Goldsmith’s application of sentimental ideas to contemporary affairs foreshadowed what was to be one of the marked tendencies of the movement in the last quarter of the century.  Thus in 1777 Thomas Day interpreted the American Revolution as a conflict between the pitiless tyranny of a corrupt civilization and the appealing virtues of a people who had found in sequestered forests and prairies the abiding place of Freedom and the only remaining opportunity “to save the ruins of the human name.”  At the same time the justification of sentimentalism on historical grounds was strengthened by the young antiquarian and poet, Thomas Chatterton.  Like Macpherson, he answers to Pope’s description of archaizing authors,—­

  Ancients in words, mere moderns in their sense.

He fabricated, in what he thought to be Middle English, a body of songs and interludes, which he attributed to a monk named Thomas Rowleie, and which showed that, in the supposedly unsophisticated simplicity of medieval times, charity to Man and love for Nature had flourished as beautifully as lyric utterance.  Even more lamentable than Chatterton’s early death is the fact that his fanciful and musical genius was shrouded in so grotesque a style.

In 1781 appeared a new poet of real distinction, George Crabbe, now the hope of the conservatives.  Edmund Burke, who early in his great career had assailed the radicals in his ironic Vindication of Natural Society, and who to the end of his life contended against them in the arena of politics, on reading some of Crabbe’s manuscripts, rescued this cultured and ingenuous man from obscurity and distress; and Dr. Johnson presently aided him in his literary labors.  In The Library Crabbe expressed the reverence of a scholarly soul for the garnered wisdom of the past, and satirized some of the popular writings of the day, including sentimental fiction.  He would not have denied the world those consolations which flow from the literature that mirrors our hopes and dreams; but his honest spirit revolted when such literature professed to be true to life.  His acquaintance with actual conditions in humble circles, and with hardships, was as personal as Goldsmith’s; but he was not the kind of poet who soothes the miseries of mankind by ignoring them.  In The Village he arose with all the vigor and intensity of insulted common sense to refute the dreamers who offered a rose-colored picture of country life as a genuine portrayal of truth and nature.  So evident was his mastery of his subject, his clearness of perception, and his earnestness of feeling, that he attracted immediate attention; and he might well have led a new advance under the ancient standards.  But silence fell upon Crabbe for many years; and this proved, to be the last occasion in the poetical history of the century that a powerful voice was raised in behalf of the old cause.