CONCLUSION 181 



Boerhave, lived at this time. Tlie inevitable injustice of satire 

 is here, — the exaggeration of weaknesses, the omission of virtues. 



The satiric poets, from the sullen and morose Butler to the 

 "Wasp of Twickenham", took their fling at the new philosophy. 

 In their verse there is the same exploitation, the same lack of dis- 

 crimination, the same desire "to make their readers sport whether 

 the persons exposed deserve it or not", as in comedy. In Butler 

 there is bitterness ; in Pope there is a temperamental ' ' painful dis- 

 cord"; in the rest there is rude and boisterous laughter. But 

 piety led Prior, Blackmore, Savage, Brooke, and Young into an 

 appreciation of the new astronomy; the loftiest verse outside of 

 Milton's was directly inspired by the "new heaven of the telescope". 

 To the Thomsonian poets, influenced by the new interest of science, 

 it was given to catch a glimpse of a new world in external nature. 

 "They walked in nature as in a garden, and tasted of its plenty". 

 In them was begun that process of harmonizing imagination and 

 the scientific spirit for which Wordsworth preached, when ' ' Science 

 should become the handmaid of Literature". The infinite variety 

 of "imaginations and similitudes", which the too optimistic Sprat 

 had prophesied, did not come to them, but they did gain in imagery, 

 in inspiration, and, perhaps more than can be calculated, in atti- 

 tude and spirit; for "there first awoke in them the general idea 

 of the importance of an objective attitude to nature and of the 

 new use of systematic experiment".^ 



In the prose treatment of the new science there are three fairly 

 distinct phases ; first, an early appreciation during the last forty 

 years of the seventeenth century, secondly, a satiric exploitation 

 extending from Eachard to the London Spy, thirdly, an incidental 

 representation in the human philosophers and a direct, non-literary 

 exposition from the virtuosi themselves. Flushed with the zeal of 

 discovery, the new philosophers "made a spirited effort to chronicle 

 the new observations in the best literary form of the age". The at- 

 tempt fell gradually away at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, but meanwhile there was developed a prose ideal, a "clear, 

 naked style, approaching mathematical plainness", whose "virtues 

 spread and wrought with the instinct of conversation and social 

 amenity, and with the love of argument and pleading and oratory, 



* Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. IV, p. 328. 



