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tarily bring themselves, is Absolute Monarchy.

Locke's

theory is no doubt the negation of this doctrine. The Social State, according to him, is a mixed form of government, acting as trustee on behalf of citizens "for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which," says he, "I call by the general name, property." Locke holds that men could never have voluntarily entered into agreement to submit themselves to one absolute ruler. Such a contract, he says, would be, "as if when men, quitting the state of nature, entered into society, they agreed that all of them should be under the restraint of laws, but that he [the absolute ruler] should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature, increased with power and made licentious with impunity. This is to think men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions."1

The Whig principle after the Revolution of 1688 was not only embodied in philosophy but, for about half a century, adorned by poetry. Compared with the Tory principle of personal loyalty, it offered few opportunities to those who appeal in verse to the reason and imagination through the emotions; but that it was capable of rousing enthusiasm may be seen by poems published so long after the Revolution as Thomson's Liberty and Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination. These works, indeed, are of the didactic order. But in the period immediately following the Revolution, while men's passions were still strongly excited, and the success of the constitutional settlement was in doubt in other words, during the reigns of William III. and Anne-the kind of poetry most in vogue for exalting the Whig principle was panegyric. The abstract and intellectual character of Whiggism threw many difficulties in the way of poetical panegyrists; but their thoughts were elevated by the importance of the European interests, civil and religious, which were evidently at stake; by the vicissitudes of the war, in which England and France played the leading 1 Two Treatises of Government, book ii. chap vii.

parts; and by the greatness of the chiefs on each side, Louis XIV., William III., and Marlborough. I shall attempt to show presently how influential were these circumstances in moulding the form of Whig panegyrical poetry, as compared with the forms of panegyric employed in the pre-Revolution period; meanwhile I shall present the reader with specimens of the more characteristic compositions of this kind, published while the struggle between Whig and Tory was at its acutest point.

The new character of panegyrical poetry may first be noted in the compositions of Charles Montague, who in time became Baron and then Earl of Halifax. Steele, dedicating to him the fourth volume of The Tatler, said: "Your patronage has produced those arts, which before shunned the commerce of the world, into the service of life; and 'tis to you we owe that the man of wit has turned himself to be a man of business." The fourth son

of George Montague, a younger son of Henry, first Earl of Manchester, he was born on the 16th April 1661, and was educated at Westminster (where he is said to have distinguished himself by his facility in making extempore epigrams) and afterwards at Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he took his M.A. degree in 1684. In 1685 he joined with other members of the University in celebrating the memory of Charles II., and his verses on this occasion, far from giving any forecast of his future Whiggism, exhibit all the extravagance of the Royalist panegyric. They begin thus:

Farewell, great Charles! Monarch of blest renown,
The best good man that ever filled a throne,
Whom Nature, as her highest pattern, wrought,
And mixt both sexes' virtue in one draught,

Wisdom for councils, bravery in war,

With all the mild good nature of the Fair.

The woman's sweetness tempered manly wit,

And loving power did crowned with meekness sit.
His awful person reverence engaged,
Which mild address and tenderness assuaged.
Thus the Almighty, gracious King above,

Does both command our fear and win our love.

The conclusion of the poem was an ingenious illustration of the maxim, "the king never dies." After comparing Charles to the river Thames, the panegyrist proceeds :-

But lo! the joyful tide our hopes restores,

And dancing waves extend the widening shores :
James is as Charles in all things but in name;

Thus Thames is daily lost, but still the same.

But two years later Montague took the opportunity, in partnership with Prior, of ridiculing Dryden's Hind and Panther in a parody based partly on The Rehearsal, partly on Horace's fable of the Town and Country Mice, and on the eve of the Revolution, he signed the invitation to the Prince of Orange. It must have been about this time that he wrote his Man of Honour, in which he praised the Duke of Shrewsbury and Lord Lumley for their manly resistance to King James. The poem contains some lines, imitating Virgil's "Excudent alii," etc., which themselves furnished a suggestion to Addison in his Epistle from Italy :

Let other nations boast their fruitful soil,
Their fragrant spices, their rich wine and oil,
In breathing colours and in living paint
Let them excel: their mastery we grant.
But to instruct the mind, and arm the soul
With virtue, which no dangers can control,
Exalt the thought, a speedy courage lend,
That horror cannot shake, or pleasure bend ;
These are the English arts, these we profess
To be the same in misery and success.1

The following passage from the same poem is of interest, because the imagery is suggested by the debasement of the coinage, which Montague himself, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, restored with such admirable skill:

1

Men, like our money, come the most in play
For being base and of a coarse allay.

The richest metals and the purest gold,

Of native value and exactest mould,

Compare the passage from Addison's Epistle from Italy, cited on p. 33,

and also the lines beginning

Others with towering piles may please the sight, etc.

By worth concealed, in private closets shine,
For vulgar use too precious and too fine;
Whilst tin and copper, with new stamping bright,
Coin of base metal, counterfeit and light,

Do all the business of the nation's turn,

Raised in contempt, used and employed in scorn.

Having brought himself into notice by his literary ability, Montague obtained a seat in the Convention of 1688, which settled the different constitutional questions raised by the flight of James II. He was still, however, in doubt as to his future profession, and continued till 1690-in which year he wrote his Epistle to Dorset on the Battle of the Boyne-to trust to his pen for advancement. But being married to the Dowager Countess of Manchester, and having been presented to the King by the Earl of Dorset, he resolved on a political career, and entered the House of Commons, where he at once distinguished himself by his skill in debate. Within three years he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer, and henceforth his work as a poet ceased. He prided himself, however, on being the protector of poets and playwrights. It was to him that Addison owed his advancement, and he was the patron of Congreve, Tickell, and Steele. How much of this patronage was due to vanity, and how much to a grateful sense of what letters had done for him, seems doubtful. Halifax loved dedications and flattery. Swift says of him

:

Thus Congreve spent in writing plays

And one poor office half his days;

While Montague, who claimed the station

To be Mæcenas of the nation,

For poets open table kept,

But ne'er considered where they slept :

Himself as rich as fifty Jews,

Was easy, though they wanted shoes.1

It is,

And Pope's testimony in his character of Bufo, alluded to by Johnson in his Life, is to the same effect. however, to be remembered that Pope's portrait was, in the

1 Libel on Dr. Delany.

first instance, drawn from Dodington, and was only applied to Halifax when an historical sketch of a patron was required for the Epistle to Arbuthnot. Halifax died in 1715. Macaulay, in his characteristic manner, says of

him :

His fame has suffered from the folly of those editors who, down to our own time, have persisted in reprinting his rhymes among the works of the British poets. There is not a year in which hundreds of verses, as good as any that he ever wrote, are not sent in for the Newdigate prize at Oxford, and for the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge.1

This judgment is certainly nearer the truth than the gross flattery of Addison-not to be excused even on the score of gratitude-who places Montague among the greatest English poets, and suggests that he is superior to Chaucer and Spenser :

The noble Montague remains unnamed,

For wit, for humour, and for judgment famed.

To Dorset he directs his artful muse,

In numbers such as Dorset's self might use.

How negligently graceful he unreins

His verse, and writes in loose familiar strains!
How Nassau's godlike acts adorn his lines,
And all the hero in full glory shines! 2

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But since Macaulay allows that Halifax "succeeded in associating his name inseparably with some names which will last as long as our language," it is desirable that such a representative figure in the history of England should be viewed on every side; and as a poetical panegyrist, Montague is not the worst poet of his age. His muse in his Epistle to Dorset is perhaps more " artful” than poetical; but there is some ingenuity in his design. He entreats Dorset in "loose familiar strains" (since Dryden's genius is unavailable) to undertake the praises of William : Dorset, however, he knows will decline the task; he therefore resolves to make the attempt himself, and inserts in his Epistle a heroic rhapsody, describing William at the 1 History of England, vol. iv. p. 454.

2 Account of the Greatest English Poets.

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