[Illustration:  Johnson, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns.]

Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few other plays, the stage had now utterly declined.  The novel, which is dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and to represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely than the theater could do.  In the novelists of the 18th century, the life of the people, as distinguished from “society” or the upper classes, began to invade literature.  Richardson was distinctly a bourgeois writer, and his contemporaries—­Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith—­ranged over a wide variety of ranks and conditions.  This is one thing which distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century from that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all previous centuries.  Among the authors of this generation whose writings belonged to other departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned, in passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published from 1776-1788, and Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary quality.

The romantic poets had addressed the imagination rather than the heart.  It was reserved for two men—­a contrast to one another in almost every respect—­to bring once more into British song a strong individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of speech.  These were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns (1759-1796).  Cowper spoke out of his own life-experience, his agony, his love, his worship and despair; and straightway the varnish that had glittered over all our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away.  Cowper had scribbled verses when he was a young law student at the Middle Temple in London, and he had contributed to the Olney Hymns, published in 1779 by his friend and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but he only began to write poetry in earnest when he was nearly fifty years old.  In 1782, the date of his first volume, he said, in a letter to a friend, that he had read but one English poet during the past twenty years.  Perhaps, therefore, of all English poets of equal culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books and the most to the need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings.  Cowper had a most unhappy life.  As a child he was shy, sensitive, and sickly, and suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whither he was sent after his mother’s death.  This happened when he was six years old; and in his affecting lines written On Receipt of My Mother’s Picture, he speaks of himself as a

  Wretch even then, life’s journey just begun.