This is the only passage in the Essay hinting at childhood, and suffices to indicate how entirely insignificant in the eyes of the philosophy underlying Pope and his school was the whole thought of childhood. The passage, while not perhaps consciously imitative of Shakespeare, suggests comparison, and one finds in Jaques under the greenwood a more human feeling. Commend us to the tramp before the drawing-room philosopher! * * * * * The prelusive notes of a new literature were sounded by Fielding, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper. It was to be a literature which touched the earth again, the earth of a common nature, the earth also of a national inheritance. Fielding, though painting contemporary society in a manner borrowed in a measure from the satiric drama, was moving constantly into the freer domain of the novelist who is a critic of life, and when he would set forth the indestructible force of a pure nature in a woman who is placed in a loose society, as in Amelia, he instinctively hedges the wife about with children, and it is a mark of his art that these children are not mere pawns which are moved about to protect the queen; they are genuine figures, their prattle is natural, and they are constantly illustrating in the most innocent fashion the steadfastness of Amelia. It is significant that Gray, with his delicate taste and fine classical scholarship, when he composed his Elegy used first the names of eminent Romans when he wrote:— “Some village Cato, who with dauntless breast The little tyrant of the fields withstood; Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest, Some Cæsar, guiltless of his country’s blood.” He changed these names for those of English heroes, and in doing so broke away from traditions which still had a strong hold in literature. It is a pity that for a reason which hardly convinces us he should have thought best to omit the charming stanza,— “There, scattered oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are showers of violets found: The Red-breast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground.” When Gray wrote this he doubtless had in mind the ballad of the Children in the Wood. In the succession of English pictures which he does give is that lovely one,— “For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening’s care; No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the evening kiss to share.” In his poem On a Distant Prospect of Eton College he has lines which are instinct with a feeling for childhood and youth. There is, it is true, a touch of artificiality in the use made of childhood in this poem, as a foil for tried manhood, its little life treated as the lost golden age of mankind; but that sentiment was a prevailing one in the period.