To these should be added a work,
whose fine scholarship and profound learning is now universally
admitted, Tyrwhitt's _Chaucer_ (1775-78). It will be noticed that all
these works fall within the space of twenty years, 1755-1775] But it
may be doubted whether any one of them, Gray excepted, saw the true
bearing of the movement more clearly than Goldsmith, or did more to
open fresh springs of thought and beauty for the poetry of the next
age, if not of his own. It would be unpardonable to turn from the
writers of the eighteenth century with no notice of a book which,
seldom now read, is nevertheless perhaps the most solid piece of work
that modern Europe had as yet to show in any branch of literary
criticism. This is Burke's treatise _On the Sublime and the Beautiful_.
Few will now be prepared to accept the material basis which Burke finds
for the ideas of the imagination. [Footnote: Burke traces our ideas
of the sublime to the sense of physical pain; our ideas of the beautiful
to that of physical pleasure; identifying the former with a contraction
or tension, and the latter with a relaxation of the muscles.
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