self-delusion rather than intent, he was engaged in an effort to deceive
by giving sentimental doctrines a basis of apparent actuality. But the
world has forgotten or forgiven his pious fraud in its gratitude for the
loveliness of his art.


IV. THE TRIUMPH OF SENTIMENTALISM (1776-1800)

Goldsmith's application of sentimental ideas to contemporary affairs
foreshadowed what was to be one of the marked tendencies of the movement
in the last quarter of the century. Thus in 1777 Thomas Day interpreted
the American Revolution as a conflict between the pitiless tyranny of a
corrupt civilization and the appealing virtues of a people who had found
in sequestered forests and prairies the abiding place of Freedom and the
only remaining opportunity "to save the ruins of the human name." At the
same time the justification of sentimentalism on historical grounds was
strengthened by the young antiquarian and poet, Thomas Chatterton. Like
Macpherson, he answers to Pope's description of archaizing authors,--

Ancients in words, mere moderns in their sense.

He fabricated, in what he thought to be Middle English, a body of songs
and interludes, which he attributed to a monk named Thomas Rowleie,
and which showed that, in the supposedly unsophisticated simplicity of
medieval times, charity to Man and love for Nature had flourished as
beautifully as lyric utterance. Even more lamentable than Chatterton's
early death is the fact that his fanciful and musical genius was shrouded
in so grotesque a style.

In 1781 appeared a new poet of real distinction, George Crabbe, now the