Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray, Etonians of the next decade, entirely lacked
Fielding’s moral robustness; they preferred the arts. To rob taste of its moral dimen-
sion struck Dr Johnson as irresponsible. He had no time for aesthetes and, though
he responded to true feeling, scorned the cult of sensibility.
Sensibility, the capacity to feel, had many roots. Moral sensibility has Christian
origins, and its 18th-century expression owes much to Dissent, Methodism and
Scotch philosophy (‘Scotch’ was the form preferred in the 18th century). But 17th-
century conflicts had made many seek a less explicit Christianity. Moral sentiment
could be formulated as philanthropic benevolence, in the manner of Deists such as
Shaftesbury. David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (1739) and Enquiry concern-
ing the Principles of Morals (1751) developed a theory of natural social sympathy and
ofthe subordination of the self to social conditions. The tradition of rural retreat
from conflict or Court corruption was modified to something more private. The
antique moral harmony of Ben Jonson’s To Penshurst was no longer an ideal. The
Civil War retirement poetry which appealed most to the 18th century was Denham’s
estate poem Cooper’s Hill. Pope’s youthful ‘Ode on Solitude’, quoted on pp. 189–90,
is a version of Horace’s daydream which became an 18th-century gentry ideal: an
independent rural life, pleasant but not soft. Voltaire was to end his Candide, a fable
on the folly of assuming that humans are naturally good, with ‘Il faut cultiver son
jardin’ (‘One should cultivate one’s own garden’). This garden was the garden of the
character, requiring what Addison called ‘a constant and assiduous culture’.
The 18th-century garden expressed an ideal of the natural life, often with a liter-
ary programme. In the 1730s Lord Cobham developed at Stowe an Elysian Fields
with a River Styx and Temples of Ancient Virtue and British Worthies; his family
name was Temple. The garden of the poet William Shenstone (1714–1763) had a
much-imitated ruin.At Sir Henry Hoare’s Stourhead in the 1740s the walk round
the lake re-created a sequence of images from Virgil’s Aeneid VI. Pope’s poetry of the
countryside was taken further by James Thomson in his popular The Seasons
(1726–30). The Eve ning Walk,a late 18th-century theme, began from Milton’s Il
Pe nseroso, imitated in the meditations of Lady Winchilsea and Thomas Parnell.
Edward Young in his Night Thoughts (1742) gratified a taste for morbid rumination,
as did Robert Blair in The Grave(1743):‘the task be mine/ To paint the gloomy
horr ors of the tomb.’Thomas Gray
Se nsibility is distilled into something more than cultural taste in the Elegy Written in
a Country Church Yard ofThomas Gray (1711–1771), the most gifted poet of the
generation after Pope. The celebrated Elegy, the most accomplished medium-length
poem of the 18th century, was published in 1751. Thereafter Gray declined the
Laureateship and wrote little verse; as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge,
he never lectured.
His fourteen published poems are sophisticated and eclectic. In Augustan vein are
his ‘Lines on Lord Holland’s Seat’ (1769), a brilliant satire on a disgraced Paymaster-
General, Henry Fox. It begins ‘Old and abandoned by each venal friend, / Here
H[olland] took the pious resolution / To smuggle some few years and strive to
mend/ A broken character and constitution.’ ‘Here’ is Margate, where Fox retired,
building ruins on his estate. He dreams (in Gray) that had he not been betrayed he
could have ruined London: ‘Owls might have hooted in St. Peter’s choir, / And foxes206 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790