Another classic of the period is the immortal boys’ story _Robinson Crusoe_ by Daniel Defoe (1659-1730). None of his other stories has lived, but his _Journal of the Plague_ is a work of great importance. Later in the seventeenth century and early in the eighteenth, Addison and Steele were the leading English writers, and their periodicals, _The Tatler_ and _The Spectator_, are classics of journalism: a very dignified and stately sort of journalism in magnificent English. Richardson (1689-1761) was the first great English novelist, and his _Pamela_, _Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Sir Charles Grandison_, had a high reputation. A little later, H. Fielding wrote _Tom Jones_, which ranked as a classic until recent times. L. Sterne (1715-68), whom some ventured to compare to Cervantes, is equally distinguished in his chief novel _Tristram Shandy_, and his _Sentimental Journey_. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), one of the most brilliant satirists, is chiefly remembered by his _Tale of a Tub_ and _Gulliver’s Travels_, which still circulates. He was not, as is commonly said, an Irish wit but was born in Ireland of English parents. Coarse as _Gulliver_ is in many pages, Swift was a Dean of the Church of England. But the same looser taste is seen in most of the literature of the time: in Smollett (whose famous novel _Roderick Random_ is based on _Gil Blas_); in the dramatist Sheridan (_The Rivals_, _School for Scandal_, etc.), and Beaumont and Fletcher. The poet James Thomson, author of _The Seasons_, and the novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), whose _Sense and Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ still stand very high, and the poets Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74), author of the _Deserted Village_, and Thomas Gray (1716-71), author of the _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_, show the more refined feeling of the time. A unique place must be given to Robert Burns (1759-96), the Scottish poet and the finest lyric poet of the time in spite of his notorious intemperance. Burns is assuredly an immortal and such pieces as _Tam_ and _The_ _Cotter’s Saturday Night_ are classics. _Auld Lang Syne_ is also his. And a very different work of the eighteenth century which is unquestionably a classic of highest rank is the great work of the historian Gibbon (1757-94), _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, the product of twenty years of incessant labor.