In many books, also, not devoted exclusively to the treatment of Nature in literature there are special studies and much running comment of a valuable sort. This is true of almost all essays on the early nineteenth-century poets, and especially so of the various essays on Wordsworth. There is something to be found in manuals of English literature, as in Gosse’s “Eighteenth Century” in the chapter, “The Dawn of Naturalism,” in various notes in Perry’s “English Literature of the Eighteenth Century,” Phelps’ “The English Romantic Movement,” and others; also, in some histories, as in Lecky’s “History of England in the Eighteenth Century;” in some philosophical studies, as in Leslie Stephen’s “English Thought in the Eighteenth Century” (“The Literary Reaction”), and in Stopford Brooke’s “Theology in the English Poets” (_passim_); in various literary studies, as in McLaughlin’s “Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature” (“The Mediaeval Feeling for Nature”), Vernon Lee’s “Euphorion” (“The Outdoor Poetry”), Symonds’ “Essays Speculative and Suggestive” (“Landscape,” “Nature Myths and Allegories”), Burroughs’ “Fresh Fields” (“Birds and Poets”), and Fischer’s “Drei Studien zur Englischen Litteraturgeschichte” “Ueber den Einfluss der See auf die Englische Litteratur”).[4] The books indicated show that there is much interest in the general theme of Nature as an element of art. The literary periods that have been most studied are, however, the Greek and Roman, the mediaeval, and the modern. The treatment of Nature in so barren a time as the eighteenth century in England has naturally received little close attention. In my own work on this period I have endeavored to discover what indications there are that the attitude toward Nature of the early nineteenth century is but the legitimate outcome of influences actively at work during the eighteenth century. This study is therefore one of origins. I have divided my work into three parts. I have endeavored to give first a general statement of the chief characteristics that marked the treatment of Nature under the dominance of the English classical poets. Then follows a detailed study of such eighteenth-century poets as show some new conception of Nature. The third division is made up of briefer studies of the fiction, the books of travel, the landscape gardening, and the painting of the eighteenth century, the purpose being to determine in how far the spirit found in the poetry reveals itself in other realms in which the love of Nature might be expected to find expression. CHAPTER I THE TREATMENT OF NATURE IN ENGLISH CLASSICAL POETRY The poetry of the English classical period falls naturally into four subdivisions: 1. The period of inception may be reckoned as beginning with Waller’s first couplets in 1621 and including the work of his followers, Denham, Davenant, and Cowley.[5]