The wider outlook acquired by travel contributed to an increase of intellectual activity, and improved means of internal communication assisted the dissemination of books. People read more; many instructive books met with a large sale, and circulating libraries were established in the larger towns. In literature the period is marked by an advance in the transition from artificiality of thought, and still more of expression, to what was natural and spontaneous. Antiquity began to attract, and romanticism gradually gained ground. Thomson, who led the flight of poetry from the gilded house of bondage, wrote at an earlier time than ours. For us the new feeling is illustrated by the popularity of _Ossian_, Bishop Percy's _Reliques_, Gray's romantic lyrics, and the pseudo-antique poems of Chatterton, a Bristol lad who killed himself in 1770. Goldsmith's poetry belongs to the old school, for he was a follower of Johnson, a strenuous opponent of the new romanticism. The poetry of Cowper, an ardent lover of nature, whose first volume appeared in 1781, though usually conventional in expression, is always sincere and sometimes exquisite. Crabbe, a story-teller and preacher, wrote some true poetry, along with much that is prosaic: rarely moved by an inspiration drawn from nature to desert the conventional couplet, he nevertheless had something of the spirit of the new movement. In 1783 the artist-poet Blake began to write verse which is absolutely untrammelled by convention, mystical, strange, and unequal. Three years later a volume by Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, contained the outpouring of a passionate soul in musical verse, and in 1798, two years after his death, the victory of the romantic school was secured by the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge, though its triumph was not confirmed until a few years later.