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Born in Glasgow in 1805, Sheriff Bell is descended from an honourable and honoured family. His father followed the practice of the law, and educated Henry to the same career. It did not seem, however, as if the son cared to have his father's mantle falling upon him. After receiving the rudiments of his education at the High School of Glasgow, he proceeded to Edinburgh, where he commenced to go through a regular University curriculum. So far as the Scottish metropolis was concerned, the first quarter of the present century was the Augustan age of literature. Sir Walter Scott was in his meridian. De Quincey, under the influence of the "Circean spells" of opium, was making Blackwood a power in the land. Sir William Hamilton, the greatest British supporter of
In the literature of the preceding age we noted two marked tendencies, the tendency to realism in subject-matter, and the tendency to polish and refinement of expression. Both these tendencies were continued in the Augustan Age, and are seen clearly in the poetry of Pope, who brought the couplet to perfection, and in the prose of Addison.
During the first years of tyranny, is reaped the harvest sown during the last years of liberty. Thus the Augustan age was rich in great minds formed in the generation of Cicero and Caesar. The fruits of the policy of Augustus were reserved for posterity. Philip the Second was the heir of the Cortes and of the Justiza Mayor; and they left him a nation which seemed able to conquer all the world.
So Art is indebted not merely to the contemplation of ideal beauty, but to the influence of great ideas permeating society, such as when the age of Phidias was kindled with the great thoughts of Socrates, Democritus, Thucydides, Euripides, Aristophanes, and others, whether contemporaries or not; a sort of Augustan or Elizabethan age, never to appear but once among the same people.
"Now I think that every observant critic will admit that the striking distinctions of the poetry most in the fashion of the present day, namely, of the Augustan age, are, first, a selection of such verbal elegances as would have been most repulsive to the barbaric taste of the preceding century; and, secondly, a very lofty disdain of all prosaic condescensions to common-sense, and an elaborate cultivation of that element of the sublime which Mr.
The Latin authors of this age were numerous, but few had taste to appreciate and imitate the literature of the Augustan age. They may be classified according to their departments of poetry, history, grammar and oratory, philosophy and science.
Though it is perhaps unfair to condemn its style as unworthy of the Augustan age of French architecture, surely the ambition with which the work was undertaken was a laudable one enough, and it is only from the fact that it spells failure in the eyes of many who lack initiative in their own make-up, that it only qualifiedly may be called a great work.
As in other cases and departments this century offers a curious "split" between its earlier part which declines not in goodness but like human life in vitality from, but still preserves the character of, the pure Elizabethan, and its later, which grows up again not in goodness but simply in the same vitality towards the Augustan.
This, however, is another story, a story which suggested that private property was necessary, equality impossible and slavery a useful expedient for colonization. It was a far more comforting message for the Augustan Age, but it could not silence the tocsins of the French Revolution which sound throughout the speeches of Misson and Carracioli. Maximillian E. Novak University of Michigan
For some time Ginevra had been under the care of Miss Machar, the daughter of the parish clergyman, an old gentleman of sober aspirations, to whom the last century was the Augustan age of English literature. He was genial, gentle, and a lover of his race, with much reverence for, and some faith in, a Scotch God, whose nature was summed up in a series of words beginning with omni.
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