write of Nature when they are young and give it up when they put away childish things. The import of these facts in this period seems to be merely that there was a genuine and widespread love of Nature on the part of many isolated poets, who, by the circumstances of their lives, knew Nature better than they did literature, but that this love was not sufficiently robust in individual cases to withstand the cramping influences of city life and literary coteries. The developing tradition was carried on not so much by the persistent influence of a few as by the constant springing up of the same spirit in many minds. In a transition period the predominant spirit is self-conscious, authoritative, and full of maxims drawn from its own successes. The new spirit comes in, as it were, by chance. It is but slightly theoretic, following instinct rather than well-defined principles. In its first stages it is apologetic rather than aggressive. These characteristics, on the whole, mark the love of Nature in the early eighteenth-century poetry. There are, however, occasional indications that some poets, at least, not only wrote according to new canons of taste, but were distinctly conscious of their revolt from the old. So early as 1709 Ambrose Philips in the Preface to his “Pastorals” justified his choice of country themes by pointing out the pleasing effect of natural scenes on the mind. John Gay’s enunciation of a creed, though meant as a satire, was so just a condemnation of existing poetic conventions, and so apt a prophecy of one phase of the new spirit that it really deserves to rank among revolutionary statements of theory. Allan Ramsay’s Preface to “The Evergreens” is equally emphatic in its scorn of classical limitations, and it was meant in downright earnest. The thought of the Preface finds expression several times in his poems as well. Dyer gives utterance to a similar scorn of Parnassus in “The Country Walk.” Shenstone, in his “Prefatory Essay on Elegy,” shows a timid but perfectly clear recognition of the fact that he is breaking away from poetical canons. Mason in the Preface to “Elfrida” says that he has introduced descriptions with a purpose of rendering the drama more pleasing. Whitehead’s “Enthusiast” with its elaborate statement of both sides of the case in man versus Nature is an important indication of the clearness with which the points of the controversy were at that time recognized. The strongest and most detailed statement of a creed came about four years later in Joseph Warton’s “Essay on Pope” (1756). Nothing else so clear, direct, and full appeared before the Prefaces of Wordsworth. After Warton it is not so necessary to indicate all self-conscious statements. It will suffice briefly to indicate Langhorne’s statement of his purpose in writing, Goldsmith’s vigorous attacks on falseness and affectation in poetry, Beattie’s Wordsworthian Preface to “The Minstrel,” John Scott’s criticism on