Taprobane," are touches of the picturesque which anticipate a more modern
mood than Addison's.

"The difference," says Matthew Arnold, "between genuine poetry and the
poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school is briefly this: their
poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is
conceived and composed in the soul." The representative minds of the
eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage,
destroying superstition with his _souriere hideux_; Gibbon, "the lord of
irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his
thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt
for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were
satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel,"
"The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock."
There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on
the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse";
Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick";
mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's
"Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's
"Machinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque of philosophy;
Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's Week," and "The Beggars' Opera"-a
"Newgate pastoral"; "Town Eclogues" by Swift and Lady Montague and
others. Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its
own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface
of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human
nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness,
and levity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of
Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early
worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the
ideal. The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely