Footnote 186:  We have endeavored here simply to show the meaning of terms in general use in our literature; but it must be remembered that it is impossible to classify or to give a descriptive name to the writers of any period or century.  While “classic” or “pseudo-classic” may apply to a part of eighteenth-century literature, every age has both its romantic and its classic movements.  In this period the revolt against classicism is shown in the revival of romantic poetry under Gray, Collins, Burns, and Thomson, and in the beginning of the English novel under Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.  These poets and novelists, who have little or no connection with classicism, belong chronologically to the period we are studying.  They are reserved for special treatment in the sections following.

Footnote 187:  Pope’s satires, for instance, are strongly suggested in Boileau; his Rape of the Lock is much like the mock-heroic Le Lutrin; and the “Essay on Criticism,” which made him famous, is an English edition and improvement of L’Art Poetique.  The last was, in turn, a combination of the Ars Poetica of Horace and of many well-known rules of the classicists.

Footnote 188:  These are the four kinds of spirits inhabiting the four elements, according to the Rosicrucians,—­a fantastic sect of spiritualists of that age.  In the dedication of the poem Pope says he took the idea from a French book called Le Comte de Gabalis.

Footnote 189:  Compare this with Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage,” in As You Like it, II, 7.

Footnote 190:  It is only fair to point out that Swift wrote this and two other pamphlets on religion at a time when he knew that they would damage, if not destroy, his own prospects of political advancement.

Footnote 191:  See Tennyson’s “Merlin and the Gleam.”

Footnote 192:  Of the Tatler essays Addison contributed forty-two; thirty-six others were written in collaboration with Steele; while at least a hundred and eighty are the work of Steele alone.

Footnote 193:  From “The Vanity of Human Wishes”

Footnote 194:  A very lovable side of Johnson’s nature is shown by his doing penance in the public market place for his unfilial conduct as a boy.  (See, in Hawthorne’s Our Old Home, the article on “Lichfield and Johnson.”) His sterling manhood is recalled in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, refusing the latter’s patronage for the Dictionary.  The student should read this incident entire, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Footnote 195:  In Johnson’s Dictionary we find this definition:  “Grub-street, the name of a street in London much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called Grub-street.”

Footnote 196:  From Macaulay’s review of Boswell’s Life of Johnson.