The prevailing intellectual characteristics are marked, in literature, by the great predominance of prose over poetry.  It will be no disparagement to Pope, Prior, Gray, Collins, Akenside, Goldsmith, or Young, to say that they did not attain in poetry what in prose was attained by Swift, Defoe, Steele, Addison, Bolingbroke, Richardson, Fielding, Smollet, Hume, Gibbon, Junius, and Burke; while Goldsmith is as much valued for his prose as for his verse, Addison, Swift, and Johnson more so.  It is to these men, and to contemporaries of lesser note, that English literature is indebted for the invention or perfection of prose forms of the highest importance and beauty.  Defoe stands pre-eminent among the founders of the newspaper, destined to attain so high a degree of power and utility.  Addison, Steele, and Johnson made the essay one of the most attractive and popular forms of literature.  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Horace Walpole, Chesterfield, and Junius brought letter-writing to perfection.  Defoe, Addison, Richardson, and Fielding developed the realistic novel.  A prosaic and conventional tone pervaded even the poetry of the period.  Appreciation of poetry was almost extinguished, Addison, writing of the poets of the past, made no mention of Shakespeare, and found it possible to say of Chaucer: 

      In vain he jests in his unpolish’d strain,
      And tries to make his readers laugh, in vain.

And of Spenser: 

      Old Spenser next, warm’d with poetick rage,
      In ancient tales amus’d a barb’rous age. 
      But now the mystick tale that pleas’d of yore
      Can charm an understanding age no more.[91]

“If you did amuse yourself with writing any thing in poetry,” wrote Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, in 1742, “you know how pleased I should be to see it; but for encouraging you to it, d’ye see, ’tis an age most unpoetical!  ’Tis even a test of wit to dislike poetry; and though Pope has half a dozen old friends that he has preserved from the taste of last century, yet, I assure you the generality of readers are more diverted with any paltry prose answer to old Marlborough’s secret history of Queen Mary’s robes.  I do not think an author would be universally commended for any production in verse, unless it were an ode to the Secret Committee, with rhymes of liberty and property, nation and administration.”

During the brilliant era of literary activity, known by the name of Queen Anne, men of letters were encouraged by the government by means of employment or rewards.  They were supported also by the public through the high social consideration which was freely accorded to men of talent.  Literary success was a passport to the houses and the intimacy of the great.  But under the first two Georges and the administration of Walpole the government was seconded by the public in its neglect of authors and their works.  In those days the circle of readers was too small to afford remuneration to authorship.  Employment