The fragment of the _Diary_
here preserved runs from September 1796 to June 1800. No one would
guess, from any word between cover and cover, that these were not
halcyon years, an epoch of complete European tranquillity. War upon
war might wake the echoes, but the river ran softly by the Ipswich
garden of this gentle enthusiast, and not a murmur reached him through
his lilacs and laburnums.
I have said that this book is one of the latest expressions of
unadulterated eighteenth-century sentiment. For form's sake, the
Diarist mentions now and again, very superficially, Shakespeare,
Bacon, and Milton; but in reality, the garden of his study is bounded
by a thick hedge behind the statue of Dryden. The classics of Greece
and Rome, and the limpid reasonable writers of England from the
Restoration downwards, these are enough for him. Writing in 1800 he
has no suspicion of a new age preparing. We read these stately pages,
and we rub our eyes. Can it be that when all this was written,
Wordsworth and Coleridge had issued _Lyrical Ballads_, and Keats
himself was in the world? Almost the only touch which shows
consciousness of a suspicion that romantic literature existed, is a
reference to the rival translations of Burger's _Lenore_ in 1797.
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