abstract, permanent truths of human character and passion.[15] The impression of the mysterious East upon modern travelers and poets like Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, Hugo,[16] Ruckert, and Gerard de Nerval, has no counterpart in the eighteenth century.  The Oriental allegory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in such papers as “The Vision of Mirza,” and by Johnson in “Rasselas,” is rather faintly colored and gets what color it has from the Old Testament.  It is significant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a novel turn to the decayed pastoral by writing a number of “Oriental Eclogues,” in which dervishes and camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the experiment was not a lucky one.  Milton had more of the East in his imagination than any of his successors.  His “vulture on Imaus bred, whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds”; his “plain of Sericana where Chinese drive their cany wagons light”; his “utmost Indian isle Taprobane,” are touches of the picturesque which anticipate a more modern mood than Addison’s.

“The difference,” says Matthew Arnold, “between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school is briefly this:  their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.”  The representative minds of the eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage, destroying superstition with his souriere hideux; Gibbon, “the lord of irony,” “sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer”; and Hume, with his thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt for “zeal” of any kind.  The characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty:  “Hudibras,” “Absalom and Achitophel,” “The Way of the World,” “Gulliver’s Travels” and “The Rape of the Lock.”  There is a whole literature of mockery:  parodies like Prior’s “Ballad on the Taking of Namur” and “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse”; Buckingham’s “Rehearsal” and Swift’s “Meditation on a Broomstick”; mock-heroics, like the “Dunciad” and “MacFlecknoe” and Garth’s “Dispensary,” and John Phillips’ “Splendid Shilling” and Addison’s “Machinae Gesticulantes”; Prior’s “Alma,” a burlesque of philosophy; Gay’s “Trivia” and “The Shepherd’s Week,” and “The Beggars’ Opera"-a “Newgate pastoral”; “Town Eclogues” by Swift and Lady Montague and others.  Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its own grinning face.  It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human nature.  As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness, and levity.  The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the ideal.  The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely rhymed prose.  The recent Queen Anne revival in architecture, dress, and bric-a-brac,