The next principal epoch is just one hundred years later, when the reign of Queen Anne was adorned by the essayists, headed by Addison; by the “classic” poets, foremost among whom are Dryden and Pope; and by the first of the novel-writers, Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe. Here we find three different kinds of authors equally eminent. This “age” continued for seventy-five years,--indeed, we may say a hundred, expiring on the appearance of the poets Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. It is called the “Classic Age,” because the leading writers, especially the poets (Dryden, Pope, etc.), tried to follow the classic models of Greece and Rome, and so produced work most highly polished and theoretically correct; but of course it was artificial and wanting in the instinctive and spontaneous elements of poetry as we know it in the nineteenth century poets. The term “classic,” however, does not apply to the novelists--Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Goldsmith following Defoe and Bunyan. These novel writers were looked on as too low for critical attention; but the prose of Addison, Steel, Swift Johnson, and Goldsmith[2] was admired as prose had never been admired before, and our later age has accepted this prose as the greatest literary achievement of the eighteenth century. The modern reader will find his chief interest in the literature of the nineteenth century. And now there are a few dates that we should remember. BURNS--1786. Burns prepared the way for the new poetry--a poetry simple, spontaneous, tender, and true, as the poetry of Pope was artificial, clever, and “elegant.” The Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poems appeared in 1786. It was a country print of the immortal work of a rude country poet. LYRICAL BALLADS--1798. The “romantic movement” in poetry, as it was called, was really inaugurated in 1798--a date always to be remembered--by the little volume of Lyrical Ballads published jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge. This volume contained “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere” (Coleridge’s best poem) and “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” (the best work of Wordsworth). No one paid much attention to the book, and but a limited number of copies were sold or given away. A few poets, however, read it and felt its spirit. The first of these to take up the new poetic movement was Scott, in his Lay of the Last Minstrel, which at once became popular. For ten years Scott was the popular poet, but then he was succeeded by Byron, the poet of the dark and cynical. Close on the heels of Byron came Shelley and Keats. Last of all came Tennyson and Browning. Tennyson’s reputation was made by his two volumes of poems published in 1842; and Browning published some of his best work in the same year, though his fame did not come to him till many years later. LAMB--1825.