generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little. Less coarse than Fielding, he is far more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly to the point; Sterne lingers among the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it. Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages seduce. He is full of good sayings both tender and witty. It was Sterne, for example, who wrote, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose _Vicar of Wakefield_, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best, novels of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic. But its characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and purity, and with touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the English Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country parson in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, 1770, who was "passing rich on forty pounds a year." This poem, though written in the fashionable couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. 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.