Johnson and Rasselas, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 The Painter and the Club, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Some Old Club-Men, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Mr. Boswell, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Gibbon, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Oliver Goldsmith, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 The Thrales and the End, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 CHAPTER IV. A Scottish Historian, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 A Pair of Poets, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Miss Burney, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Hannah More, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 CHAPTER V. King George III., . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Two Orators, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 An Orator and Playwright, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 The Boy Chatterton, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Laurence Sterne, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 CHAPTER VI. Macpherson and other Scots, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 George Crabbe, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 William Cowper, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 His Later Life, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 {ix} CHAPTER VII. Parson White, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 A Hampshire Novelist, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Old Juvenilia, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Miss Edgeworth, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Some Early Romanticism, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 Vathek, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Robert Burns, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 CHAPTER VIII. A Banker Poet, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Coleridge, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Charles Lamb, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Wordsworth, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 His Poems, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 Personal History, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 {1} _ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS._ CHAPTER I. We open in this book upon times--belonging to the earlier quarter of the eighteenth century--when, upon the Continent of Europe, Peter the Great was stamping out sites for cities in the bogs by the Finland gulf--when that mad-cap Swedish King Charles XII. was cutting his bloody swathe through Poland--when Louis XIV., tired at last of wars, and more tired of Marlborough, was nearing the end of his magnificent career, and when King Mammon was making ready his huge bloat of the Mississippi Bubble for France and of the South Sea Company for England. {2}