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opinions of its votaries. But, in the case of Literature, I am not 
at all prepared to admit that we make any progress towards the 
absolutely perfect, or towards the knowledge of what the absolutely 
perfect is. Our forms of literary instruction or amusement change 
from generation to generation, much as the fashions of our dress 
change, and we have no standard by which to test them, except 
our own opinion, which will probably be condemned by the 
opinion of a succeeding age. 
Perhaps you will think this is not an altogether superfluous 
preamble, when I tell you that I propose to take for the subject 
of my address, ‘‘The Writers of English Fiction in the Eighteenth 
Century,” for it has been the fashion of the nineteenth century, 
now itself tottering into its grave, to look down with some 
contempt on its immediate predecessor and all his works. 
This is not the occasion to pronounce either the apology or the 
eulogy of the eighteenth century, but this at least may be truly and 
briefly said of it, that though it has never been charged with 
enthusiasm, its close- was marked by the greatest upheaval of 
social and political ideas which modern history has seen ; and that 
though it has never been justly accused of imagination, it gave us 
the Novel. 
In dealing with English Fiction, we need not go back more 
than one hundred and fifty years. A hundred years earlier, in the 
time of the Commonwealth, we find Miss Dorothy Osborne, one 
of the cleverest young ladies of her day, writing one of her 
charming love letters to Mr.—afterwards Sir William—Temple, 
thanking him for the loan of ‘‘La Reine Marguerite,” and recom- 
mending to him the “Cléopatre” of Calprenéde, which she has both 
in French and in English. The first-named work was a French 
account of the intrigues of the Queen of Navarre (the heroine of 
Dumas’ novel ‘‘La Reine Marguerite”), and the other a collection 
of stories translated from the French, fashionable in that day, but 
unreadable by reason of their dulness in this. In the “ Rape of 
the Lock,” which was written about 1712, Pope refers to this 
kind of work as if it was still the staple of fiction, though, I should 
judge, already a little old-fashioned ;— 
