ENGLISH POETS

OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

SELECTED AND EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY

ERNEST BERNBAUM

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

1918

PREFACE

The text of this collection of poetry is authentic and not bowdlerized.The general reader will, I hope, be gratified to find that its pagesdisplay no pedantic or scholastic traits. His pleasure in the poetryitself will not be distracted by a marginal numbering of the lines; byindex-figures and footnotes; or by antiquated peculiarities of spelling,capitalization, and elision. Except where literal conventions areessential to the poet's purpose,—as in The Castle of Indolence, TheSchoolmistress, or Chatterton's poems,—I have followed modern usage.Dialect words are explained in the glossary; and the student who may wishto consult the context of any passage will find the necessary referencesin the unusually full table of contents. Whenever the title of a poemgives too vague a notion of its substance, or whenever its substance ismiscellaneous, I have supplied [bracketed] captions for the extracts;except for these, there is nothing on the pages of the text besides thepoets' own words.

Originality is not the proper characteristic of an anthologist, and inthe choice of extracts I have rarely indulged my personal likings whenthey conflicted with time-honored preferences; yet this anthology,—thefirst published in a projected series of four or five volumes comprisingthe English poets from Elizabethan to Victorian times,—has certain minorfeatures that may be deemed objectionably novel. Much the greater portionof the volume has of course, as usual, been given to those poems (byPope, Thomson, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cowper, and Burns) whichhave been loved or admired from their day to our own. But I have venturedto admit also a few which, though forgotten to-day, either were popularin the eighteenth century or possess marked historical significance. Inother words, I present not solely what the twentieth century considersenduringly great in the poetry of the eighteenth, but also alittle—proportionately very little—of what the eighteenth centuryitself (perhaps mistakenly) considered interesting. This secondarypurpose accounts for my inclusion of passages from such neglected authorsas Mandeville, Brooke, Day, and Darwin. The passages of this sort are tooinfrequent to annoy him who reads for aesthetic pleasure only; and to thestudent they will illustrate movements in the spirit of the age whichwould otherwise be unrepresented, and which, as the historicalintroduction points out, are an integral part of its thought and feeling.The inclusion of passages from "Ossian," though almost unprecedented,requires, I think, no defense against the literal-minded protest thatthey are written in "prose."

Students of poetical history will find it illuminating to read thepassages in chronological order (irrespective of authorship); and inorder to facilitate this method I have given in the table of contents thedate of each poem.

E. B.

JOHN POMFRET THE CHOICE (1700)

DANIEL DEFOE
  THE TRUE-BORN ENGLISHMAN (1701),
      ll. 119-132, 189-228, 312-321
  A HYMN TO THE PILLORY (17

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