Johnson--so
that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists--did,
perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins to recall English
poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country life.
[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.
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