too well-bred to call a lady to account for her offenses.  Jenyns versified this effeminization of Christianity, charged orthodoxy with attributing cruelty to God, and asserted that faith in divine and human kindness would banish all wrong and discord from the world.  In 1735 a far more important poet of sentimentalism arose in Henry Brooke, an undeservedly neglected pioneer, who, likewise drawing his inspiration from Shaftesbury, developed its theories with unusual consistency and fullness.  His Universal Beauty voiced his sense of the divine immanence in every part of the cosmos, and emphasized the doctrine that animals, because they unhesitatingly follow the promptings of Nature, are more lovely, happy, and moral than Man, who should learn from them the individual and social virtues, abandon artificial civilization, and follow instinct.  Brooke, in the prologue of his Gustavus Vasa, shows that he foresaw the political bearings of this theory; it is, in his opinion, peculiarly a people “guiltless of courts, untainted, and unread” that, illumined by Nature, understands and upholds freedom:  but this was a thought too advanced to be general at this time even among Brooke’s fellow-sentimentalists.

Though sentimental literature bore the seeds of revolution, its earliest effect upon its devotees was to create, through flattery of human character, a feeling of good-natured complacency.  Against this optimism the traditional school reacted in two ways,—­derisive and hortatory.  Pope, Young, and Swift satirized with masterful skill the inherent weaknesses and follies of mankind, the vigor of their strokes drawing from the sentimentalist Whitehead the feeble but significant protest, On Ridicule, deprecating satire as discouraging to benevolence.  On the other hand, Wesley’s hymns fervently summoned to repentance and piety; while Young’s Night Thoughts, yielding to the new influence only in its form (blank verse), reasserted the hollowness of earthly existence, the justice of God’s stern will, and the need of faith in heavenly immortality as the only adequate satisfaction of the spiritual elements in Man.  The literary powers of Pope, Swift, and Young were far superior to those of the opposed school, which might have been overborne had not a second generation of sentimentalists arisen to voice its claims in a more poetical manner.

These newcomers,—­Akenside, J.G.  Cooper, the Wartons, and Collins,—­all of them very young, appeared between 1744 and 1747; and each rendered distinct service to their common cause.  The least original of the group, John Gilbert Cooper, versified in The Power of Harmony Shaftesbury’s cosmogony.  More independently, Mark Akenside developed out of the same doctrine of universal harmony the theory of aesthetics that was to guide the school,—­the theory that the true poet is created not by culture and discipline at all, but owes to the impress of Nature—­that beauty which is goodness—­his