PROSE WRITERS.--The masters of prose (some being also true poets) were innumerable. Daniel Defoe, journalist, satirist, pamphleteer, was the author of the immortal _Robinson Crusoe_; Addison, justly adored by Voltaire, author of a sound tragedy, _Cato_, is supremely a scholar, the acute, sensible, and extremely thoughtful editor of _The Spectator_; Richardson, the idol of Diderot and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, enjoyed a European success with his sentimental and virtuous novels, _Pamela_, _Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Sir Charles Grandison_. As a critic and as a personality, Dr. Johnson has no parallel in any age or land. His _Dictionary_ is famous despite its faults, and _Rasselas_, which he wrote to pay for his mother's funeral, can still be read. Fielding, who began by being only the parodist of Richardson, in _Joseph Andrews_, ended by becoming an astounding realistic novelist, the worthy predecessor of Thackeray and Dickens in his extraordinary _Tom Jones_. The amiable Goldsmith, more akin to Richardson, wrote that idyllic novel _The Vicar of Wakefield_, the charm of which was still felt throughout Europe only fifty years ago. Laurence Sterne, the most accurate representative of English _humour_, capable of emotion more especially ironical, jester, mystificator, has both amused and disquieted several generations with his _Sentimental Journey_ and his fantastical, disconcerting and enchanting _Tristram Shandy_. Swift, horribly bitter, a corrosive and cruel satirist, sadly scoffed at all the society of his time in _Gulliver's Travels_, in _Drapier's Letters_, in his _Proposal to Prevent the Children of the Poor Being a Burden_, in a mass of other small works wherein the most infuriated wrath is sustained under the form of calm and glacial irony. HISTORY.--History was expressed in England in the eighteenth century by David Hume, who chronicled the progress of the English race from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century; by Robertson, who similarly handled the Scotch and who narrated the reign of Charles V; and by Gibbon, so habitually familiar with the French society of his time, who followed the Romans from the first Cæsars to Marcus Aurelius, then more closely from Marcus Aurelius to the epoch of Constantine, and finally the Byzantine Empire up to the period of the Renaissance. The imposing erudition, the rather pompous but highly distinguished style of the author, without counting his animosity to Christianity, caused him to enjoy a great success, especially in France. The work of Gibbon is regarded as the finest example of history written by an Englishman.