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; bribery and corruption 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, supplanting 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.