PERIODICAL LITERATURE. ADDISON. POPE. SWIFT. STEELE. ANOTHER revolution, the consequences of which have been and still continue to be incalculable, now took place. The periodical press, at once political and literary, was established on the banks of the Thames. Steele wrote, on whig principles, the Tatler, the Spectator, the Mentor, the Englishman, the Lover, the Reader, the Towntalk, the Chit-chat, the Plebeian; he attacked the Examiner, written by Swift, in the tory spirit. Addison, Congreve, Walsh, Arbuthnot, Gay, Pope, King, ranged themselves according to their respective opinions, under the banners of Swift and Steele. Jonathan Swift, born in Ireland, on the 30th of November, 1667, has been most inappropriately called by Voltaire the English Rabelais. Voltaire relished only the impieties of Rabelais, and his humour, when it is good; but the deep satire on society and man, the lofty philosophy, the grand style of the curé of Meudon, escaped his notice, as he saw only the weak side of Christianity, and had no idea of the intellectual and moral revolution effected in mankind by the Gospel. The "Tale of a Tub," in which the Pope, Luther, and Calvin are attacked, and “ Gulliver," in which social institutions are stigmatised, exhibit but faint copies of "Gargantua." The ages in which the two writers lived produce, moreover, a wide difference between them: Rabelais began his language; Swift finished his. It is not certain, however, that the "Tale of a Tub" is Swift's, or that it was written entirely by him; Swift amused himself by manufacturing verses of twenty, thirty, and sixty feet. Velly, the historian, has translated the satire on the peace of Utrecht, entitled "John Bull." was at the end of his William III., who did so many things, taught Swift the art of growing asparagus in the Dutch manner. Jonathan fell in love with Stella, took her to his deanery of St. Patrick, and at the end of sixteen years, when he passion, he married her. Esther van Homrigh conceived an affection for Swift, though he was old, ugly, and disgusting: when she learned that he was absolutely married to Stella, who had become quite indifferent to him, she died; Stella soon followed Esther. The hard-hearted man, who caused the death of these two beautiful young women, was not able, like the truly great poets, to bestow on them a second life. Steele, a countryman of Swift's, became his rival in politics. Having obtained a seat in the House of Commons, he was expelled from it as the author of seditious libels. On the creation of twelve peers, during the administration of Oxford and Bolingbroke, he addressed a cutting letter to Sir Miles Wharton, on the making of peers for particular occasions. Steele did not enrich himself by his connexion with the great corrupter Walpole relinquishing his pamphlets, he turned his attention to mechanical literature, and invented a machine for conveying salmon fresh to London. Steele has been deservedly commended for having cleansed the drama of those obscenities with which the writers of the time of Charles II. had infected it this was so much the more meritorious in the author of the "Conscious Lovers,' inasmuch as his own manners were far from re gular. Meanwhile, his contemporary, Gay, the fabulist, brought upon the stage his "Beggars' Opera," the hero of which is a robber and the heroine a prostitute. The "Beggars' Opera," is the original of our melo-dramas of the present day. TRANSITION FROM CLASSIC LITERATURE TO DIDACTIC, DESCRIPTIVE, AND SENTIMENTAL LITERATURE. POEMS OF DIFFERENT WRITERS. ENGLISH classic literature, which resembled ours as nearly as the difference of national manners would permit, degenerated rapidly, and passed from the Classic to the Spirit of the eighteenth century. We then became in our turn imitators: we fell to work to copy our neighbours, with an eagerness which still seizes us by fits. Here the subject is so well known and so completely exhausted, that it would be tiresome to proceed in chronological order, and to repeat what every body is acquainted with. Moral, technical, didactic, descriptive poetry includes the names of Gay, Young, Akenside, Goldsmith, Gray, Bloomfield, Glover, Thomson, &c.; the novel boasts of Richardson and Fielding; history of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, who have been followed by Smollett and Lingard. Besides all these poets, there were read in their day The Art of Preserving Health," by Armstrong, "The Chase," by Somerville, "The Actor," by Lloyd, "The Art of Poetry," by Roscommon, "The Art of Poetry," by Francis, "The Art of Politics," by Bramston, “The Art of Cookery," by King. "The Art of Politics" possesses spirit. The exordium of these different poems is imitated from the opening of the Ars Poetica of Horace. Bramston compares a man at once Whig and Tory to a human figure with Delacourt in his " Prospect of Poetry" aimed at that imitative technical harmony, which has since been cultivated in France by M. Piis. RRs jar untuneful o'er the quiv'ring tongue, Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination," is deficient in imagination; and Stillingfleet's poem on "Conversation," could only have been composed among a people who knew not how to converse. I ought further to mention "The Shipwreck," by Falconer; "The Traveller," and "The De |