men like Reynolds and Burke, Richardson and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gibbon, and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows like Beattie and a genius like Adam Smith.  Gray, studious in his college at Cambridge, is exercising his fastidious talent; Collins’ sequestered, carefully nurtured muse is silent; a host of minor poets are riding Pope’s poetic diction, and heroic couplet to death.  Outside scattered about is the van of Romance—­Percy collecting his ballads; Burns making songs and verses in Scotland; the “mad” people, Smart and Chatterton, and above all Blake, obscurely beginning the work that was to finish in Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats.

Of Johnson’s set the most remarkable figure was Edmund Burke—­“the supreme writer,” as De Quincey called him, “of his century.”  His writings belong more to the history of politics than to that of literature, and a close examination of them would be out of place here.  His political theory strikes a middle course which offends—­and in his own day offended—­both parties in the common strife of political thinking.  He believed the best government to consist in a patriotic aristocracy, ruling for the good of the people.  By birth an Irishman, he had the innate practicality which commonly lies beneath the flash and colour of Irish forcefulness and rhetoric.  That, and his historical training, which influenced him in the direction of conceiving every institution as the culmination of an evolutionary development, sent him directly counter to the newest and most enthusiastically urged political philosophy of his day—­the philosophy stated by Rousseau, and put in action by the French Revolution.  He disliked and distrusted “metaphysical theories,” when they left the field of speculation for that of practice, had no patience with “natural rights” (which as an Irishman he conceived as the product of sentimentalism) and applied what would nowadays be called a “pragmatic” test to political affairs.  Practice was the touchstone; a theory was useless unless you could prove that it had worked.  It followed that he was not a democrat, opposed parliamentary reform, and held that the true remedy for corruption and venality was not to increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce it so as to obtain electors of greater weight and independence.  For him a member of Parliament was a representative and not a delegate, and must act not on his elector’s wishes but on his own judgment.  These opinions are little in fashion in our own day, but it is well to remember that in Burke’s case they were the outcome not of prejudice but of thought, and that even democracy may admit they present a case that must be met and answered.