CHAP. gossip from White's, Wills's, the Grecian, and the St. James's XXVIII. coffee-houses, the rendezvous respectively of wits and beaux,

poets, men of letters, and the diplomatic world. Unfortunately for Steele, the Tatler had published certain satirical papers upon Harley, shortly before his appointment to office. The change of ministry cost Steele his place as gazetteer, and, it is said, but for the friendly intervention of Swift, would probably have cost him the post of commissioner of stamps, worth £300 a year. At any rate, the Tatler abruptly ceased on January 2, 1711.

On March the Spectator appeared, professing "an exact neutrality between the Whigs and Tories". By the time its tenth number was issued, its circulation was 3,000 a day. Addison wrote 274 numbers; and Steele 236. Eustace Budgell, Addison's cousin and secretary; John Hughes, author of the tragedy, The Siege of Damascus; Laurence Eusden, who succeeded Rowe as poet-laureate in 1718, and a few others, also contributed. But Addison's was the pen which brought the Spectator popularity. The coffee-houses had furnished opportunities for conversation, whereas, through lack of general culture, wholesome material was scanty. It was this defect which Addison set himself to supply. "I shall be ambitious," he wrote in the tenth number, "to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." He seriously endeavoured, by the use of the weapon of gentle irony, to improve the social tone, so that Taine somewhat contemptuously dismisses the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, which last followed the Spectator in March, 1713, as "mere lay sermons". Yet they hit the taste of the reading public, among whom women, attracted by Addison's playful satires upon their sex, numerously enrolled themselves. Addison's success produced imitations. Sir Richard Blackmore and John Hughes edified the public with The Lay Monk (November 16, 1713, to February 15, 1714). In March, 1718, Ambrose Philips started The Freethinker, a name not connoting theological heterodoxy, to which Hugh Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, and Gilbert Burnet, the son of the bishop, were contributors. Scurrilous essays, such as Mrs. Manley's Female Tatler (July 8, 1709), also made their

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appearance. The Rambler, started by Dr. Johnson in 1750, CHAP. is the best known of a fresh group of essay sheets. It lacked the lighter humour of Addison, and, as Johnson himself admitted, in its pages "the severity of dictatorial instruction has been too seldom relieved". Its original circulation was small, but it introduced Johnson to the world as a serious moralist, and the appetite for "lay sermons" had grown so keen that ten editions passed through the press in his life-time. On the extinction of the Rambler, in 1752, John Hawkesworth, who in 1744 had succeeded Johnson as the compiler of parliamentary debates for the Gentleman's Magazine, started The Adventurer, which ran for two years.

The daily newspaper first made its appearance on March 12, 1702, in the form of The Daily Courant. Four years later followed The Evening Post. De Foe's Review (1704-13) made journalism a power in the state. In 1709 eighteen papers were published in London. The earliest inspired ministerial paper was The Examiner, which appeared on August 3, 1710. It was edited by Dr. William King, of Balliol College, Oxford, assisted by Prior, Atterbury, and Freind. From November 2, 1710, to June 14, 1711, it was written by Swift. In its turn it called into being, on September 14, 1710, its rival, The Whig Examiner, from the pen of Addison. This, after a short life of three numbers, was followed by The Medley, mainly by Arthur Maynwaring, with the help of Steele, the whig wit and physician Dr. Samuel Garth, and Oldmixon; Maynwaring's patroness, the Duchess of Marlborough, supplying inspiration. On October 6, 1713, Steele published The Englishman, a paper committed to whig politics. The insinuations of this paper, and of his pamphlet The Crisis, in which Addison and Hoadly had a share, that the tory ministry was endangering the protestant succession, led to Steele's expulsion from the house of commons, on March 18, 1714. The Whig Flying Post, conducted by George Ridpath, was another thorn in Bolingbroke's side. After the accession of George I., Mist's Weekly Journal became the organ of the Jacobites and the High-Flyers, De Foe anticipating the modern leading article by "Letters Introductory". In 1715 and 1716 Addison held up Jacobitism to ridicule in The Freeholder. The most formidable opposition organ was The Craftsman, mentioned else

CHAP. where. After the retirement of Walpole, Fielding's True XXVIII. Patriot, in 1745-46, and his satirical The Jacobite Journal, in 1747-48, were written to discredit the pretender and his partisans. When, in 1756, Pitt was in power, he was attacked by The Test, to reply to which The Con-Test was edited by Philip Francis, the translator of Horace and Demosthenes.

The success of the essayists and the multiplication of newspapers led to a change in the position of the author. At the accession of Anne the general method of publication was the enlistment of subscribers under a nobleman whose interest was secured by the prospect of a fulsome dedication. Halifax was the typical patron of the day, satirised by Pope as "Fullblown Bufo, puff'd by every quill". Nor was the author's hoped-for remuneration confined to the proceeds of the subscriptions of a select circle of readers. It was almost a duty incumbent upon the belauded patron to see him rewarded at the public charge. Addison, Stepney, the ambassador to the emperor, who, like Addison, had floated into fashion upon Latin verse, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Nicholas Rowe, Budgell, John Hughes, Ambrose Philips, Tickell, Mallet, and many others, looked to official place for their main subsistence. The lively writer of comedies, George Farquhar, was an officer in the army. With a growing circle of readers the patron became less indispensable, and the publisher came forward as the middleman between the public and the author. Lintot bought Pope's Iliad and Odyssey. De Foe sold Robinson Crusoe to John Taylor who, after having made a large sum by it, sold his publishing business in 1724 to the first Thomas Longman. Pope's earliest published poems appeared in Jacob Tonson's Miscellany. Robert Dodsley, founder of the Annual Register (1758) was both publisher and author. Authorship, like publishing, became a calling. Hack-writers and translators depended upon the publisher for a livelihood, and, if Pope's lampoons upon the piratical publisher, Edmund Curll, may be believed, lay in garrets, two in a bed. Men with literary tastes, like James Thomson, drifted up to London to earn a living. Unfortunately the class of necessitous authors and the decline of the ambition of patronage conspired towards the middle

1 Pp. 336-342.

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of the century to make literature unfashionable. As late as CHAP. 1781, Dr. Johnson praised Lord Carlisle for "not disdaining' literary fame.

One form of literature, of which examples are rare, was reserved for persons of social distinction. French society in the seventeenth century, notably the Marchioness de Sevigné, had set the fashion. The writing of letters intended for publication was a post obit advertisement of the social importance, the taste, and the popularity of the author. Lord Chesterfield, himself the writer of letters still read as an example of eighteenth century worldly wisdom, desired the acquisition of the art by his son. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's vivacious pictures of her life were preserved in copies taken by her friends. Of all the letter-writers of the period Horace Walpole remains the most popular, but is rivalled by his friend and schoolfellow, the poet Gray.

Letter-writing was fostered by the grand tour which, as the century advanced, became an indispensable part of a gentleman's education. It thinned the universities, where learning was at a discount, and aroused the dislike of conservative minds. The tory fox-hunter in Addison's Freeholder said "he did not know what travelling was good for but to teach a man ... to jabber French and to talk against passive obedience". It also exercised a reflex action upon taste. The Alps or the wild landscapes of Salvator Rosa gradually revolutionised taste, and as the century advanced made the old-fashioned formal garden seem prim and tame. Formalism had been carried to grotesqueness, and, as Horace Walpole tells us, London and Wise, the gardeners to Queen Anne and George I., "had stocked our gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms, and mottoes in yew, box and holly". Wise's successor in 1720, Bridgman, abandoned "the geometric style," and became the pioneer of reversion to nature. By borrowing from the military art the device of the sunk fence in place of the wall, he contrived the "opener vista" praised by Pope, embracing the surrounding country. His methods were developed by William Kent, painter, furniture designer, architect, and "the father of landscape gardening," who popularised temples and grottoes as giving an Italian air to scenery. Of the gardens of this style those of Stowe are the most famous, contrasted

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CHAP. by Pope with the old-fashioned tastelessness of the Duke of Chandos's at Canons. Pope himself was an expert in landscape gardening, and his five acres at Twickenham were so metamorphosed as to afford a vista of lawns "surrounded with impenetrable woods". Kent's method was followed by Launcelot Brown, generally known as "Capability" Brown, whose excellence lay in bringing out the effects of undulating landscape. The prevalence of Italian taste in matters of art generally was marked by the establishment of the Society of Dilettanti in 1732. A fashion arose of collecting Italian pictures. In this Sir Robert Walpole shewed an example, his gallery costing him at least £30,000. Foreign, especially Italian, artists, some of whose works survive, were imported by wealthy noblemen for the decoration of their mansions. Two of them have been handed down to fame by Pope's description of the chapel at Canons :

On painted ceilings you devoutly stare

Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre.

Their rival, Sir James Thornhill, painted the dome of St. Paul's and the great hall of Greenwich Hospital. Thornhill was also a capable portrait painter. His son-in-law, William Hogarth, was an original genius, best known by his realistic pictures of contemporary life which, conformably to the didactic temper of the times, carry a moral with them. Charles Jervas, an Irishman, was a fashionable portrait painter, though Kneller ridiculed his drawing. The first portrait painter of the day was undoubtedly Sir Godfrey Kneller (d. 1723), a German by birth. His chief rival was a Swede, Michael Dahl (d. 1743). Jonathan Richardson succeeded these in favour, a writer upon the theory of his art as well as a skilful, if cold, artist. His pupil, George Knapton, was the first portrait painter of the Society of Dilettanti. Thomas Hudson was the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who soon after the middle of the century was beginning to assert his supremacy, though as late as 1760 the portraits of Allan Ramsay, the son of the poet, were preferred. Thomas Gainsborough was at this time better known as a landscape painter, in which branch of the art Richard Wilson, as early as 1750, was acquiring a reputation in Italy. The first public exhibition in London by British artists of their own works was held in 1760.