novels.
Smollett's NovelsHis three best known works are Roderick Random (1748), a series of adventures related by the hero; Peregrine Pickle693 (1751) in which he reflects with brutal directness the worst of his experiences at sea; and Humphrey Clinker (1771), his last work, recounting the mild adventures of a Welsh family in a journey through England and Scotland. This last alone can be generally read without arousing the readers profound disgust. Without any particular ability, he models his novels on Don Quixote, and the result is simply a series of coarse adventures which are characteristic of the picaresque novel of his age. Were it not for the fact that he unconsciously imitates Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, he would hardly be named among our writers of fiction; but in seizing upon some grotesque habit or peculiarity and making a character out of it--such as Commodore Trunnion in Peregrine Pickle, Matthew Bramble in Humphrey Clinker, and Bowling694 in Roderick Random--he laid the foundation for that exaggeration in portraying695 human eccentricities696 which finds a climax in Dickens's caricatures.
Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) has been compared to a "little bronze satyr of antiquity697 in whose hollow body exquisite odors were stored." That is true, so far as the satyr is concerned; for a more weazened, unlovely personality would be hard to find. The only question in the comparison is in regard to the character of the odors, and that is a matter of taste. In his work he is the reverse of Smollett, the latter being given over to coarse vulgarities, which are often mistaken for realism; the former to whims189 and vagaries698 and sentimental tears, which frequently only disguise a sneer699 at human grief and pity.
Sterne's WorkThe two books by which Sterne is remembered are Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. These are termed novels for the simple reason that we know not what else to call them. The former was begun, in his own words, "with no real idea of how it was to turn out"; its nine volumes, published at intervals from 1760 to 1767, proceeded in the most aimless way, recording700 the experiences of the eccentric Shandy family; and the book was never finished. Its strength lies chiefly in its brilliant style, the most remarkable of the age, and in its odd characters, like Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, which, with all their eccentricities, are so humanized by the author's genius that they belong among the great "creations" of our literature. The Sentimental Journey is a curious combination of fiction, sketches of travel, miscellaneous essays on odd subjects,--all marked by the same brilliancy of style, and all stamped with Sterne's false attitude towards everything in life. Many of its best passages were either adapted or taken bodily from Burton, Rabelais, and a score of other writers; so that, in reading Sterne, one is never quite sure how much is his own work, though the mark of his grotesque genius is on every page.
The First Novelists and their Work. With the publication of Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield in 1766 the first series of English novels came to a suitable close. Of this work, with its abundance of homely sentiment clustering about the family life as the most sacred of Anglo-Saxon institutions, we have already spoken[217] If we except Robinson Crusoe, as an adventure story, the Vicar of Wakefield is the only novel of the period which can be freely recommended to all readers, as giving an excellent idea of the new literary type, which was perhaps more remarkable for its promise than for its achievement. In the short space of twenty-five years there suddenly appeared and flourished a new form of literature, which influenced all Europe for nearly a century, and which still furnishes the largest part of our literary enjoyment. Each successive novelist brought some new element to the work, as when Fielding supplied animal vigor and humor to Richardson's analysis of a human heart, and Sterne added brilliancy, and Goldsmith emphasized purity and the honest domestic sentiments which are still the greatest ruling force among men. So these early workers were like men engaged in carving701 a perfect cameo from the reverse side. One works the profile, another the eyes, a third the mouth and the fine lines of character; and not till the work is finished, and the cameo turned, do we see the complete human face and read its meaning. Such, in a parable274, is the story of the English novel.
Summary of the Eighteenth Century. The period we are studying is included between the English Revolution of 1688 and the beginning of the French Revolution of 1789. Historically, the period begins in a remarkable way by the adoption702 of the Bill of Rights in 1689. This famous bill was the third and final step in the establishment of constitutional government, the first step being the Great Charter (1215), and the second the Petition of Right (1628). The modern form of cabinet government was established in the reign of George I (1714-1727). The foreign prestige of England was strengthened by the victories of Marlborough on the Continent, in the War of the Spanish Succession; and the bounds of empire were enormously increased by Clive in India, by Cook in Australia and the islands of the Pacific, and by English victories over the French in Canada and the Mississippi Valley, during the Seven Years', or French and Indian, Wars. Politically, the country was divided into Whigs and Tories: the former seeking greater liberty for the people; the latter upholding the king against popular government. The continued strife between these two political parties had a direct (and generally a harmful) influence on literature, as many of the great writers were used by the Whig or Tory party to advance its own interests and to satirize its enemies. Notwithstanding this perpetual strife of parties, the age is remarkable for the rapid social development, which soon expressed itself in literature. Clubs and coffeehouses multiplied, and the social life of these clubs resulted in better manners, in a general feeling of toleration, and especially in a kind of superficial elegance which shows itself in most of the prose and poetry of the period. On the other hand, the moral standard of the nation was very low; bands of rowdies infested the city streets after nightfall; bribery703 and corruption704 were the rule in politics; and drunkenness was frightfully prevalent among all classes. Swift's degraded race of Yahoos is a reflection of the degradation to be seen in multitudes of London saloons. This low standard of morals emphasizes the importance of the great Methodist revival under Whitefield and Wesley, which began in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.
The literature of the century is remarkably complex, but we may classify it all under three general heads,--the Reign of so-called Classicism, the Revival of Romantic Poetry, and the Beginning of the Modern Novel. The first half of the century, especially, is an age of prose, owing largely to the fact that the practical and social interests of the age demanded expression. Modern newspapers, like the Chronicle, Post, and Times, and literary magazines, like the Tatler and Spectator, which began in this age, greatly influenced the development of a serviceable prose style. The poetry of the first half of the century, as typified in Pope, was polished, unimaginative, formal; and the closed couplet was in general use, supplanting705 all other forms of verse. Both prose and poetry were too frequently satiric, and satire does not tend to produce a high type of literature. These tendencies in poetry were modified, in the latter part of the century, by the revival of romantic poetry.
In our study we have noted: (1) the Augustan or Classic Age; the meaning of Classicism; the life and work of Alexander Pope, the greatest poet of the age; of Jonathan Swift, the satirist; of Joseph Addison, the essayist; of Richard Steele, who was the original genius of the Tatler and the Spectator; of Samuel Johnson, who for nearly half a century was the dictator of English letters; of James Boswell, who gave us the immortal Life of Johnson; of Edmund Burke, the greatest of English orators; and of Edward Gibbon, the historian, famous for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
(2) The Revival of Romantic Poetry; the meaning of Romanticism; the life and work of Thomas Gray; of Oliver Goldsmith, famous as poet, dramatist, and novelist; of William Cowper; of Robert Burns, the greatest of Scottish poets; of William Blake, the mystic; and the minor poets of the early romantic movement,--James Thomson, William Collins, George Crabbe, James Macpherson, author of the Ossian poems, Thomas Chatterton, the boy who originated the Rowley Papers, and Thomas Percy, whose work for literature was to collect the old ballads, which he called the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and to translate the stories of Norse mythology in his Northern Antiquities.
(3) The First English Novelists; the meaning and history of the modern novel; the life and work of Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, who is hardly to be called a novelist, but whom we placed among the pioneers; and the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith.
Selections for Reading. Manly's English Poetry and Manly's English Prose (Ginn and Company) are two excellent volumes containing selections from all authors studied. Ward8's English Poets (4 vols.), Craik's English Prose Selections (5 vols.), and Garnett's English Prose from Elizabeth to Victoria are useful for supplementary706 reading. All important works should be read entire, in one of the following inexpensive editions, published for school use. (For titles and publishers, see General Bibliography707 at end of this book.)
Pope. Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, edited by Parrott, in Standard English Classics. Various other school editions of the Essay on Man, and Rape of the Lock, in Riverside Literature Series, Pocket Classics, etc.; Pope's Iliad, I, VI, XXII, XXIV, in Standard English Classics, etc. Selections from Pope, edited by Reed, in Holt's English Readings.
Swift. Gulliver's Travels, school edition by Ginn and Company; also in Temple Classics, etc. Selections from Swift, edited by Winchester, in Athenaeum Press (announced); the same, edited by Craik, in Clarendon Press; the same, edited by Prescott, in Holt's English Readings. Battle of the Books, in King's Classics, Bohn's Library, etc.
Addison and Steele. Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, in Standard English Classics, Riverside Literature, etc.; Selections from Addison, edited by Wendell and Greenough, and Selections from Steele, edited by Carpenter, both in Athenaeum Press; various other selections, in Golden Treasury708 Series, Camelot Series, Holt's English Readings, etc.
Johnson. Lives of the Poets, in Cassell's National Library; Selected Essays, edited by G.B. Hill (Dent); Selections, in Little Masterpieces Series; Rasselas, in Holt's English Readings, and in Morley's Universal Library.
Boswell. Life of Johnson (2 vols.), in Everyman's Library; the same (3 vols.), in Library of English Classics; also in Temple Classics, and Bohn's Library.
Burke. American Taxation, Conciliation with America, Letter to a Noble Lord, in Standard English Classics; various speeches, in Pocket Classics, Riverside Literature Series, etc.; Selections, edited by B. Perry (Holt); Speeches on America (Heath, etc.).
Gibbon. The Student's Gibbon, abridged709 (Murray); Memoirs, edited by Emerson, in Athenaeum Press.
Gray. Selections, edited by W.L. Phelps, in Athenaeum Press; Selections from Gray and Cowper, in Canterbury Poets, Riverside Literature, etc.; Gray's Elegy, in Selections from Five English Poets (Ginn and Company).
Goldsmith. Deserted Village, in Standard English Classics, etc.; Vicar of Wakefield, in Standard English Classics, Everyman's Library, King's Classics, etc.; She Stoops to Conquer, in Pocket Classics, Belles710 Lettres Series, etc.
Cowper. Selections, edited by Murray, in Athenaeum Press; Selections, in Cassell's National Library, Canterbury Poets, etc.; The Task, in Temple Classics.
Burns. Representative Poems, with Carlyle's Essay on Burns, edited by C.L. Hanson, in Standard English Classics; Selections, in Pocket Classics, Riverside Literature, etc.
Blake. Poems, edited by W.B. Yeats, in Muses' Library; Selections, in Canterbury Poets, etc.
Minor Poets. Thomson, Collins, Crabbe, etc. Selections, in Manly's English Poetry. Thomson's The Seasons, and Castle of Indolence, in Modern Classics; the same poems in Clarendon Press, and in Temple Classics; Selections from Thomson, in Cassell's National Library. Chatterton's poems, in Canterbury Poets. Macpherson's Ossian, in Canterbury Poets. Percy's Reliques, in Everyman's Library, Chandos Classics, Bohn's Library, etc. More recent and reliable collections of popular ballads, for school use, are Gummere's Old English Ballads, in Athenaeum Press; The Ballad Book, edited by Allingham, in Goldern Treasury Series; Gayley and Flaherty's Poetry of the People (Ginn and Company), etc. See Bibliography on p. 64.
Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, school edition, by Ginn and Company; the same in Pocket Classics, etc.; Journal of the Plague Year, edited by Hurlbut (Ginn and Company); the same, in Everyman's Library, etc.; Essay on Projects, in Cassell's National Library.
The Novelists. Manly's English Prose; Craik's English Prose Selections, vol. 4; Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (see above); Selected Essays of Fielding, edited by Gerould, in Athen?um Press.
Bibliography.[218]
History. Text-book, Montgomery, pp. 280-322; Cheyney, pp. 516-574. General Works, Greene, ch. 9, sec. 7, to ch. 10, sec. 4; Traill, Gardiner, Macaulay, etc. Special Works, Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vols. 1-3; Morris's The Age of Queen Anne and the Early Hanoverians (Epochs of Modern History); Seeley's The Expansion of England; Macaulay's Clive, and Chatham; Thackeray's The Four Georges, and the English Humorists; Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne; Susan Hale's Men and Manners of the Eighteenth Century; Sydney's England and the English in the Eighteenth Century.
Literature. General Works. The Cambridge Literature, Taine, Saintsbury, etc. Special Works. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century; L. Stephen's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century; Seccombe's The Age of Johnson; Dennis's The Age of Pope; Gosse's History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century; Whitwell's Some Eighteenth Century Men of Letters (Cowper, Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith, Gray, Johnson, and Boswell); Johnson's Eighteenth Century Letters and Letter Writers; Williams's English Letters and Letter Writers of the Eighteenth Century; Minto's Manual of English Prose Writers; Clark's Study of English Prose Writers; Bourne's English Newspapers; J.B. Williams's A History of English Journalism711; L. Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.
The Romantic Revival. W.L. Phelps's The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement; Beers's English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century.
The Novel. Raleigh's The English Novel; Simonds's An Introduction to the Study of English Fiction; Cross's The Development of the English Novel; Jusserand's The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare; Stoddard's The Evolution of the English Novel; Warren's The History of the English Novel previous to the Seventeenth Century; Masson's British Novelists and their Styles; S. Lanier's The English Novel; Hamilton's the Materials and Methods of Fiction; Perry's A Study of Prose Fiction.
Pope. Texts: Works in Globe Edition, edited by A.W. Ward; in Cambridge Poets, edited by H.W. Boynton; Satires and Epistles, in Clarendon Press; Letters, in English Letters and Letter Writers of the Eighteenth Century, edited by H. Williams (Bell). Life: by Courthope; by L. Stephen (English Men of Letters Series); by Ward, in Globe Edition; by Johnson, in Lives of the Poets (Cassell's National Library, etc.). Criticism: Essays, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Lowell, in My Study Windows; by De Quincey, in Biographical Essays, and in Essays on the Poets; by Thackeray, in English Humorists; by Sainte-Beuve, in English Portraits. Warton's Genius and Writings of Pope (interesting chiefly from the historical view point, as the first definite and extended attack on Pope's writings).
Swift. Texts: Works, 19 vols., ed. by Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1814-1824); best edition of prose works is edited by T. Scott, with introduction by Lecky, 12 vols. (Bonn's Library); Selections, edited by Winchester (Ginn and Company); also in Camelot Series, Carisbrooke Library, etc., Journal to Stella, (Dutton, also Putnam); Letters, in Eighteenth Century Letters and Letter Writers, ed. by T.B. Johnson. Life: by L. Stephen (English Men of Letters); by Collins; by Craik; by J. Forster; by Macaulay; by Walter Scott; by Johnson, in Lives of the Poets. Criticism: Essays, by Thackeray, in English Humorists; by A. Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes; by Masson, in the Three Devils and Other Essays.
Addison. Texts: Works, in Bohn's British Classics; Selections, in Athenaeum Press, etc. Life: by Lucy Aiken; by Courthope (English Men of Letters); by Johnson, in Lives of the Poets. Criticism: Essays, by Macaulay; by Thackeray.
Steele. Texts: Selections, edited by Carpenter in Athenaeum Press (Ginn and Company); various other Selections published by Putnam, Bangs, in Camelot Series, etc.; Plays, edited by Aitken, in Mermaid712 Series. Life: by Aitken; by A. Dobson (English Worthies713 Series). Criticism: Essays by Thackeray; by Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes.
Johnson. Texts: Works, edited by Walesby, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1825); the same, edited by G.B. Hill, in Clarendon Press. Essays, edited by G.B. Hill (Dent); the same, in Camelot series; Rasselas, various school editions, by Ginn and Company, Holt, etc.; Selections from Lives of the Poets, with Macaulay's Life of Johnson, edited by Matthew Arnold (Macmillan). Life: Boswell's Life of Johnson, in Everyman's Library, Temple Classics, Library of English Classics, etc.; by L. Stephen (English Men of Letters); by Grant. Criticism: G.B. Hill's Dr. Johnson, his Friends and Critics; Essays, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Macaulay, Birrell, etc.
Boswell. Texts: Life of Johnson, edited by G.B. Hill (London, 1874); various other editions (see above). Life: by Fitzgerald (London, 1891); Roger's Boswelliana (London, 1874). Whitfield's Some Eighteenth Century Men of Letters.
Burke. Texts: Works, 12 vols. (Boston, 1871); reprinted, 6 vols., in Bohn's Library; Selected Works, edited by Payne, in Clarendon Press; On the Sublime and Beautiful, in Temple Classics. For various speeches, see Selections for Reading, above. Life: by Prior; by Morley (English Men of Letters). Criticism: Essay, by Birrell, in Obiter Dicta. See also Dowden's French Revolution and English Literature, and Woodrow Wilson's Mere Literature.
Gibbon. Texts: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by Bury, 7 vols. (London, 1896-1900); various other editions; The Student's Gibbon, abridged (Murray); Memoirs, edited by Emerson, in Athenaeum Press (Ginn and Company). Life: by Morison (English Men of Letters). Criticism: Essays, by Birrell, in Collected Essays and Res Judicatae; by Stephen, in Studies of a Biographer; by Robertson, in Pioneer Humanists; by Frederick Harrison, in Ruskin and Other Literary Estimates; by Bagehot, in Literary Studies; by Sainte-Beuve, in English Portraits. See also Anton's Masters in History.
Sheridan. Texts: Speeches, 5 vols. (London, 1816); Plays, edited by W.F. Rae (London, 1902); the same, edited by R. Dircks, in Camelot Series; Major Dramas, in Athenaeum Press; Plays also in Morley's Universal Library, Macmillan's English Classics, etc. Life: by Rae; by M. Oliphant (English Men of Letters); by L. Sanders (Great Writers).
Gray. Texts: Works, edited by Gosse (Macmillan); Poems, in Routledge's Pocket Library, Chandos Classics, etc.; Selections, in Athenaeum Press, etc.; Letters, edited by D.C. Tovey (Bohn). Life: by Gosse (English Men of Letters). Criticism: Essays, by Lowell, in Latest Literary Essays; by M. Arnold, in Essays in Criticism; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by A. Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes.
Goldsmith. Texts: edited by Masson, Globe edition; Works, edited by Aiken and Tuckerman (Crowell); the same, edited by A. Dobson (Dent); Morley's Universal Library; Arber's The Goldsmith Anthology (Frowde). See also Selections for Reading, above. Life: by Washington Irving; by A. Dobson (Great Writer's Series); by Black (English Men of Letters); by J. Forster; by Prior. Criticism: Essays, by Macaulay; by Thackeray; by De Quincey; by A. Dobson, in Miscellanies.
Cowper. Texts: Works, Globe and Aldine editions; also in Chandos Classics; Selections, in Athenasum Press, Canterbury Poets, etc. The Correspondence of William Cowper, edited by T. Wright, 4 vols. (Dodd, Mead714 & Company). Life: by Goldwin Smith (English Men of Letters); by Wright; by Southey. Criticism: Essays, by L. Stephen; by Bagehot; by Sainte-Beuve; by Birrell; by Stopford Brooke; by A. Dobson (see above). See also Woodberry's Makers715 of Literature.
Burns. Texts: Works, Cambridge Poets Edition (containing Henley's Study of Burns), Globe and Aldine editions, Clarendon Press, Canterbury Poets, etc.; Selections, in Athenaeum Press, etc.; Letters, in Camelot Series. Life: by Cunningham; by Henley; by Setoun; by Blackie (Great Writers); by Shairp (English Men of Letters). Criticism: Essays, by Carlyle; by R.L. Stevenson, in Familiar Studies; by Hazlitt, in Lectures on the English Poets; by Stopford Brooke, in Theology in the English Poets; by J. Forster, in Great Teachers.
Blake. Texts: Poems, Aldine edition; also in Canterbury Poets; Complete Works, edited by Ellis and Yeats (London, 1893); Selections, edited by W.B. Yeats, in the Muses' Library (Dutton); Letters, with Life by F. Tatham, edited by A.G.B. Russell (Scribner's, 1896). Life: by Gilchrist; by Story; by Symons. Criticism: Swinburne's William Blake, a Critical Study; Ellis's The Real Blake (McClure, 1907); Elizabeth Cary's The Art of William Blake (Moffat, Yard & Company, 1907). Essay, by A.C. Benson, in Essays.
Thomson. Texts: Works, Aldine edition; The Seasons, and Castle of Indolence, in Clarendon Press, etc. Life: by Bayne; by G.B. Macaulay (English Men of Letters). Essay, by Hazlitt, in Lectures on the English Poets.
Collins. Works, edited by Bronson, in Athenaeum Press; also in Aldine edition. Life: by Johnson, in Lives of the Poets. Essay, by Swinburne, in Miscellanies. See also Beers's English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century.
Crabbe. Works, with memoir394 by his son, G. Crabbe, 8 vols. (London, 1834-1835); Poems, edited by A.W. Ward, 3 vols., in Cambridge English Classics (Cambridge, 1905); Selections, in Temple Classics, Canterbury Poets, etc. Life: by Kebbel (Great Writers); by Ainger (English Men of Letters). Essays, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Woodberry, in Makers of Literature; by Saintsbury, in Essays in English Literature; by Courthope, in Ward's English Poets; by Edward Fitzgerald, in Miscellanies; by Hazlitt, in Spirit of the Age.
Macpherson. Texts: Ossian, in Canterbury Poets; Poems, translated by Macpherson, edited by Todd (London, 1888). Life and Letters, edited by Saunders (London, 1894). Criticism: J.S. Smart's James Macpherson (Nutt, 1905). See also Beers's English Romanticism. For relation of Macpherson's work to the original Ossian, see Dean of Lismore's Book, edited by MacLauchlan (Edinburgh, 1862); also Poems of Ossian, translated by Clerk (Edinburgh, 1870).
Chatterton. Works, edited by Skeat (London, 1875); Poems, in Canterbury Poets. Life: by Russell; by Wilson; Masson's Chatterton, a Biography. Criticism: C.E. Russell's Thomas Chatterton (Moffatt, Yard & Company); Essays, by Watts-Dunton, in Ward's English Poets; by Masson, in Essays Biographical and Critical. See also Beers's English Romanticism.
Percy. Reliques, edited by Wheatley (London, 1891); the same, in Everyman's Library, Chandos Classics, etc. Essay, by J.W. Hales, Revival of Ballad Poetry, in Folia Literaria. See also Beers's English Romanticism, etc. (Special works, above.)
Defoe. Texts: Romances and Narratives, edited by Aitken (Dent); Poems and Pamphlets, in Arber's English Garner716, vol. 8; school editions of Robinson Crusoe, and Journal of the Plague Year (Ginn and Company, etc.); Captain Singleton, and Memoirs of a Cavalier, in Everyman's Library; Early Writings, in Carisbrooke Library (Routledge). Life: by W. Lee; by Minto (English Men of Letters); by Wright; also in Westminster Biographies (Small, Maynard). Essay, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library.
Richardson. Works: edited by L. Stephen (London, 1883); edited by Philips, with life (New York, 1901); Correspondence, edited by A. Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804). Life: by Thomson; by A. Dobson. Essays, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by A. Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes.
Fielding. Works: Temple Edition, edited by Saintsbury (Dent); Selected Essays, in Athenaeum Press; Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, in Cassell's National Library. Life: by Dobson (English Men of Letters); Lawrence's Life and Times of Fielding. Essays, by Lowell; by Thackeray; by L. Stephen; by A. Dobson (see above); by G.B. Smith, in Poets and Novelists.
Smollett. Works, edited by Saintsbury (London, 1895); Works, edited by Henley (Scribner). Life: by Hannah (Great Writers); by Smeaton; by Chambers717. Essays, by Thackeray; by Henley; by Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes.
Sterne. Works: edited by Saintsbury (Dent); Tristram Shandy, and A Sentimental Journey, in Temple Classics, Morley's Universal Library, etc. Life: by Fitzgerald; by Traill (English Men of Letters); Life and Times, by W.L. Cross (Macmillan). Essays, by Thackeray; by Bagehot, in Literary Studies.
Horace Walpole. Texts: Castle of Otranto, in King's Classics, Cassell's National Library, etc. Letters, edited by C.D. Yonge. Morley's Walpole, in Twelve English Statesmen (Macmillan). Essay, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library. See also Beers's English Romanticism.
Frances Burney (Madame d'Arblay). Texts: Evelina, in Temple Classics, 2 vols. (Macmillan). Diary and Letters, edited by S.C. Woolsey. Seeley's Fanny Burney and her Friends. Essay, by Macaulay.
Suggestive Questions. 1. Describe briefly the social development of the eighteenth century. What effect did this have on literature? What accounts for the prevalence of prose? What influence did the first newspapers exert on life and literature? How do the readers of this age compare with those of the Age of Elizabeth?
2. How do you explain the fact that satire was largely used in both prose and poetry? Name the principal satires of the age. What is the chief object of satire? of literature? How do the two objects conflict?
3. What is the meaning of the term "classicism," as applied to the literature of this age? Did the classicism of Johnson, for instance, have any relation to classic literature in its true sense? Why is this period called the Augustan Age? Why was Shakespeare not regarded by this age as a classical writer?
4. Pope. In what respect is Pope a unique writer? Tell briefly the story of his life. What are his principal works? How does he reflect the critical spirit of his age? What are the chief characteristics of his poetry? What do you find to copy in his style? What is lacking in his poetry? Compare his subjects with those of Burns of Tennyson or Milton, for instance. How would Chaucer or Burns tell the story of the Rape of the Lock? What similarity do you find between Pope's poetry and Addison's prose?
5. Swift. What is the general character of Swift's work? Name his chief satires. What is there to copy in his style? Does he ever strive for ornament115 or effect in writing? Compare Swift's Gulliver's Travels with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, in style, purpose of writing, and interest. What resemblances do you find in these two contemporary writers? Can you explain the continued popularity of Gulliver's Travels?
6. Addison and Steele. What great work did Addison and Steele do for literature? Make a brief comparison between these two men, having in mind their purpose, humor, knowledge of life, and human sympathy, as shown, for instance, in No. 112 and No. 2 of the Spectator Essays. Compare their humor with that of Swift. How is their work a preparation for the novel?
7. Johnson. For what is Dr. Johnson famous in literature? Can you explain his great influence? Compare his style with that of Swift or Defoe. What are the remarkable elements in Boswell's Life of Johnson? Write a description of an imaginary meeting of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Boswell in a coffeehouse.
8. Burke. For what is Burke remarkable? What great objects influenced him in the three periods of his life? Why has he been called a romantic poet who speaks in prose? Compare his use of imagery with that of other writers of the period. What is there to copy and what is there to avoid in his style? Can you trace the influence of Burke's American speeches on later English politics? What similarities do you find between Burke and Milton, as revealed in their prose works?
9. Gibbon. For what is Gibbon "worthy to be remembered"? Why does he mark an epoch in historical writing? What is meant by the scientific method of writing history? Compare Gibbon's style with that of Johnson. Contrast it with that of Swift, and also with that of some modern historian, Parkman, for example.
10. What is meant by the term "romanticism?" What are its chief characteristics? How does it differ from classicism? Illustrate the meaning from the work of Gray, Cowper, or Burns. Can you explain the prevalence of melancholy in romanticism?
11. Gray. What are the chief works of Gray? Can you explain the continued popularity of his "Elegy"? What romantic elements are found in his poetry? What resemblances and what differences do you find in the works of Gray and of Goldsmith?
12. Goldsmith. Tell the story of Goldsmith's life. What are his chief works? Show from The Deserted Village the romantic and the so-called classic elements in his work. What great work did he do for the early novel, in The Vicar of Wakefield? Can you explain the popularity of She Stoops to Conquer? Name some of Goldsmith's characters who have found a permanent place in our literature. What personal reminiscences have you noted in The Traveller, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer?
13. Cowper. Describe Cowper's The Task. How does it show the romantic spirit? Give passages from "John Gilpin" to illustrate Cowper's humor.
14. Burns. Tell the story of Burns's life. Some one has said, "The measure of a man's sin is the difference between what he is and what he might be." Comment upon this, with reference to Burns. What is the general character of his poetry? Why is he called the poet of common men? What subjects does he choose for his poetry? Compare him, in this respect, with Pope. What elements in the poet's character are revealed in such poems as "To a Mouse" and "To a Mountain Daisy"? How do Burns and Gray regard nature? What poems show his sympathy with the French Revolution, and with democracy? Read "The Cotter's Saturday Night," and explain its enduring interest. Can you explain the secret of Burns's great popularity?
15. Blake. What are the characteristics of Blake's poetry? Can you explain why Blake, though the greatest poetic genius of the age, is so little appreciated?
16. Percy. In what respect did Percy's Reliques influence the romantic movement? What are the defects in his collection of ballads? Can you explain why such a crude poem as "Chevy Chase" should be popular with an age that delighted in Pope's "Essay on Man"?
17. Macpherson. What is meant by Macpherson's "Ossian"? Can you account for the remarkable success of the Ossianic forgeries?
18. Chatterton. Tell the story of Chatterton and the Rowley Poems. Read Chatterton's "Bristowe Tragedie," and compare it, in style and interest, with the old ballads, like "The Battle of Otterburn" or "The Hunting of the Cheviot" (all in Manly's English Poetry).
19. The First Novelists. What is meant by the modern novel? How does it differ from the early romance and from the adventure story? What are some of the precursors of the novel? What was the purpose of stories modeled after Don Quixote? What is the significance of Pamela? What elements did Fielding add to the novel? What good work did Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield accomplish? Compare Goldsmith, in this respect, with Steele and Addison.
CHRONOLOGY
End of Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Century
HISTORY LITERATURE
1689. William and Mary 1683-1719. Defoe's early writings
Bill of Rights.
Toleration Act
1695. Press made free
1700(?) Beginning of London clubs
1702. Anne (d. 1714)
War of Spanish Succession
1702. First daily newspaper
1704. Battle of Blenheim 1704. Addison's The Campaign
Swift's Tale of a Tub
1707. union of England and Scotland
1709. The Tatler
Johnson born (d. 1784)
1710-1713. Swift in London. Journal
to Stella
1711. The Spectator
1712. Pope's Rape of the Lock
1714. George I (d. 1727)
1719. Robinson Crusoe
1721. Cabinet government, Walpole
first prime minister
1726. Gulliver's Travels
1726-1730. Thomson's The Seasons
1727. George II (d. 1760)
1732-1734. Essay on Man
1738. Rise of Methodism
1740. Richardson's Pamela
1740. War of Austrian Succession
1742. Fielding's Joesph Andrews
1746. Jacobite Rebellion
1749. Fielding's Tom Jones
1750-1752. Johnson's The Rambler
1750-1757. Conquest of India 1751. Gray's Elegy
1755. Johnson's Dictionary
1756. War with France
1759. Wolf at Quebec
1760. George III (d. 1820) 1760-1767. Sterne's Tristram Shandy
1764. Johnson's Literary Club
1765. Stamp Act 1765. Percy's Reliques
1766. Goldsmith's Vicar of
Wakefield
1770. Goldsmith's Deserted Village
1771. Beginning of great newspapers
1773. Boston Tea Party
1774. Howard's prison reforms 1774-1775. Burke's American speeches
1775. American Revolution 1776-1788. Gibbon's Rome
1776. Declaration of Independence 1779. Cowper's Olney Hymns
1779-81. Johnson's Lives of the Poets
1783. Treaty of Paris 1783. Blake's Poetical Sketches
1785. Cowper's The Task
The London Times
1786. Trial of Warren Hastings
1786. Burns's first poems (the
Kilmarnock Burns)
Burke's Warren Hastings
1789-1799. French Revolution
1790. Burke's French Revolution
1791. Boswell's Life of Johnson
1793. War with France
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1 banished | |
v.放逐,驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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2 banish | |
vt.放逐,驱逐;消除,排除 | |
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3 remarkable | |
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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4 isolated | |
adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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5 sociability | |
n.好交际,社交性,善于交际 | |
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6 filthy | |
adj.卑劣的;恶劣的,肮脏的 | |
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7 infested | |
adj.为患的,大批滋生的(常与with搭配)v.害虫、野兽大批出没于( infest的过去式和过去分词 );遍布于 | |
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8 ward | |
n.守卫,监护,病房,行政区,由监护人或法院保护的人(尤指儿童);vt.守护,躲开 | |
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9 prevailing | |
adj.盛行的;占优势的;主要的 | |
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10 elegance | |
n.优雅;优美,雅致;精致,巧妙 | |
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11 dissenters | |
n.持异议者,持不同意见者( dissenter的名词复数 ) | |
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12 dissenter | |
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13 offset | |
n.分支,补偿;v.抵消,补偿 | |
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14 antagonisms | |
对抗,敌对( antagonism的名词复数 ) | |
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15 unity | |
n.团结,联合,统一;和睦,协调 | |
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16 philosophical | |
adj.哲学家的,哲学上的,达观的 | |
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17 zeal | |
n.热心,热情,热忱 | |
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18 scripture | |
n.经文,圣书,手稿;Scripture:(常用复数)《圣经》,《圣经》中的一段 | |
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19 satire | |
n.讽刺,讽刺文学,讽刺作品 | |
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20 followers | |
追随者( follower的名词复数 ); 用户; 契据的附面; 从动件 | |
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21 borough | |
n.享有自治权的市镇;(英)自治市镇 | |
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22 patriotic | |
adj.爱国的,有爱国心的 | |
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23 patriot | |
n.爱国者,爱国主义者 | |
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24 cynical | |
adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的,不信世道向善的 | |
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25 corrupt | |
v.贿赂,收买;adj.腐败的,贪污的 | |
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26 premier | |
adj.首要的;n.总理,首相 | |
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27 revival | |
n.复兴,复苏,(精力、活力等的)重振 | |
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28 untold | |
adj.数不清的,无数的 | |
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29 noted | |
adj.著名的,知名的 | |
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30 poetic | |
adj.富有诗意的,有诗人气质的,善于抒情的 | |
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31 poetical | |
adj.似诗人的;诗一般的;韵文的;富有诗意的 | |
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32 inadequate | |
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33 fetter | |
n./vt.脚镣,束缚 | |
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34 excellence | |
n.优秀,杰出,(pl.)优点,美德 | |
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35 graceful | |
adj.优美的,优雅的;得体的 | |
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36 terse | |
adj.(说话,文笔)精炼的,简明的 | |
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37 vigor | |
n.活力,精力,元气 | |
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38 satires | |
讽刺,讥讽( satire的名词复数 ); 讽刺作品 | |
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39 artistic | |
adj.艺术(家)的,美术(家)的;善于艺术创作的 | |
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40 sonorous | |
adj.响亮的,回响的;adv.圆润低沉地;感人地;n.感人,堂皇 | |
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41 eloquence | |
n.雄辩;口才,修辞 | |
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42 orations | |
n.(正式仪式中的)演说,演讲( oration的名词复数 ) | |
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43 prosaic | |
adj.单调的,无趣的 | |
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44 witty | |
adj.机智的,风趣的 | |
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45 vice | |
n.坏事;恶习;[pl.]台钳,老虎钳;adj.副的 | |
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46 refinement | |
n.文雅;高尚;精美;精制;精炼 | |
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47 strife | |
n.争吵,冲突,倾轧,竞争 | |
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48 satirizing | |
v.讽刺,讥讽( satirize的现在分词 ) | |
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49 ridicule | |
v.讥讽,挖苦;n.嘲弄 | |
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50 satirist | |
n.讽刺诗作者,讽刺家,爱挖苦别人的人 | |
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51 labor | |
n.劳动,努力,工作,劳工;分娩;vi.劳动,努力,苦干;vt.详细分析;麻烦 | |
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52 laborer | |
n.劳动者,劳工 | |
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53 constructive | |
adj.建设的,建设性的 | |
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54 meekly | |
adv.温顺地,逆来顺受地 | |
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55 applied | |
adj.应用的;v.应用,适用 | |
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56 reign | |
n.统治时期,统治,支配,盛行;v.占优势 | |
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57 entirely | |
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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58 patriotism | |
n.爱国精神,爱国心,爱国主义 | |
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59 delightful | |
adj.令人高兴的,使人快乐的 | |
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60 professed | |
公开声称的,伪称的,已立誓信教的 | |
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61 doffing | |
n.下筒,落纱v.脱去,(尤指)脱帽( doff的现在分词 ) | |
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62 wig | |
n.假发 | |
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63 sham | |
n./adj.假冒(的),虚伪(的) | |
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64 cult | |
n.异教,邪教;时尚,狂热的崇拜 | |
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65 lyric | |
n.抒情诗,歌词;adj.抒情的 | |
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66 lyrics | |
n.歌词 | |
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67 epics | |
n.叙事诗( epic的名词复数 );壮举;惊人之举;史诗般的电影(或书籍) | |
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68 epic | |
n.史诗,叙事诗;adj.史诗般的,壮丽的 | |
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69 satiric | |
adj.讽刺的,挖苦的 | |
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70 remarkably | |
ad.不同寻常地,相当地 | |
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71 whim | |
n.一时的兴致,突然的念头;奇想,幻想 | |
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72 neatly | |
adv.整洁地,干净地,灵巧地,熟练地 | |
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73 clergy | |
n.[总称]牧师,神职人员 | |
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74 livelihood | |
n.生计,谋生之道 | |
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75 temperament | |
n.气质,性格,性情 | |
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76 deformed | |
adj.畸形的;变形的;丑的,破相了的 | |
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77 dwarfish | |
a.像侏儒的,矮小的 | |
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78 dwarf | |
n.矮子,侏儒,矮小的动植物;vt.使…矮小 | |
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79 apparently | |
adv.显然地;表面上,似乎 | |
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80 instinctively | |
adv.本能地 | |
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81 peevish | |
adj.易怒的,坏脾气的 | |
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82 admiration | |
n.钦佩,赞美,羡慕 | |
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83 browsed | |
v.吃草( browse的过去式和过去分词 );随意翻阅;(在商店里)随便看看;(在计算机上)浏览信息 | |
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84 rape | |
n.抢夺,掠夺,强奸;vt.掠夺,抢夺,强奸 | |
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85 judgment | |
n.审判;判断力,识别力,看法,意见 | |
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86 judgments | |
判断( judgment的名词复数 ); 鉴定; 评价; 审判 | |
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87 villa | |
n.别墅,城郊小屋 | |
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88 utterly | |
adv.完全地,绝对地 | |
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89 physically | |
adj.物质上,体格上,身体上,按自然规律 | |
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90 retired | |
adj.隐退的,退休的,退役的 | |
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91 maxims | |
n.格言,座右铭( maxim的名词复数 ) | |
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92 err | |
vi.犯错误,出差错 | |
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93 quotation | |
n.引文,引语,语录;报价,牌价,行情 | |
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94 snipped | |
v.剪( snip的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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95 plunged | |
v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 );暴跌;骤降;突降 | |
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96 plunge | |
v.跳入,(使)投入,(使)陷入;猛冲 | |
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97 ballad | |
n.歌谣,民谣,流行爱情歌曲 | |
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98 satirized | |
v.讽刺,讥讽( satirize的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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99 satirize | |
v.讽刺 | |
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100 lengthen | |
vt.使伸长,延长 | |
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101 burlesque | |
v.嘲弄,戏仿;n.嘲弄,取笑,滑稽模仿 | |
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102 gnomes | |
n.矮子( gnome的名词复数 );侏儒;(尤指金融市场上搞投机的)银行家;守护神 | |
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103 delicacy | |
n.精致,细微,微妙,精良;美味,佳肴 | |
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104 toil | |
vi.辛劳工作,艰难地行动;n.苦工,难事 | |
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105 boundless | |
adj.无限的;无边无际的;巨大的 | |
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106 bent | |
n.爱好,癖好;adj.弯的;决心的,一心的 | |
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107 odyssey | |
n.长途冒险旅行;一连串的冒险 | |
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108 perfectly | |
adv.完美地,无可非议地,彻底地 | |
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109 grandeur | |
n.伟大,崇高,宏伟,庄严,豪华 | |
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110 exulting | |
vi. 欢欣鼓舞,狂喜 | |
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111 refulgent | |
adj.辉煌的,灿烂的 | |
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112 azure | |
adj.天蓝色的,蔚蓝色的 | |
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113 serene | |
adj. 安详的,宁静的,平静的 | |
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114 gild | |
vt.给…镀金,把…漆成金色,使呈金色 | |
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115 ornament | |
v.装饰,美化;n.装饰,装饰物 | |
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116 ornaments | |
n.装饰( ornament的名词复数 );点缀;装饰品;首饰v.装饰,点缀,美化( ornament的第三人称单数 ) | |
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117 vindicate | |
v.为…辩护或辩解,辩明;证明…正确 | |
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118 vindication | |
n.洗冤,证实 | |
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119 accomplished | |
adj.有才艺的;有造诣的;达到了的 | |
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120 discord | |
n.不和,意见不合,争论,(音乐)不和谐 | |
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121 erring | |
做错事的,错误的 | |
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122 abounds | |
v.大量存在,充满,富于( abound的第三人称单数 ) | |
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123 abound | |
vi.大量存在;(in,with)充满,富于 | |
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124 knave | |
n.流氓;(纸牌中的)杰克 | |
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125 frightful | |
adj.可怕的;讨厌的 | |
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126 mien | |
n.风采;态度 | |
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127 behold | |
v.看,注视,看到 | |
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128 kindly | |
adj.和蔼的,温和的,爽快的;adv.温和地,亲切地 | |
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129 rattle | |
v.飞奔,碰响;激怒;n.碰撞声;拨浪鼓 | |
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130 tickled | |
(使)发痒( tickle的过去式和过去分词 ); (使)愉快,逗乐 | |
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131 muse | |
n.缪斯(希腊神话中的女神),创作灵感 | |
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132 beads | |
n.(空心)小珠子( bead的名词复数 );水珠;珠子项链 | |
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133 bauble | |
n.美观而无价值的饰物 | |
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134 controversy | |
n.争论,辩论,争吵 | |
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135 appreciation | |
n.评价;欣赏;感谢;领会,理解;价格上涨 | |
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136 forth | |
adv.向前;向外,往外 | |
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137 superfluous | |
adj.过多的,过剩的,多余的 | |
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138 lust | |
n.性(淫)欲;渴(欲)望;vi.对…有强烈的欲望 | |
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139 irony | |
n.反语,冷嘲;具有讽刺意味的事,嘲弄 | |
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140 wrested | |
(用力)拧( wrest的过去式和过去分词 ); 费力取得; (从…)攫取; ( 从… ) 强行取去… | |
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141 wrest | |
n.扭,拧,猛夺;v.夺取,猛扭,歪曲 | |
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142 dominant | |
adj.支配的,统治的;占优势的;显性的;n.主因,要素,主要的人(或物);显性基因 | |
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143 brutal | |
adj.残忍的,野蛮的,不讲理的 | |
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144 brutally | |
adv.残忍地,野蛮地,冷酷无情地 | |
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145 supreme | |
adj.极度的,最重要的;至高的,最高的 | |
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146 supremely | |
adv.无上地,崇高地 | |
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147 misery | |
n.痛苦,苦恼,苦难;悲惨的境遇,贫苦 | |
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148 dub | |
vt.(以某种称号)授予,给...起绰号,复制 | |
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149 grudgingly | |
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150 detested | |
v.憎恶,嫌恶,痛恨( detest的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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151 galling | |
adj.难堪的,使烦恼的,使焦躁的 | |
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152 moor | |
n.荒野,沼泽;vt.(使)停泊;vi.停泊 | |
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153 steadily | |
adv.稳定地;不变地;持续地 | |
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154 unbearable | |
adj.不能容忍的;忍受不住的 | |
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155 labored | |
adj.吃力的,谨慎的v.努力争取(for)( labor的过去式和过去分词 );苦干;详细分析;(指引擎)缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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156 chafed | |
v.擦热(尤指皮肤)( chafe的过去式 );擦痛;发怒;惹怒 | |
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157 yoke | |
n.轭;支配;v.给...上轭,连接,使成配偶 | |
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158 sever | |
v.切开,割开;断绝,中断 | |
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159 lash | |
v.系牢;鞭打;猛烈抨击;n.鞭打;眼睫毛 | |
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160 contemplate | |
vt.盘算,计议;周密考虑;注视,凝视 | |
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161 arrogance | |
n.傲慢,自大 | |
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162 aspire | |
vi.(to,after)渴望,追求,有志于 | |
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163 bishop | |
n.主教,(国际象棋)象 | |
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164 insanity | |
n.疯狂,精神错乱;极端的愚蠢,荒唐 | |
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165 spoke | |
n.(车轮的)辐条;轮辐;破坏某人的计划;阻挠某人的行动 v.讲,谈(speak的过去式);说;演说;从某种观点来说 | |
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166 climax | |
n.顶点;高潮;v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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167 asylum | |
n.避难所,庇护所,避难 | |
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168 incurables | |
无法治愈,不可救药( incurable的名词复数 ) | |
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169 peculiar | |
adj.古怪的,异常的;特殊的,特有的 | |
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170 monstrous | |
adj.巨大的;恐怖的;可耻的,丢脸的 | |
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171 shams | |
假象( sham的名词复数 ); 假货; 虚假的行为(或感情、言语等); 假装…的人 | |
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172 determined | |
adj.坚定的;有决心的 | |
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173 pseudonym | |
n.假名,笔名 | |
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174 rant | |
v.咆哮;怒吼;n.大话;粗野的话 | |
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175 maker | |
n.制造者,制造商 | |
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176 coffin | |
n.棺材,灵柩 | |
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177 elegy | |
n.哀歌,挽歌 | |
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178 ferocious | |
adj.凶猛的,残暴的,极度的,十分强烈的 | |
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179 hypocrisy | |
n.伪善,虚伪 | |
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180 injustice | |
n.非正义,不公正,不公平,侵犯(别人的)权利 | |
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181 precisely | |
adv.恰好,正好,精确地,细致地 | |
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182 Christian | |
adj.基督教徒的;n.基督教徒 | |
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183 motive | |
n.动机,目的;adv.发动的,运动的 | |
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184 perversity | |
n.任性;刚愎自用 | |
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185 indifference | |
n.不感兴趣,不关心,冷淡,不在乎 | |
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186 portray | |
v.描写,描述;画(人物、景象等) | |
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187 portrayed | |
v.画像( portray的过去式和过去分词 );描述;描绘;描画 | |
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188 alleged | |
a.被指控的,嫌疑的 | |
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189 WHIMS | |
虚妄,禅病 | |
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190 mariners | |
海员,水手(mariner的复数形式) | |
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191 arrant | |
adj.极端的;最大的 | |
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192 jack | |
n.插座,千斤顶,男人;v.抬起,提醒,扛举;n.(Jake)杰克 | |
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193 evade | |
vt.逃避,回避;避开,躲避 | |
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194 sects | |
n.宗派,教派( sect的名词复数 ) | |
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195 professes | |
声称( profess的第三人称单数 ); 宣称; 公开表明; 信奉 | |
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196 outlet | |
n.出口/路;销路;批发商店;通风口;发泄 | |
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197 astounding | |
adj.使人震惊的vt.使震惊,使大吃一惊astound的现在分词) | |
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198 shipwreck | |
n.船舶失事,海难 | |
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199 wreck | |
n.失事,遇难;沉船;vt.(船等)失事,遇难 | |
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200 motives | |
n.动机,目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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201 dwarfs | |
n.侏儒,矮子(dwarf的复数形式)vt.(使)显得矮小(dwarf的第三人称单数形式) | |
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202 capers | |
n.开玩笑( caper的名词复数 );刺山柑v.跳跃,雀跃( caper的第三人称单数 ) | |
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203 momentous | |
adj.重要的,重大的 | |
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204 foe | |
n.敌人,仇敌 | |
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205 nag | |
v.(对…)不停地唠叨;n.爱唠叨的人 | |
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206 venom | |
n.毒液,恶毒,痛恨 | |
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207 doomed | |
命定的 | |
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208 vices | |
缺陷( vice的名词复数 ); 恶习; 不道德行为; 台钳 | |
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209 degradation | |
n.降级;低落;退化;陵削;降解;衰变 | |
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210 purely | |
adv.纯粹地,完全地 | |
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211 harangue | |
n.慷慨冗长的训话,言辞激烈的讲话 | |
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212 doggerel | |
n.拙劣的诗,打油诗 | |
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213 decency | |
n.体面,得体,合宜,正派,庄重 | |
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214 modesty | |
n.谦逊,虚心,端庄,稳重,羞怯,朴素 | |
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215 exterior | |
adj.外部的,外在的;表面的 | |
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216 simplicity | |
n.简单,简易;朴素;直率,单纯 | |
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217 disdain | |
n.鄙视,轻视;v.轻视,鄙视,不屑 | |
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218 grotesque | |
adj.怪诞的,丑陋的;n.怪诞的图案,怪人(物) | |
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219 eyewitness | |
n.目击者,见证人 | |
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220 wholesome | |
adj.适合;卫生的;有益健康的;显示身心健康的 | |
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221 originality | |
n.创造力,独创性;新颖 | |
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222 wield | |
vt.行使,运用,支配;挥,使用(武器等) | |
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223 wields | |
手持着使用(武器、工具等)( wield的第三人称单数 ); 具有; 运用(权力); 施加(影响) | |
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224 lasting | |
adj.永久的,永恒的;vbl.持续,维持 | |
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225 kindliness | |
n.厚道,亲切,友好的行为 | |
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226 virtue | |
n.德行,美德;贞操;优点;功效,效力 | |
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227 worthy | |
adj.(of)值得的,配得上的;有价值的 | |
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228 veal | |
n.小牛肉 | |
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229 violation | |
n.违反(行为),违背(行为),侵犯 | |
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230 Oxford | |
n.牛津(英国城市) | |
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231 diplomacy | |
n.外交;外交手腕,交际手腕 | |
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232 promptly | |
adv.及时地,敏捷地 | |
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233 lavishly | |
adv.慷慨地,大方地 | |
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234 slay | |
v.杀死,宰杀,杀戮 | |
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235 mighty | |
adj.强有力的;巨大的 | |
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236 dread | |
vt.担忧,忧虑;惧怕,不敢;n.担忧,畏惧 | |
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237 repulsed | |
v.击退( repulse的过去式和过去分词 );驳斥;拒绝 | |
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238 battalions | |
n.(陆军的)一营(大约有一千兵士)( battalion的名词复数 );协同作战的部队;军队;(组织在一起工作的)队伍 | |
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239 simile | |
n.直喻,明喻 | |
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240 jealousy | |
n.妒忌,嫉妒,猜忌 | |
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241 mingle | |
vt.使混合,使相混;vi.混合起来;相交往 | |
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242 serenely | |
adv.安详地,宁静地,平静地 | |
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243 hack | |
n.劈,砍,出租马车;v.劈,砍,干咳 | |
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244 materialism | |
n.[哲]唯物主义,唯物论;物质至上 | |
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245 dissection | |
n.分析;解剖 | |
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246 interpretation | |
n.解释,说明,描述;艺术处理 | |
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247 dabbler | |
n. 戏水者, 业余家, 半玩半认真做的人 | |
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248 herald | |
vt.预示...的来临,预告,宣布,欢迎 | |
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249 genial | |
adj.亲切的,和蔼的,愉快的,脾气好的 | |
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250 attain | |
vt.达到,获得,完成 | |
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251 unities | |
n.统一体( unity的名词复数 );(艺术等) 完整;(文学、戏剧) (情节、时间和地点的)统一性;团结一致 | |
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252 rhetoric | |
n.修辞学,浮夸之言语 | |
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253 immortality | |
n.不死,不朽 | |
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254 immortal | |
adj.不朽的;永生的,不死的;神的 | |
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255 drawn | |
v.拖,拉,拔出;adj.憔悴的,紧张的 | |
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256 longing | |
n.(for)渴望 | |
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257 nought | |
n./adj.无,零 | |
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258 eternity | |
n.不朽,来世;永恒,无穷 | |
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259 devout | |
adj.虔诚的,虔敬的,衷心的 (n.devoutness) | |
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260 hymns | |
n.赞美诗,圣歌,颂歌( hymn的名词复数 ) | |
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261 hymn | |
n.赞美诗,圣歌,颂歌 | |
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262 spacious | |
adj.广阔的,宽敞的 | |
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263 firmament | |
n.苍穹;最高层 | |
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264 antithesis | |
n.对立;相对 | |
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265 playwright | |
n.剧作家,编写剧本的人 | |
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266 joyously | |
ad.快乐地, 高兴地 | |
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267 ridicules | |
n.嘲笑( ridicule的名词复数 );奚落;嘲弄;戏弄v.嘲笑,嘲弄,奚落( ridicule的第三人称单数 ) | |
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268 overflowing | |
n. 溢出物,溢流 adj. 充沛的,充满的 动词overflow的现在分词形式 | |
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269 gazetteer | |
n.地名索引 | |
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270 immediate | |
adj.立即的;直接的,最接近的;紧靠的 | |
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271 dedication | |
n.奉献,献身,致力,题献,献辞 | |
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272 guise | |
n.外表,伪装的姿态 | |
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273 discourse | |
n.论文,演说;谈话;话语;vi.讲述,著述 | |
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274 parable | |
n.寓言,比喻 | |
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275 narrative | |
n.叙述,故事;adj.叙事的,故事体的 | |
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276 narratives | |
记叙文( narrative的名词复数 ); 故事; 叙述; 叙述部分 | |
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277 attentive | |
adj.注意的,专心的;关心(别人)的,殷勤的 | |
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278 jobbers | |
n.做零活的人( jobber的名词复数 );营私舞弊者;股票经纪人;证券交易商 | |
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279 looms | |
n.织布机( loom的名词复数 )v.隐约出现,阴森地逼近( loom的第三人称单数 );隐约出现,阴森地逼近 | |
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280 monopolizes | |
n.垄断( monopolize的名词复数 );独占;专卖;专营v.垄断( monopolize的第三人称单数 );独占;专卖;专营 | |
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281 opposition | |
n.反对,敌对 | |
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282 distinguished | |
adj.卓越的,杰出的,著名的 | |
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283 vile | |
adj.卑鄙的,可耻的,邪恶的;坏透的 | |
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284 gulp | |
vt.吞咽,大口地吸(气);vi.哽住;n.吞咽 | |
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285 oracle | |
n.神谕,神谕处,预言 | |
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286 pessimism | |
n.悲观者,悲观主义者,厌世者 | |
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287 rime | |
n.白霜;v.使蒙霜 | |
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288 massacre | |
n.残杀,大屠杀;v.残杀,集体屠杀 | |
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289 offhand | |
adj.临时,无准备的;随便,马虎的 | |
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290 doctrine | |
n.教义;主义;学说 | |
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291 marvel | |
vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异;n.令人惊异的事 | |
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292 allusions | |
暗指,间接提到( allusion的名词复数 ) | |
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293 muses | |
v.沉思,冥想( muse的第三人称单数 );沉思自语说(某事) | |
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294 melancholy | |
n.忧郁,愁思;adj.令人感伤(沮丧)的,忧郁的 | |
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295 reactionary | |
n.反动者,反动主义者;adj.反动的,反动主义的,反对改革的 | |
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296 wretch | |
n.可怜的人,不幸的人;卑鄙的人 | |
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297 awakening | |
n.觉醒,醒悟 adj.觉醒中的;唤醒的 | |
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298 omnivorous | |
adj.杂食的 | |
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299 dismal | |
adj.阴沉的,凄凉的,令人忧郁的,差劲的 | |
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300 influential | |
adj.有影响的,有权势的 | |
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301 ridiculed | |
v.嘲笑,嘲弄,奚落( ridicule的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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302 tavern | |
n.小旅馆,客栈;小酒店 | |
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303 taverns | |
n.小旅馆,客栈,酒馆( tavern的名词复数 ) | |
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304 wharf | |
n.码头,停泊处 | |
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305 reminder | |
n.提醒物,纪念品;暗示,提示 | |
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306 lodging | |
n.寄宿,住所;(大学生的)校外宿舍 | |
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307 lodgings | |
n. 出租的房舍, 寄宿舍 | |
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308 synonym | |
n.同义词,换喻词 | |
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309 dreary | |
adj.令人沮丧的,沉闷的,单调乏味的 | |
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310 savage | |
adj.野蛮的;凶恶的,残暴的;n.未开化的人 | |
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311 intervals | |
n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 );间隔时间;[数学]区间;(戏剧、电影或音乐会的)幕间休息 | |
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312 earnings | |
n.工资收人;利润,利益,所得 | |
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313 labors | |
v.努力争取(for)( labor的第三人称单数 );苦干;详细分析;(指引擎)缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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314 royalty | |
n.皇家,皇族 | |
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315 adversary | |
adj.敌手,对手 | |
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316 oracles | |
神示所( oracle的名词复数 ); 神谕; 圣贤; 哲人 | |
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317 curiously | |
adv.有求知欲地;好问地;奇特地 | |
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318 monologues | |
n.(戏剧)长篇独白( monologue的名词复数 );滔滔不绝的讲话;独角戏 | |
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319 lexicon | |
n.字典,专门词汇 | |
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320 scotch | |
n.伤口,刻痕;苏格兰威士忌酒;v.粉碎,消灭,阻止;adj.苏格兰(人)的 | |
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321 ponderous | |
adj.沉重的,笨重的,(文章)冗长的 | |
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322 lighter | |
n.打火机,点火器;驳船;v.用驳船运送;light的比较级 | |
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323 scant | |
adj.不充分的,不足的;v.减缩,限制,忽略 | |
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324 mire | |
n.泥沼,泥泞;v.使...陷于泥泞,使...陷入困境 | |
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325 orator | |
n.演说者,演讲者,雄辩家 | |
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326 orators | |
n.演说者,演讲家( orator的名词复数 ) | |
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327 tiresome | |
adj.令人疲劳的,令人厌倦的 | |
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328 trots | |
小跑,急走( trot的名词复数 ); 匆匆忙忙地走 | |
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329 frantic | |
adj.狂乱的,错乱的,激昂的 | |
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330 caress | |
vt./n.爱抚,抚摸 | |
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331 cuff | |
n.袖口;手铐;护腕;vt.用手铐铐;上袖口 | |
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332 contented | |
adj.满意的,安心的,知足的 | |
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333 trout | |
n.鳟鱼;鲑鱼(属) | |
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334 agitated | |
adj.被鼓动的,不安的 | |
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335 recollecting | |
v.记起,想起( recollect的现在分词 ) | |
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336 stunned | |
adj. 震惊的,惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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337 apprehensive | |
adj.担心的,恐惧的,善于领会的 | |
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338 persistency | |
n. 坚持(余辉, 时间常数) | |
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339 abate | |
vi.(风势,疼痛等)减弱,减轻,减退 | |
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340 idol | |
n.偶像,红人,宠儿 | |
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341 superstitions | |
迷信,迷信行为( superstition的名词复数 ) | |
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342 scorched | |
烧焦,烤焦( scorch的过去式和过去分词 ); 使(植物)枯萎,把…晒枯; 高速行驶; 枯焦 | |
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343 twitches | |
n.(使)抽动, (使)颤动, (使)抽搐( twitch的名词复数 ) | |
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344 puffing | |
v.使喷出( puff的现在分词 );喷着汽(或烟)移动;吹嘘;吹捧 | |
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345 specimen | |
n.样本,标本 | |
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346 random | |
adj.随机的;任意的;n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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347 utterances | |
n.发声( utterance的名词复数 );说话方式;语调;言论 | |
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348 brutes | |
兽( brute的名词复数 ); 畜生; 残酷无情的人; 兽性 | |
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349 scriptures | |
经文,圣典( scripture的名词复数 ); 经典 | |
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350 authorized | |
a.委任的,许可的 | |
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351 reprehension | |
n.非难,指责 | |
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352 pensive | |
a.沉思的,哀思的,忧沉的 | |
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353 scorpions | |
n.蝎子( scorpion的名词复数 ) | |
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354 flouts | |
v.藐视,轻视( flout的第三人称单数 ) | |
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355 hibernation | |
n.冬眠 | |
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356 colloquial | |
adj.口语的,会话的 | |
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357 gored | |
v.(动物)用角撞伤,用牙刺破( gore的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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358 auditors | |
n.审计员,稽核员( auditor的名词复数 );(大学课程的)旁听生 | |
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359 obsequiously | |
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360 irrelevancy | |
n.不恰当,离题,不相干的事物 | |
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361 propounds | |
v.提出(问题、计划等)供考虑[讨论],提议( propound的第三人称单数 ) | |
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362 conundrum | |
n.谜语;难题 | |
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363 sculptors | |
雕刻家,雕塑家( sculptor的名词复数 ); [天]玉夫座 | |
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364 imposing | |
adj.使人难忘的,壮丽的,堂皇的,雄伟的 | |
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365 regularity | |
n.规律性,规则性;匀称,整齐 | |
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366 lesser | |
adj.次要的,较小的;adv.较小地,较少地 | |
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367 thoroughly | |
adv.完全地,彻底地,十足地 | |
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368 fulsome | |
adj.可恶的,虚伪的,过分恭维的 | |
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369 oratory | |
n.演讲术;词藻华丽的言辞 | |
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370 confession | |
n.自白,供认,承认 | |
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371 verbiage | |
n.冗词;冗长 | |
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372 clog | |
vt.塞满,阻塞;n.[常pl.]木屐 | |
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373 sublime | |
adj.崇高的,伟大的;极度的,不顾后果的 | |
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374 eloquent | |
adj.雄辩的,口才流利的;明白显示出的 | |
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375 devoted | |
adj.忠诚的,忠实的,热心的,献身于...的 | |
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376 commonwealth | |
n.共和国,联邦,共同体 | |
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377 conciliation | |
n.调解,调停 | |
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378 solely | |
adv.仅仅,唯一地 | |
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379 gratitude | |
adj.感激,感谢 | |
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380 persistence | |
n.坚持,持续,存留 | |
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381 taxation | |
n.征税,税收,税金 | |
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382 impeachment | |
n.弹劾;控告;怀疑 | |
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383 acquitted | |
宣判…无罪( acquit的过去式和过去分词 ); 使(自己)作出某种表现 | |
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384 illuminating | |
a.富于启发性的,有助阐明的 | |
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385 inquiry | |
n.打听,询问,调查,查问 | |
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386 essentially | |
adv.本质上,实质上,基本上 | |
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387 cadence | |
n.(说话声调的)抑扬顿挫 | |
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388 homely | |
adj.家常的,简朴的;不漂亮的 | |
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389 majestic | |
adj.雄伟的,壮丽的,庄严的,威严的,崇高的 | |
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390 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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391 permanently | |
adv.永恒地,永久地,固定不变地 | |
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392 potent | |
adj.强有力的,有权势的;有效力的 | |
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393 wary | |
adj.谨慎的,机警的,小心的 | |
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394 memoir | |
n.[pl.]回忆录,自传;记事录 | |
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395 memoirs | |
n.回忆录;回忆录传( mem,自oir的名词复数) | |
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396 paternal | |
adj.父亲的,像父亲的,父系的,父方的 | |
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397 meditated | |
深思,沉思,冥想( meditate的过去式和过去分词 ); 内心策划,考虑 | |
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398 musing | |
n. 沉思,冥想 adj. 沉思的, 冥想的 动词muse的现在分词形式 | |
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399 barbarians | |
n.野蛮人( barbarian的名词复数 );外国人;粗野的人;无教养的人 | |
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400 splendor | |
n.光彩;壮丽,华丽;显赫,辉煌 | |
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401 criticise | |
v.批评,评论;非难 | |
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402 sift | |
v.筛撒,纷落,详察 | |
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403 sifted | |
v.筛( sift的过去式和过去分词 );筛滤;细查;详审 | |
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404 discriminating | |
a.有辨别能力的 | |
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405 copious | |
adj.丰富的,大量的 | |
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406 pageants | |
n.盛装的游行( pageant的名词复数 );穿古代服装的游行;再现历史场景的娱乐活动;盛会 | |
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407 frankly | |
adv.坦白地,直率地;坦率地说 | |
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408 fulfills | |
v.履行(诺言等)( fulfill的第三人称单数 );执行(命令等);达到(目的);使结束 | |
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409 bondage | |
n.奴役,束缚 | |
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410 toiler | |
辛劳者,勤劳者 | |
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411 crumbled | |
(把…)弄碎, (使)碎成细屑( crumble的过去式和过去分词 ); 衰落; 坍塌; 损坏 | |
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412 prudent | |
adj.谨慎的,有远见的,精打细算的 | |
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413 appreciable | |
adj.明显的,可见的,可估量的,可觉察的 | |
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414 deserted | |
adj.荒芜的,荒废的,无人的,被遗弃的 | |
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415 outrage | |
n.暴行,侮辱,愤怒;vt.凌辱,激怒 | |
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416 obdurate | |
adj.固执的,顽固的 | |
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417 culminated | |
v.达到极点( culminate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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418 varied | |
adj.多样的,多变化的 | |
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419 strictly | |
adv.严厉地,严格地;严密地 | |
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420 reverence | |
n.敬畏,尊敬,尊严;Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称;v.尊敬,敬畏,崇敬 | |
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421 sagas | |
n.萨迦(尤指古代挪威或冰岛讲述冒险经历和英雄业绩的长篇故事)( saga的名词复数 );(讲述许多年间发生的事情的)长篇故事;一连串的事件(或经历);一连串经历的讲述(或记述) | |
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422 illustrate | |
v.举例说明,阐明;图解,加插图 | |
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423 tolls | |
(缓慢而有规律的)钟声( toll的名词复数 ); 通行费; 损耗; (战争、灾难等造成的)毁坏 | |
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424 knell | |
n.丧钟声;v.敲丧钟 | |
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425 herd | |
n.兽群,牧群;vt.使集中,把…赶在一起 | |
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426 plow | |
n.犁,耕地,犁过的地;v.犁,费力地前进[英]plough | |
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427 plods | |
v.沉重缓慢地走(路)( plod的第三人称单数 );努力从事;沉闷地苦干;缓慢进行(尤指艰难枯燥的工作) | |
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428 glimmering | |
n.微光,隐约的一瞥adj.薄弱地发光的v.发闪光,发微光( glimmer的现在分词 ) | |
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429 beetle | |
n.甲虫,近视眼的人 | |
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430 drowsy | |
adj.昏昏欲睡的,令人发困的 | |
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431 lull | |
v.使安静,使入睡,缓和,哄骗;n.暂停,间歇 | |
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432 infancy | |
n.婴儿期;幼年期;初期 | |
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433 hoods | |
n.兜帽( hood的名词复数 );头巾;(汽车、童车等的)折合式车篷;汽车发动机罩v.兜帽( hood的第三人称单数 );头巾;(汽车、童车等的)折合式车篷;汽车发动机罩 | |
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434 beaver | |
n.海狸,河狸 | |
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435 precipice | |
n.悬崖,危急的处境 | |
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436 torrent | |
n.激流,洪流;爆发,(话语等的)连发 | |
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437 sketched | |
v.草拟(sketch的过去式与过去分词形式) | |
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438 emancipation | |
n.(从束缚、支配下)解放 | |
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439 minor | |
adj.较小(少)的,较次要的;n.辅修学科;vi.辅修 | |
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440 prospect | |
n.前景,前途;景色,视野 | |
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441 bard | |
n.吟游诗人 | |
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442 frenzy | |
n.疯狂,狂热,极度的激动 | |
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443 prophesies | |
v.预告,预言( prophesy的第三人称单数 ) | |
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444 tyrant | |
n.暴君,专制的君主,残暴的人 | |
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445 plunges | |
n.跳进,投入vt.使投入,使插入,使陷入vi.投入,跳进,陷入v.颠簸( plunge的第三人称单数 );暴跌;骤降;突降 | |
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446 antiquities | |
n.古老( antiquity的名词复数 );古迹;古人们;古代的风俗习惯 | |
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447 awakened | |
v.(使)醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 );(使)觉醒;弄醒;(使)意识到 | |
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448 versatile | |
adj.通用的,万用的;多才多艺的,多方面的 | |
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449 awakens | |
v.(使)醒( awaken的第三人称单数 );(使)觉醒;弄醒;(使)意识到 | |
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450 primrose | |
n.樱草,最佳部分, | |
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451 ballads | |
民歌,民谣,特别指叙述故事的歌( ballad的名词复数 ); 讴 | |
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452 dime | |
n.(指美国、加拿大的钱币)一角 | |
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453 ministry | |
n.(政府的)部;牧师 | |
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454 cork | |
n.软木,软木塞 | |
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455 embark | |
vi.乘船,着手,从事,上飞机 | |
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456 amiable | |
adj.和蔼可亲的,友善的,亲切的 | |
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457 teller | |
n.银行出纳员;(选举)计票员 | |
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458 flute | |
n.长笛;v.吹笛 | |
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459 comedian | |
n.喜剧演员;滑稽演员 | |
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460 usher | |
n.带位员,招待员;vt.引导,护送;vi.做招待,担任引座员 | |
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461 invaluable | |
adj.无价的,非常宝贵的,极为贵重的 | |
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462 justified | |
a.正当的,有理的 | |
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463 inordinate | |
adj.无节制的;过度的 | |
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464 velvet | |
n.丝绒,天鹅绒;adj.丝绒制的,柔软的 | |
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465 inaccurate | |
adj.错误的,不正确的,不准确的 | |
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466 animated | |
adj.生气勃勃的,活跃的,愉快的 | |
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467 magpie | |
n.喜欢收藏物品的人,喜鹊,饶舌者 | |
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468 homeliness | |
n.简朴,朴实;相貌平平 | |
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469 absurdities | |
n.极端无理性( absurdity的名词复数 );荒谬;谬论;荒谬的行为 | |
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470 butt | |
n.笑柄;烟蒂;枪托;臀部;v.用头撞或顶 | |
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471 contagious | |
adj.传染性的,有感染力的 | |
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472 quack | |
n.庸医;江湖医生;冒充内行的人;骗子 | |
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473 frailties | |
n.脆弱( frailty的名词复数 );虚弱;(性格或行为上的)弱点;缺点 | |
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474 frail | |
adj.身体虚弱的;易损坏的 | |
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475 ledger | |
n.总帐,分类帐;帐簿 | |
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476 permeated | |
弥漫( permeate的过去式和过去分词 ); 遍布; 渗入; 渗透 | |
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477 intrigue | |
vt.激起兴趣,迷住;vi.耍阴谋;n.阴谋,密谋 | |
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478 bustling | |
adj.喧闹的 | |
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479 shun | |
vt.避开,回避,避免 | |
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480 briefly | |
adv.简单地,简短地 | |
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481 tribulation | |
n.苦难,灾难 | |
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482 imprisonment | |
n.关押,监禁,坐牢 | |
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483 triumphant | |
adj.胜利的,成功的;狂欢的,喜悦的 | |
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484 martyrs | |
n.martyr的复数形式;烈士( martyr的名词复数 );殉道者;殉教者;乞怜者(向人诉苦以博取同情) | |
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485 arena | |
n.竞技场,运动场所;竞争场所,舞台 | |
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486 blessing | |
n.祈神赐福;祷告;祝福,祝愿 | |
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487 glorified | |
美其名的,变荣耀的 | |
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488 hamper | |
vt.妨碍,束缚,限制;n.(有盖的)大篮子 | |
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489 hampered | |
妨碍,束缚,限制( hamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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490 lank | |
adj.瘦削的;稀疏的 | |
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491 thawed | |
解冻 | |
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492 reins | |
感情,激情; 缰( rein的名词复数 ); 控制手段; 掌管; (成人带着幼儿走路以防其走失时用的)保护带 | |
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493 predecessor | |
n.前辈,前任 | |
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494 miserable | |
adj.悲惨的,痛苦的;可怜的,糟糕的 | |
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495 bully | |
n.恃强欺弱者,小流氓;vt.威胁,欺侮 | |
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496 buckles | |
搭扣,扣环( buckle的名词复数 ) | |
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497 affected | |
adj.不自然的,假装的 | |
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498 patrimony | |
n.世袭财产,继承物 | |
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499 quaintly | |
adv.古怪离奇地 | |
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500 morbid | |
adj.病的;致病的;病态的;可怕的 | |
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501 vein | |
n.血管,静脉;叶脉,纹理;情绪;vt.使成脉络 | |
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502 brooks | |
n.小溪( brook的名词复数 ) | |
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503 lumbering | |
n.采伐林木 | |
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504 destined | |
adj.命中注定的;(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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505 trickled | |
v.滴( trickle的过去式和过去分词 );淌;使)慢慢走;缓慢移动 | |
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506 quill | |
n.羽毛管;v.给(织物或衣服)作皱褶 | |
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507 amorous | |
adj.多情的;有关爱情的 | |
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508 laborious | |
adj.吃力的,努力的,不流畅 | |
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509 rendering | |
n.表现,描写 | |
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510 monarch | |
n.帝王,君主,最高统治者 | |
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511 chuckles | |
轻声地笑( chuckle的名词复数 ) | |
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512 heartily | |
adv.衷心地,诚恳地,十分,很 | |
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513 stanza | |
n.(诗)节,段 | |
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514 primitive | |
adj.原始的;简单的;n.原(始)人,原始事物 | |
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515 aspirations | |
强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 ); 志向; 发送气音; 发 h 音 | |
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516 creed | |
n.信条;信念,纲领 | |
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517 stanzas | |
节,段( stanza的名词复数 ) | |
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518 trudge | |
v.步履艰难地走;n.跋涉,费力艰难的步行 | |
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519 attire | |
v.穿衣,装扮[同]array;n.衣着;盛装 | |
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520 bleak | |
adj.(天气)阴冷的;凄凉的;暗淡的 | |
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521 toiled | |
长时间或辛苦地工作( toil的过去式和过去分词 ); 艰难缓慢地移动,跋涉 | |
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522 careworn | |
adj.疲倦的,饱经忧患的 | |
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523 unpaid | |
adj.未付款的,无报酬的 | |
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524 solitude | |
n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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525 eldest | |
adj.最年长的,最年老的 | |
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526 hermit | |
n.隐士,修道者;隐居 | |
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527 galley | |
n.(飞机或船上的)厨房单层甲板大帆船;军舰舰长用的大划艇; | |
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528 arrears | |
n.到期未付之债,拖欠的款项;待做的工作 | |
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529 exteriors | |
n.外面( exterior的名词复数 );外貌;户外景色图 | |
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530 diligently | |
ad.industriously;carefully | |
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531 gathering | |
n.集会,聚会,聚集 | |
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|
532 ovation | |
n.欢呼,热烈欢迎,热烈鼓掌 | |
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|
533 riotous | |
adj.骚乱的;狂欢的 | |
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|
534 jaunt | |
v.短程旅游;n.游览 | |
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|
535 highland | |
n.(pl.)高地,山地 | |
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536 armour | |
(=armor)n.盔甲;装甲部队 | |
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537 auld | |
adj.老的,旧的 | |
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538 galloping | |
adj. 飞驰的, 急性的 动词gallop的现在分词形式 | |
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539 miserably | |
adv.痛苦地;悲惨地;糟糕地;极度地 | |
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|
540 exquisite | |
adj.精美的;敏锐的;剧烈的,感觉强烈的 | |
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|
541 epoch | |
n.(新)时代;历元 | |
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|
542 embodied | |
v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 );象征;包括;包含 | |
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543 pathos | |
n.哀婉,悲怆 | |
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544 groans | |
n.呻吟,叹息( groan的名词复数 );呻吟般的声音v.呻吟( groan的第三人称单数 );发牢骚;抱怨;受苦 | |
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545 embodies | |
v.表现( embody的第三人称单数 );象征;包括;包含 | |
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|
546 juxtaposition | |
n.毗邻,并置,并列 | |
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|
547 faculty | |
n.才能;学院,系;(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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548 rustic | |
adj.乡村的,有乡村特色的;n.乡下人,乡巴佬 | |
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549 unfamiliar | |
adj.陌生的,不熟悉的 | |
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550 enjoyment | |
n.乐趣;享有;享用 | |
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|
551 adorned | |
[计]被修饰的 | |
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552 engraving | |
n.版画;雕刻(作品);雕刻艺术;镌版术v.在(硬物)上雕刻(字,画等)( engrave的现在分词 );将某事物深深印在(记忆或头脑中) | |
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|
553 implicitly | |
adv. 含蓄地, 暗中地, 毫不保留地 | |
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|
554 bowers | |
n.(女子的)卧室( bower的名词复数 );船首锚;阴凉处;鞠躬的人 | |
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555 gem | |
n.宝石,珠宝;受爱戴的人 [同]jewel | |
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|
556 exalted | |
adj.(地位等)高的,崇高的;尊贵的,高尚的 | |
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|
557 peculiarity | |
n.独特性,特色;特殊的东西;怪癖 | |
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|
558 virgin | |
n.处女,未婚女子;adj.未经使用的;未经开发的 | |
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|
559 shrouded | |
v.隐瞒( shroud的过去式和过去分词 );保密 | |
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|
560 dictated | |
v.大声讲或读( dictate的过去式和过去分词 );口授;支配;摆布 | |
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561 intelligible | |
adj.可理解的,明白易懂的,清楚的 | |
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|
562 evasion | |
n.逃避,偷漏(税) | |
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|
563 sane | |
adj.心智健全的,神志清醒的,明智的,稳健的 | |
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564 gems | |
growth; economy; management; and customer satisfaction 增长 | |
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565 remains | |
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹 | |
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|
566 sketches | |
n.草图( sketch的名词复数 );素描;速写;梗概 | |
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567 innocence | |
n.无罪;天真;无害 | |
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|
568 sifting | |
n.筛,过滤v.筛( sift的现在分词 );筛滤;细查;详审 | |
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569 chaotic | |
adj.混沌的,一片混乱的,一团糟的 | |
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570 extravagant | |
adj.奢侈的;过分的;(言行等)放肆的 | |
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|
571 intemperate | |
adj.无节制的,放纵的 | |
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572 titanic | |
adj.巨人的,庞大的,强大的 | |
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573 apocalyptic | |
adj.预示灾祸的,启示的 | |
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574 splendors | |
n.华丽( splendor的名词复数 );壮丽;光辉;显赫 | |
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|
575 chaff | |
v.取笑,嘲笑;n.谷壳 | |
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576 scattered | |
adj.分散的,稀疏的;散步的;疏疏落落的 | |
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577 winnowing | |
v.扬( winnow的现在分词 );辨别;选择;除去 | |
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|
578 casually | |
adv.漠不关心地,无动于衷地,不负责任地 | |
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|
579 uncertainty | |
n.易变,靠不住,不确知,不确定的事物 | |
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|
580 disciple | |
n.信徒,门徒,追随者 | |
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|
581 accentuate | |
v.着重,强调 | |
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582 depicting | |
描绘,描画( depict的现在分词 ); 描述 | |
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|
583 vaguely | |
adv.含糊地,暖昧地 | |
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|
584 sordid | |
adj.肮脏的,不干净的,卑鄙的,暗淡的 | |
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|
585 laborers | |
n.体力劳动者,工人( laborer的名词复数 );(熟练工人的)辅助工 | |
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|
586 virtues | |
美德( virtue的名词复数 ); 德行; 优点; 长处 | |
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587 catered | |
提供饮食及服务( cater的过去式和过去分词 ); 满足需要,适合 | |
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|
588 momentary | |
adj.片刻的,瞬息的;短暂的 | |
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|
589 forgeries | |
伪造( forgery的名词复数 ); 伪造的文件、签名等 | |
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|
590 subscription | |
n.预订,预订费,亲笔签名,调配法,下标(处方) | |
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|
591 lamentable | |
adj.令人惋惜的,悔恨的 | |
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|
592 counterfeit | |
vt.伪造,仿造;adj.伪造的,假冒的 | |
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593 primal | |
adj.原始的;最重要的 | |
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594 bombastic | |
adj.夸夸其谈的,言过其实的 | |
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595 beheld | |
v.看,注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 );瞧;看呀;(叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现)哎哟 | |
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596 forgery | |
n.伪造的文件等,赝品,伪造(行为) | |
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597 dedicated | |
adj.一心一意的;献身的;热诚的 | |
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598 celebrated | |
adj.有名的,声誉卓著的 | |
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599 relics | |
[pl.]n.遗物,遗迹,遗产;遗体,尸骸 | |
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|
600 misuse | |
n.误用,滥用;vt.误用,滥用 | |
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|
601 systematic | |
adj.有系统的,有计划的,有方法的 | |
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602 garbled | |
adj.(指信息)混乱的,引起误解的v.对(事实)歪曲,对(文章等)断章取义,窜改( garble的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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|
603 dealing | |
n.经商方法,待人态度 | |
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|
604 atone | |
v.赎罪,补偿 | |
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|
605 obsolete | |
adj.已废弃的,过时的 | |
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|
606 mythology | |
n.神话,神话学,神话集 | |
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607 rugged | |
adj.高低不平的,粗糙的,粗壮的,强健的 | |
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|
608 maiden | |
n.少女,处女;adj.未婚的,纯洁的,无经验的 | |
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|
609 maidens | |
处女( maiden的名词复数 ); 少女; 未婚女子; (板球运动)未得分的一轮投球 | |
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|
610 twilight | |
n.暮光,黄昏;暮年,晚期,衰落时期 | |
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|
611 phenomena | |
n.现象 | |
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|
612 innate | |
adj.天生的,固有的,天赋的 | |
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|
613 knight | |
n.骑士,武士;爵士 | |
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|
614 knights | |
骑士; (中古时代的)武士( knight的名词复数 ); 骑士; 爵士; (国际象棋中)马 | |
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|
615 inevitably | |
adv.不可避免地;必然发生地 | |
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|
616 enthralls | |
迷住,吸引住( enthrall的第三人称单数 ); 使感到非常愉快 | |
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617 lured | |
吸引,引诱(lure的过去式与过去分词形式) | |
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618 adventurous | |
adj.爱冒险的;惊心动魄的,惊险的,刺激的 | |
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|
619 precursors | |
n.先驱( precursor的名词复数 );先行者;先兆;初期形式 | |
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|
620 predecessors | |
n.前任( predecessor的名词复数 );前辈;(被取代的)原有事物;前身 | |
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|
621 chivalry | |
n.骑士气概,侠义;(男人)对女人彬彬有礼,献殷勤 | |
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|
622 expressive | |
adj.表现的,表达…的,富于表情的 | |
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|
623 curbed | |
v.限制,克制,抑制( curb的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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624 delightfully | |
大喜,欣然 | |
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|
625 civilized | |
a.有教养的,文雅的 | |
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626 forerunner | |
n.前身,先驱(者),预兆,祖先 | |
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|
627 delineation | |
n.记述;描写 | |
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|
628 guardian | |
n.监护人;守卫者,保护者 | |
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|
629 simultaneously | |
adv.同时发生地,同时进行地 | |
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|
630 apparition | |
n.幽灵,神奇的现象 | |
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|
631 unnatural | |
adj.不自然的;反常的 | |
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|
632 repentance | |
n.懊悔 | |
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|
633 puritanical | |
adj.极端拘谨的;道德严格的 | |
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|
634 portrayal | |
n.饰演;描画 | |
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|
635 aristocrat | |
n.贵族,有贵族气派的人,上层人物 | |
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|
636 prefix | |
n.前缀;vt.加…作为前缀;置于前面 | |
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|
637 questionable | |
adj.可疑的,有问题的 | |
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|
638 partially | |
adv.部分地,从某些方面讲 | |
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|
639 radical | |
n.激进份子,原子团,根号;adj.根本的,激进的,彻底的 | |
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|
640 possessed | |
adj.疯狂的;拥有的,占有的 | |
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641 sincerity | |
n.真诚,诚意;真实 | |
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642 picturesque | |
adj.美丽如画的,(语言)生动的,绘声绘色的 | |
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|
643 extraordinarily | |
adv.格外地;极端地 | |
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|
644 plausible | |
adj.似真实的,似乎有理的,似乎可信的 | |
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645 thereby | |
adv.因此,从而 | |
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|
646 dissenting | |
adj.不同意的 | |
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|
647 ferociously | |
野蛮地,残忍地 | |
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|
648 literally | |
adv.照字面意义,逐字地;确实 | |
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|
649 pillory | |
n.嘲弄;v.使受公众嘲笑;将…示众 | |
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|
650 imprisoned | |
下狱,监禁( imprison的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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|
651 hieroglyphic | |
n.象形文字 | |
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|
652 contrived | |
adj.不自然的,做作的;虚构的 | |
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|
653 ridiculing | |
v.嘲笑,嘲弄,奚落( ridicule的现在分词 ) | |
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|
|
654 prosecutors | |
检举人( prosecutor的名词复数 ); 告发人; 起诉人; 公诉人 | |
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|
655 advertising | |
n.广告业;广告活动 a.广告的;广告业务的 | |
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|
656 persecution | |
n. 迫害,烦扰 | |
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657 rogue | |
n.流氓;v.游手好闲 | |
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658 rogues | |
n.流氓( rogue的名词复数 );无赖;调皮捣蛋的人;离群的野兽 | |
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659 villains | |
n.恶棍( villain的名词复数 );罪犯;(小说、戏剧等中的)反面人物;淘气鬼 | |
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|
660 marooned | |
adj.被围困的;孤立无援的;无法脱身的 | |
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|
661 amazement | |
n.惊奇,惊讶 | |
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662 cargo | |
n.(一只船或一架飞机运载的)货物 | |
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|
663 vessel | |
n.船舶;容器,器皿;管,导管,血管 | |
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|
664 defense | |
n.防御,保卫;[pl.]防务工事;辩护,答辩 | |
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665 foes | |
敌人,仇敌( foe的名词复数 ) | |
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|
666 agitation | |
n.搅动;搅拌;鼓动,煽动 | |
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|
667 feverish | |
adj.发烧的,狂热的,兴奋的 | |
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|
668 fortitude | |
n.坚忍不拔;刚毅 | |
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|
669 treatise | |
n.专著;(专题)论文 | |
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|
670 sentimental | |
adj.多愁善感的,感伤的 | |
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|
671 tribulations | |
n.苦难( tribulation的名词复数 );艰难;苦难的缘由;痛苦 | |
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672 grandiloquent | |
adj.夸张的 | |
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|
673 scruples | |
n.良心上的不安( scruple的名词复数 );顾虑,顾忌v.感到于心不安,有顾忌( scruple的第三人称单数 ) | |
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674 humiliation | |
n.羞辱 | |
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|
|
675 illustrates | |
给…加插图( illustrate的第三人称单数 ); 说明; 表明; (用示例、图画等)说明 | |
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676 antiquated | |
adj.陈旧的,过时的 | |
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|
677 precarious | |
adj.不安定的,靠不住的;根据不足的 | |
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|
678 farces | |
n.笑剧( farce的名词复数 );闹剧;笑剧剧目;作假的可笑场面 | |
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|
|
679 extravagantly | |
adv.挥霍无度地 | |
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|
|
680 magistrate | |
n.地方行政官,地方法官,治安官 | |
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|
|
681 cemetery | |
n.坟墓,墓地,坟场 | |
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|
|
682 generosity | |
n.大度,慷慨,慷慨的行为 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
683 minces | |
v.切碎( mince的第三人称单数 );剁碎;绞碎;用绞肉机绞(食物,尤指肉) | |
参考例句: |
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684 woes | |
困境( woe的名词复数 ); 悲伤; 我好苦哇; 某人就要倒霉 | |
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|
|
685 hilarious | |
adj.充满笑声的,欢闹的;[反]depressed | |
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|
686 follies | |
罪恶,时事讽刺剧; 愚蠢,蠢笨,愚蠢的行为、思想或做法( folly的名词复数 ) | |
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687 virile | |
adj.男性的;有男性生殖力的;有男子气概的;强有力的 | |
参考例句: |
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|
688 detests | |
v.憎恶,嫌恶,痛恨( detest的第三人称单数 ) | |
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|
689 frailty | |
n.脆弱;意志薄弱 | |
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|
690 concur | |
v.同意,意见一致,互助,同时发生 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
691 Founder | |
n.创始者,缔造者 | |
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|
|
692 peculiarities | |
n. 特质, 特性, 怪癖, 古怪 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
693 pickle | |
n.腌汁,泡菜;v.腌,泡 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
694 bowling | |
n.保龄球运动 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
695 portraying | |
v.画像( portray的现在分词 );描述;描绘;描画 | |
参考例句: |
|
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696 eccentricities | |
n.古怪行为( eccentricity的名词复数 );反常;怪癖 | |
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697 antiquity | |
n.古老;高龄;古物,古迹 | |
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698 vagaries | |
n.奇想( vagary的名词复数 );异想天开;异常行为;难以预测的情况 | |
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699 sneer | |
v.轻蔑;嘲笑;n.嘲笑,讥讽的言语 | |
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700 recording | |
n.录音,记录 | |
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701 carving | |
n.雕刻品,雕花 | |
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702 adoption | |
n.采用,采纳,通过;收养 | |
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703 bribery | |
n.贿络行为,行贿,受贿 | |
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704 corruption | |
n.腐败,堕落,贪污 | |
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705 supplanting | |
把…排挤掉,取代( supplant的现在分词 ) | |
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706 supplementary | |
adj.补充的,附加的 | |
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707 bibliography | |
n.参考书目;(有关某一专题的)书目 | |
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708 treasury | |
n.宝库;国库,金库;文库 | |
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709 abridged | |
削减的,删节的 | |
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710 belles | |
n.美女( belle的名词复数 );最美的美女 | |
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711 journalism | |
n.新闻工作,报业 | |
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712 mermaid | |
n.美人鱼 | |
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713 worthies | |
应得某事物( worthy的名词复数 ); 值得做某事; 可尊敬的; 有(某人或事物)的典型特征 | |
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714 mead | |
n.蜂蜜酒 | |
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715 makers | |
n.制造者,制造商(maker的复数形式) | |
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716 garner | |
v.收藏;取得 | |
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717 chambers | |
n.房间( chamber的名词复数 );(议会的)议院;卧室;会议厅 | |
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