XXX. GEORGIAN PROSE…

XXX. GEORGIAN PROSE

I.

The Great Novelists.

The novel, since the days of the mediaeval romances, and the Elizabethan prose stories from Sidney's "Arcadia" to the tales of Greene and Nash, was never quite unrepresented in England, for example, there were translations and imitations of the huge French "Heroic" romances; Bunyan's stories are religious and moral novels, and under the Restoration Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) wrote short novels of love which do not quite deserve the bad reputation conferred on them by an anecdote told by Sir Walter Scott. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was prolific in prose tales, and is the author of a little romance of Prince Charles's adventures in 1749-1750, disguised as "A Letter of H-- G--," Henry Goring, the Prince's equerry. But in literary circles, the novel was held in as high disdain as it was later, before Scott produced "Waverley" (1814).

The novel of modern life, manners, and sentiment first came to its own as the universal joy of reading mankind in Richardson's "Pamela"; advertised as it was, in modern fashion from the pulpits of all denominations.

Samuel Richardson, the son of a Yorkshire joiner, was born in 1689, and after being educated at the Charterhouse was apprenticed to a London printer. As a boy he made small sums by writing love-letters for maid-servants and others who were unable to write for themselves; and when, as a middle-aged man, he turned to writing novels, he cast them in the form of letters. "Pamela," which he began to publish in 1740, is the story of a girl who is a waiting-maid to a lady and is persecuted by her mistress's son; in the end he marries her and becomes a model husband. It may annoy us from the very strange and unnatural way in which all the characters behave. Pamela strikes us less as a being of equal innocence and virtue, mistress of her own passion for "the dear obliger," Mr. B. (only the initial is given), than as a young woman who knows her game and plays her cards most adroitly. Her snobbishness was, no doubt, in the manner of her class in her day, but we approve of Pamela no more than Fielding did, when he overwhelmed it with the sturdy laughter of his parody, "Joseph Andrews," brother of Pamela, and as virtuous as that paragon, yet no milksop. But "Pamela" was admired beyond "this side idolatry".

"Clarissa" (1748) is another novel of Virtue in danger and distress, but Clarissa is a lady of good family and fortune, and of a pure and heroic spirit. Decoyed from her home and friends by the wiles of the professional seducer, Lovelace, a rake so brilliant and witty and reckless as to win the hearts, if not of Clarissa, of all Richardson's lady readers, Clarissa is exposed to the last extreme of misery, steadily refuses to marry the scoundrel who has wronged her, and dies slowly among the sobs of the congregation.

"Sir Charles Grandison," whose name has become a proverb in the English language, appeared in 1753, and is one of the longest books that ever was printed. It is very badly constructed too, and contains lengthy episodes which have nothing to do with the story, and only puzzle and confuse the reader. Properly speaking it is not so much a novel as a series of incidents, all tending to the glorification of the hero, who is made up of long words, fine sentiments and whalebone. The women of the tale are less exasperating than the men, though they can hardly be considered attractive. The reason of this may be found in the fact that Richardson neither sought nor was sought by men, while he was in the habit of reading his manuscripts to a group of enthusiastic young ladies (among whom was the future Mrs. Chapone) in his garden at Fulham. Unluckily his audience, who might have been of service to him in pointing out that well-bred people had other manners than those of the characters of Richardson, were too deeply engulfed in admiration to be capable of criticism; or possibly they may not have been aware, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was, that Richardson did not know the society which he described. The letters themselves, besides showing a frankness and lack of reticence which it may confidently be said few real letters could ever parallel, are of a length which even on a desert island no one could write. The genuine letters in his correspondence, between him and the unknown but worshipping Lady Bradshaigh, and their romantic and elaborate arrangements to discover each other in Hyde Park, are far more amusing reading. Richardson has been accused, and justly, of a portentous lack of humour, but if his reader has any of his own, he will not read the novels in vain.

These censures are the candid criticism of the modern reader who finds that he cannot think himself back into the circle of Richardson, who finds its Virtue and its Sentiment hardly intelligible, though he is entirely at home with the society of all degrees that Fielding describes, or that lives in Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and in the "Letters" of Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, expressing themselves like people of this world. But though Richardson lived in a kind of moral and sentimental hothouse, where one can scarcely breathe; though he had a more than feminine liking for accumulated minutenesses of details and a more than mediaeval prolixity; yet his full-length pictures of his personages, stippled like a miniature in a ring, delighted not only English but continental, especially French readers. It was an age when people took little exercise, were little in the open air, and passed endless hours in conversation on the ethics and philosophy of love and sentiment. The Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay are partly a romance in the manner of Richardson, and to read them is to understand the society which found in him its ideal novelist. "The man would hang himself who tried to read 'Clarissa' for its story," said Dr. Johnson, a friend of the author, partly because the author was the friend of Virtue. We, if we please, may detest and disbelieve in Lovelace, who was, none the less, the conqueror of the hearts of the ladies of the time, that implored Richardson to convert a hero so brilliant, witty and amiable. But for Richardson it had been enough to convert Mr. B., and he was artist enough to refuse to gratify tastes which, in the manner of Charles II., demanded that all tragedies should end happily. Scott, with the resurrection of Athelstane; Dickens, with the conversion of Estella, were more good-naturedly and erroneously amenable to the requests of friends.

There was a blush between Charles Lamb and the girl who sat down beside him to read "Pamela," and, in fact, Richardson's way of educating girls in virtue may seem apt to have effects which he did not contemplate. Other times, other manners.

Henry Fielding.

To say anything at once new and true about Henry Fielding passes the power of man. His defects and his qualities; the good in him and in his work, and the not so good, are so conspicuous that his contemporaries, and later generations down to our own, have passed on them the same remarks. There are the admirers of Fielding, who justly see in him one of the three very greatest of English novelists of contemporary life and manners as exhibited in the portions of society which he knew and illustrated. But he did not take all contemporary society for his province. Born at Sharpham Park, in Somerset, in 1707, he had far greater advantages of birth than other men of the pen. The House of Fielding is ancient and noble, though, unlike Gibbon in his monumental compliment to Fielding, Mr. Horace Round cannot accept its connexion with the House of Hapsburg.

The Fieldings had two Earldoms, of Desmond (in Ireland) and of Denbigh; Fielding's father was of a cadet branch of the family: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a kind of cousin of the novelist. He was educated at Eton and in the law-loving University of Leyden; but when he "came upon the town," in 1728, he did not associate himself with the circle of Pope and Bolingbroke and the wits and the great ladies; he does not draw his characters from that splendid society, though Lady Bellaston, in "Tom Jones," is a member thereof.

Fielding had to live by his brains, by writing comedies, and by journalism. He showed his genius for parody of the heroic tiresome tragedy that was "such an unconscionable time adying," in "Tom Thumb the Great"; and his dangerous turn for political satire in "The Historical Register" (1737). But the Licensing Act, making the Lord Chamberlain, or his subaltern, Licencer of Plays, excluded Fielding from that course; he was called to the Bar (1740), where he did not practise much. He was married in 1735 to the original, it is said, of the exquisite Sophia of "Tom Jones"; he wrote in the Press; in 1745 he took the Hanoverian side, in "The True Patriot," and "The Jacobite's Journal," in mockery so named; and during all this period he saw a great deal of the world, especially the world of the stage and of light literature.

But of all this he makes little display in his novels. He falls back on the humours of the country: on the country parson, Adams; the Tory Squire, Squire Western; a neighbour, in character of Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and so good an Englishman that he rejoices when he hears that "twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Kent" to back the Rightful King, and the landed interest, against Hanoverians, financiers, and Whigs in general. His excellent Allworthy is no townsman; Mr. Thomas Jones, a Foundling, is country born and country bred; most of the adventures of Joseph Andrews take place in the country; in "Amelia" we are in town, and in taverns and prisons often, but by no means "in society".

"Jonathan Wild" is a tale of town villains and rogues; and Fielding's minor characters, from postilions to philosophers, like Philosopher Square, landlords, landladies, serving-men, lawyers, parsons, unfortunate ladies, people on the road, are of ordinary humanity, with a considerable sprinkling of hypocrites. He had heard the chimes at midnight and much later; he had hunted; he had lived the tavern life, the life of debts and expedients, but he "had kept the bird in his bosom," the sterling excellence of his heart; pity for the poor and oppressed; honour, good humour, tolerance, and manly indignation.

To Fielding, Richardson's "Pamela," the text of many a sermon, the snow-pure prudent Pamela, with Virtue rewarded by the hand of the enterprising Mr. B., was even as a red rag to a bull. He did not weep over Pamela's tears, these "pearly fugitives". He no more believed in Mr. B.'s return to virtue than in that of Vanbrugh's Loveless. Respectability was so far from being his favourite virtue, that, like many very inferior writers, he inclined to identify it, unjustly, with hypocrisy.

Consequently he began "Joseph Andrews" as a parody or burlesque of "Pamela". That paragon had a brother, appropriately named Joseph; and the virtue of Joseph is assailed like that of his sister, but in vain. Joseph is invincibly respectable, yet no hypocrite, but a very manly young fellow with an honest love in his own rank. The story soon ceased to be a parody; that grotesque, learned, excellent and extremely muscular Christian, Parson Adams, came into the tale with the egregious Mrs. Slipslop; and the thing became a "picaresque" novel, a tale of the road and of chance meetings: with the lesson that kind hearts are more than coronets, and a postilion, later guilty of robbing a hen roost, is a better Christian than a whole coach-load of Pharisees. Indeed St. Augustine, once at least, robbed an orchard, yet became a shining light, having been misled (as regards the apples and pears) by his sense of humour.

"Joseph Andrews," though its language is occasionally coarse, as regards its meaning is not obscure, and it is certainly one of the most amusing works in our language: though it is not written for small boys and little girls. We meet Pamela and Mr. B. (cruelly styled Mr. Booby), again at the close, and they behave ill in church, when Joseph is married.

Richardson was very much hurt, of course, and spoke very ill of Fielding; if he forgave Fielding, he "forgave him as a Christian," like Rowena in Ivanhoe, "'which means,' said Wamba, 'that she does not forgive him at all'".

There is an endless discussion about Fielding's morality. Natural goodness of heart is everything with him. Of his Tom Jones the epitaph might be that devised by Joe Gargery in "Great Expectations" for his reprobate of a father,

Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart.

Thomas was "that good at his heart" and lectures young Nightingale very nobly on the infamy of corrupting virtue. But where there is no virtue to corrupt in others, Thomas pays no attention to his own. Perhaps he could have resisted temptation, in Nightingale's circumstances, but he is wisely kept out of it by the author. He does what is thought the very basest thing that a man can do; Colonel Newcome never forgave him; if we are to pardon Tom it must be, as Dumas urges in the case of Porthos, because, "other times, other manners".

This affair is the dangerous step in "Tom Jones" (1749), that epic of the eighteenth century. Fielding thought of it as an epic in prose; he is fond of burlesquing Homer and of quoting Aristotle. The plot has been praised by Coleridge and justly, as on a level with that of the "Œdipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles. The construction of plots has not been the strong point of most great novelists, but Fielding set this good example, not immaculate of course, but admirable.

The real merit of the book lies in its pell-mell of characters, all delineated with exquisite humour, wit, and observation, from the mysterious mother of the hero, and the adorable Sophia, to the adroit hypocrite, Blifil; the uproarious stupid fox-hunter, the Jacobite who drinks healths, Squire Western; the philanthropic yet really good Allworthy; the delightful pedantic Partridge, with his tags of Latin quotations; the rural ruffian, Black George; the harmless vanity of Miss Western (the aunt), the sternly Protestant and Anglican, but not immaculately virtuous Philosopher Square, and all the attendant crowd.

The moral introductory reflections may, of course, be skipped, yet not by wise readers, for they are full of Fielding's humour, and display his confidence in the immortality of his book.

Fielding was Thackeray's master and model; in his too frequent reflections he follows Fielding too closely. If all men were equally fortunate, they would all read "Tom Jones" in the six small volumes of the First Edition: but in any edition the book is delightful. Charlotte Brontë thought it corrupting to such young fellows as her brother, the unhappy Branwell, but Branwells will go their own way, with or without the aid of the too fortunate Foundling.

Fielding was a sturdy Hanoverian, but he was mortal and an author. He must have been pleased had he known that the hero of 1745 (the year in which the tale is cast), that Prince Charles then lurking in a Parisian convent, purchased "Tom Jones," both in French and English.

Earlier than "Tom Jones" is "Jonathan Wild the Great," the romance of a thief-taker and sharer of spoils with thieves, who was gibbeted in 1725. It is customary to speak of this book, a satire of the "greatness" of men like Julius Cæsar, as a masterpiece of irony, and as a success in the field where Thackeray, on the same estimate, failed with "Barry Lyndon". If irony is to be openly and noisily unveiled in every page, then "Jonathan Wild" may be a masterpiece of irony. The reader may be left, if he can read "Jonathan Wild," to compare it with "Barry Lyndon" for himself, and to draw his own conclusions as to the relative merits of these books. The deliciously absurd adventures of Mrs. Heartfree, like those of the heroines of late Greek romances, are, at all events, intentionally or unintentionally funny. Sir Walter Scott disliked this masterpiece, and after reading it, and the commendations which eminent modern critics bestow upon it, the writer cannot honestly dissent from the disrelish of Sir Walter. He is said not to have understood Fielding's meaning which Fielding constantly proclaims and avows, namely that greatness of intellect and ambition without goodness of heart is a mischievous monstrosity. Mr. Carlyle, in some moods of hero-worship, might have differed, but we can give a general assent without wading through "Jonathan Wild".

Fielding's own heart was as good as Steele's. He adored his beautiful wife as Steele adored Prue. But, while "the greatest blessing is a faithful and beloved wife," says our author in "Amelia," "it rather tends to aggravate the misfortune of distressed circumstances from the consideration of the share which she is to bear in them". But the circumstances were distressed because Fielding, like Amelia's Captain Booth, was "a good fellow," and, like Johnson's friend, Savage, was at no time of his life the first to leave any company,--over the punch bowl. And Amelia was listening for every footstep, and dreading every accident of the streets, and money was a minus quantity, and a scrag of mutton was a rare festival, because Captain Booth had every generosity except that of a little self-denial.

By 1749 Mr. Fielding, as his friendly biographer says, "was a martyr to gout". "He had not stolen it," and we have heard of another sufferer, "a martyr to delirium tremens". By this time his wife was dead; later he married her maid, an excellent woman, Mary Daniel, probably of an old and ruined Jacobite family of Daniel. At the end of 1748 Fielding had been made a stipendiary magistrate for Westminster. Unlike his Jonathan Thrasher, Esq., J.P., who was infamously corrupt, and as ignorant of the law as the country justice before whom Frank Osbaldistone appears in "Rob Roy," Fielding brought to his work his honesty, courage, and sympathy with the poor.

The first chapters of his "Amelia" (1751) contain pictures of the contemporary corruption of justice, and the laxity of the prisons. Thence came the misfortunes of Captain Booth, a true lover, but also a young man in the prime of life. From this error of the Captain's, who met a Circe in prison, and from the greatness of his wife's character, the beautiful Amelia, the plot of the novel adroitly develops itself. She was "too good to be true". On the other hand the high spirit and temper of Miss Matthews make her a kind of shady Brynhild; and only coincidences in which Captain Booth recognized the hand of Providence prevent the most tragical catastrophe. "Men worship women on their knees; when they get up they go away," says Fielding's great successor. They never get up and go away when they worship Amelia.

The book, in addition to her and Miss Matthews, presents the delightfully amusing characters of Colonel Bath, "old honour and dignity," who fights Booth in Hyde Park from motives of the purest friendship; Colonel James, with a philosophy of love rather like Lord Foppington's; Sergeant Atkinson, a kind of later Great Heart; Mrs. Ellison, a lady "not of the nicest delicacy"; Murphy, a Jonathan Wild as attorney; and a score of other characters worthy of their creator. With "Joseph Andrews" and "Tom Jones," "Amelia" is an immortal glory of English fiction.

Fielding's experiences led him into plans for suppressing lawlessness, and for important social reforms. In 1753 he took the side of Elizabeth Canning in that unsolved mystery of a girl who, if not a good girl, "has been too hard for me," says Fielding. His own behaviour, in the case of Miss Virtue's examination, is rather startling to the modern student; and whether he ended as a partisan of the Gipsy or of Elizabeth Canning is uncertain (1753-1754). Elizabeth made a good marriage, in America, whither she was banished, and lived and died respected.

In his pamphlet on Elizabeth's affair, which excited and divided London for more than a year, Fielding speaks of his illness and overtaxed strength. He spent what was left of it in his public duties; was advised to voyage to Portugal, and his "Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon," written with a dying hand, is the record of his sufferings and reflections. He sailed in the "Queen of Portugal" (Captain Veal), had intervals of enjoyment, and sketched, with his usual humour, the events and incidents of the expedition. He died at Lisbon on 8 October, 1754.

Tobias Smollett.

The name of Smollett is coupled as familiarly with that of Fielding as the name of Thackeray with that of Dickens. Smollett and Fielding were contemporaries: both came of ancient families: each had a profession;--Smollett was a physician while Fielding was a barrister,--but each lived mainly by journalism, literature and fiction. If opinions as to their relative merits were divided in their day, posterity has awarded the crown to Fielding. The reason is obvious: Fielding is full of good humour; in him there is no rancour; he admires good women almost to adoration, and paints them as only the very greatest poets have done. Again, his tales are well constructed, especially "Tom Jones". On the other hand Smollett allows his story to wander in the roads and haunt the inns, and encounter grotesque adventures; he has bitter grudges against all and sundry, especially against his patrons and his kinsfolk. His heroines are regarded by his heroes rather as luxuries than as ladies; his heroes, to be plain, are not merely libertines, but often behave like selfish ruffians; and his relish for odious images and thoughts is hardly surpassed by that of Swift. These faults in temper and taste have made Smollett unpopular, despite his wide knowledge of life; his irresistible power of compelling laughter, his swaggering vein. But, if he drew Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle from himself, he gave them bad qualities far in excess of his own, and did not endow them with many of his own better attributes. Smollett would never have used the loyal Strap as Roderick Random often does; and was incapable of what may be styled the dastardly plot in which Peregrine was fain to have imitated Richardson's Lovelace.

Smollett was born in 1721, a younger son of a younger son of the ancient house of Smollett of Bonhill, on the Leven near Loch Lomond. An ancestor of his, he says, blew up a galleon of the Spanish Armada in Tobermory Bay. He did indeed, by an act of suborned treachery. Like Burns, Tobias celebrated in verse his native stream; like Burns in boyhood he devoured the truculent romance of "Wallace" by Blind Harry. He was poor, and believed himself to be badly treated by his kinsfolk; after studying at Glasgow University he was apprenticed to a surgeon. In 1739 he went to London to push his fortunes, carrying with him a foolish tragedy on the murder of James I, which was the apple of his eye. No manager would accept it, wherefore Smollett raged against Garrick and Lord Lyttelton: he puts the story of his woes into "Roderick Random," where Mr. Melopoyn, unhappy poet, is the sufferer. He got what Chatterton and Goldsmith failed to obtain, the post of surgeon's mate in a ship of war; lived through the distresses of the siege of Carthagena (1741), and obtained that knowledge of naval squalor and brutality, and of the good qualities of sea-men, which he used in "Roderick Random" and in the characters of Bowling and Trunnion. Leaving the navy, he married in Jamaica, came to town, practised as a physician, and certainly lived in most fashionable quarters. He speaks of Bob Sawyer's method of advertisement by being hastily called out of church as an old trick; perhaps Dickens, a reader of Smollett from his childhood, borrowed here from "Count Fathom". His patriotism was stirred by the fatal disaster of Culloden, and he boldly published his "Tears of Scotland" (1746).

In 1748 he published "Roderick Random," the history of a meritorious orphan who lives on his servant, cheats his tailor, is a gambler, and enriches himself in the slave trade; but all is to be forgiven to Roderick's ebullient vigour and occasional sentimentalism. There are countless changes of scene and varieties of character, from the ocean to the Marshalsea Prison, to adventures in French service, from Strap and Bowling to the literary Miss Snapper and the unfortunate Miss Williams. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu supposed her cousin, Fielding, to be the author, which showed little discrimination, though her ladyship's letters are among the wittiest and most brilliantly amusing of her century. Smollett had a bitter feud with Fielding; we do not know, or care, for what cause. The briskness of the book, and the novelty of the nautical horrors, made Smollett's reputation.

Going to Paris in 1750, Smollett found some of the characters who appear in the crowd of "Peregrine Pickle" (1751), of which the first edition aroused censures on passages later pruned by the author. It is a work of amazingly careless vigour and humour: the irrepressible Peregrine is even a less desirable hero than Roderick; and an infamous Jacobite spy was not ill-advised in choosing Pickle for his pseudonym. Emilia is more than too good for the rascal to whom she descends in marriage, after escaping plots of his which might have disgusted Pamela's Mr. B. But Cadwallader Crabtree, Hatchway and Pipes, and Commander Hawser Trunnion are immortal characters; it is cruel to call Trunnion caricatured; he is a comic masterpiece.

The "Ferdinand, Count Fathom" (1753), the adventurous son of a suttler and murderess, is not a much worse man than Peregrine, but, in place of Trunnion and Pipes, we are entertained with a queer attempt at romance in the loves of Rinaldo and Monimia, who meets her lover as he weeps over her empty tomb. "Sir Lancelot Greaves," a modern Don Quixote, armour and all, was preferred by Scott to "Jonathan Wild," and, despite the patent absurdity of the armed knight, is really a much more agreeable story. In 1763 Smollett visited Italy, and his grumbling hypochondriacal narrative of his tour was ridiculed by that more sentimental traveller, Sterne. His "Adventures of an Atom" (1769) is a scurrilous political satire. On the other hand his "Humphry Clinker" (1771), a narrative, in letters, of a journey by English travellers in Scotland, is both more good-humoured and more amusing than any of his other stories--Matthew Bramble is a favourable study of his later self; Lieutenant Lismahago is a kind of Dugald Dalgetty, born more than a century later than the laird of Drumthwacket, and the spelling and innocent good-hearted absurdity of Winifred Jenkins endear her to every reader, as a contrast to Tabitha Bramble, a bad kind of old maid. Here we meet Ferdinand, Count Fathom, as a sincerely converted character!

Smollett is not only remarkable for variety, humour, vigour, as a social observer: he strongly influenced both Fanny Burney and Dickens. His History of England has been justly described by Sir Pitt Crawley as less interesting but less dangerous than that by Hume. Smollett, revisiting Italy, died at Monte Nero, near Leghorn, in the early autumn of 1771.

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XXXI. GEORGIAN PROSE

II.

Samuel Johnson.

We could scarcely understand how Dr. Johnson gained his immense influence and acknowledged chiefship in literature if we had only his works of various kinds before us. But he had a friend and biographer, James Boswell, Esq. (younger of Auchinleck in Ayrshire), and "Bozzy," by showing Johnson as he was and talked, explains his supremacy. In an age when classical learning counted for something, Johnson was, especially in Roman literature, vastly learned. In a time when people who could tear themselves from cards, took little exercise, but sat and talked, over wine or over tea, or as they slowly sauntered, Johnson was probably the best and certainly the best reported of the talkers. While politicians like Burke, and painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds, and musicians like Burney (Fanny Burney's father), were men of letters, critics, talkers, a scholar and author who could talk like Johnson was certain of his reward, was sure to be at the front. Though he confessed himself not specially partial to clean linen; though he did not eat in a neat and cleanly fashion; though he had the strange tricks which we know so well; though if his pistol missed fire in argument he knocked you down with the butt; though he had curious prejudices, was at heart a Jacobite, and could be extremely rude, yet the excellence of his heart, his large sagacity, his immense knowledge and readiness, his humour, all of him that is immortally delightful to read about in Boswell's Life, won his forgiveness and his welcome from the most refined of men and women. He thought himself a lady's man, he said, and a man of the world, and he was thoroughly a man's man, with heart, and tongue, and hands, if that were necessary.

As a playwriter, he had not great success, and his friend Goldsmith's comedies keep the stage, unlike Johnson's tragedy. Johnson's tale "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," has wisdom and humour enough, "wit enough to keep it sweet," but it never did nor ever can share the popularity of Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield".

Johnson's essays, in "The Rambler" and "The Idler," may still be but are seldom read: they are far less alive than the essays of Addison and Steele, and are weighed down by the ponderous harmonies of the Latinised style.

Of his books, "The Lives of the Poets," written in his old age, are, to some, we may hope to many, readers, entrancing. Here we find the Johnson of conversation. He is not, indeed, a scientific biographer, a searcher among old letters and old records. But his memory was rich in anecdotes of the half century before his own; his style contains many a humorous comment, and his criticism is often acute, and always honest, and unaffectedly tinged, especially when he writes of the republican and puritan Milton, or of the dainty, yet, in poetry, revolutionary Gray, with all the literary and political prejudices that gave salt to his conversation. There may have been more enlightened critics, but none was ever more entertaining.

If his literary biographies are not of the most exact, they are occasionally minute enough. "Pope's weakness was so great, that he constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a waterman (of Twickenham) who, in lifting him into his boat, had often felt them." Again, "Pope once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry". In his "Life of Swift" Johnson is by no means friendly, and publishes an anecdote which was indignantly denied. His life of his friend, Richard Savage, a most detestable person, is an example of Johnson's loyalty and tolerance. Supposing that Savage was the son of the Countess of Macclesfield, and was persecuted by her with incredible cruelty, yet his conduct in most ways was detestable, though Johnson, who candidly narrates the facts, good-humouredly condones them. The conversation of Savage must, apparently, have won the heart of "the great Lexicographer". Even the Dictionary of the Doctor contains several of his good sayings, and perhaps the learning and persevering industry which Johnson displayed as a "drudge" increased his reputation, and won for him friends and admirers, as much as his more literary works.

The outlines of his life are too well known to need more than a brief summary. His family was matter of interest to the Highlanders when he visited them, was he a MacIan of Glencoe or a Johnston of the Border? He was born at Lichfield (18 September, 1709), his father was a bookseller. His Oxford career, at Pembroke College, was embittered by poverty, but he retained a great affection for his college and University, which delighted to honour him. He kept a school without much profit, and, coming to London with Garrick in 1737, lived the life of Grub Street, doing translations, writing for Cave's "Gentleman's Magazine," compiling parliamentary debates in which he "took care not to let the Whig dogs have the best of it". Of his doings in 1745 Boswell could learn nothing, and there was a fancy that he was inclined to take part in what he called "a gallant enterprise," that of Prince Charles.

His "London," an imitation of Juvenal, was well thought of by Pope, and Scott took more pleasure in no modern poem than in Johnson's manly, resolute, and mournful "Vanity of Human Wishes," also based on Juvenal's satire (1749). The "Rambler" and "Idler," were his next works (with the Dictionary), and in 1759 he rapidly wrote "Rasselas," to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. In 1762 he accepted, from a King who "gloried in the name of Briton," a pension of £300 yearly. He lived much, after this date, at the house of Mrs. Thrale and her husband, "my Master" as she called him, the rich brewer. Here he was happy in the society of many wits, of the beautiful Sophy Streatfield, "with nose and notions à la Grecque," and of Fanny Burney, blessed in the success of "Evelina". Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney have left many reminiscences of him which complete the account by his young Scottish adorer and butt, Boswell.

Johnson founded the Club, and such was his influence that the Club did not blackball Bozzy. With him Johnson made his difficult journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; so happily described both by Boswell and himself; stayed at Dunvegan Castle, was entertained by Flora Macdonald, met a learned minister in Skye who was a sceptic about Homer, inquired into the Second Sight; stayed at Inveraray Castle with the Duke of Argyll; and at St. Andrews was told that at Oxford they had nothing like the St. Andrews University Library. On hearing this Dr. Johnson, for once, made no reply.

His "Lives of the Poets" was written in 1779-1781, when he was 70 years of age and more. His cruel last illness was nobly borne; he died on 13 December, 1784, one of the best, greatest, wisest, and most humorous of Englishmen.

His "Lives," and the Life of him are among the works which time cannot stale; read ten times over they please the more, and more excellencies are discovered. No man of times past is known so well, and none was so well worth knowing. His critical tastes and rules are not ours, and perhaps even in his own day were falling out of fashion; but they are none the less historically valuable.

Oliver Goldsmith.

Dr. Johnson carried all his set with him into renown, and though Oliver Goldsmith was a writer of versatile and charming genius, but for his friendship with Johnson he would have been much less successful in life, and less well loved and remembered after his death.

Like several great writers born in Ireland, Goldsmith was of an English family, but they had been so long settled in Ireland that they had become "more Irish than the Irish". Goldsmith's father had the care of Protestant souls at Pallasmore, County Longford, where (10 November, 1728) the poet was born. The father obtained a cure worth more than the "forty pounds a year" at Lissoy in West Meath, and Lissoy contributes some features to the Auburn of the "Deserted Village," an ideal village, in an ideal state of desertion. His father, according to Goldsmith's poetry and prose, was a most excellent man; more capable of teaching his family how to spend large fortunes in benevolence than how to earn a maintenance,

More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.

He was the generous host of "all the vagrant train," of "the long-remembered beggar," an Irish Edie Ochiltree, of "the ruined spendthrift," who "claimed kindred," and came to "scorn," and of "the broken soldier".

Careless their merits or their faults to scan His pity gave ere charity began.

This pity was Goldsmith's own characteristic. When an exceedingly poor scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, his feats of charity matched those of St. Francis or St. Martin of Tours. He is said to have given away his blanket, and slept in the ticking of his bed.

A love of fine clothes was no less part of his nature than love of his neighbours, while he liked "the cards," and the bowl and tavern talk. He took his bachelor's degree in February, 1749: idled away a year or two at home, learned to play the flute, failed to take holy orders, and, as a medical student, went to Edinburgh University (1752-1754) lived on the benevolence of an uncle, Contarine, and, on his way to Leyden, was taken in the company of five or six Scottish gentlemen in French service, who had been recruiting for King Louis in the Highlands. Alan Breck may have been in this adventure. Throughout 1755-1756, Goldsmith roamed about the Continent, supporting himself by his flute, and entertained by the hospitality of the Universities.

"Sir," said Johnson, "he disputed his way through Europe," as the Admirable Crichton had done, a hundred and seventy years earlier. At Padua, it is thought, if anywhere, he obtained his Doctor's degree: his adventures later gave him materials for essays, for the wandering scholar in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and for his poem, "The Traveller". "He was making himself all the time."

Returning to England in 1756, he lived as an usher in a small school; as a corrector for the press; as a kind of indentured reviewer and general hack to Griffiths the publisher; failed to pass as a naval surgeon; wrote with Smollett's literary gang, conducted a weekly booklet or magazine, "The Bee," for a few numbers (1759); and published "An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe". He was much more successful (1760) with letters in "The Public Ledger," in the assumed character of a Chinese visitor to London.

In the former work Goldsmith complains that young genius effervesces at college and is unrewarded, while dull plodders fatten. "The link" between "the great" and the literary "now seems entirely broken". "An author" is a thing only to be laughed at. "His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company." Indeed Goldsmith's person was quaint, his attire, when in funds, was that of the bird of paradise; while his wit flowed from his pen, not from his tongue; his repartee was not ready; eager he was but apparently absent-minded in company. As for the publisher, "it is his interest to allow as little as possible for writing, and of the author to write as much as possible". Writers for the stage suffer from the competition of the dead. Like two or three men of genius of our day, Goldsmith asks "who will deliver us from Shakespeare?" from "these pieces of forced humour, far-fetched conceit, and unnatural hyperbole which have been ascribed to Shakespeare." Here is scepticism! Managers make new authors wait some years before giving their plays a chance: a malady most incident to managers; and Garrick believed that he was attacked.

The not unnatural acrimony of a neglected man appears in some of the Chinese Letters (published in book form as "The Citizen of the World"), notably in the visit to Westminster Abbey. Goldsmith had a spite against the patronage, given to the art of painting, and made his Chinaman share it. The same critic looks on Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" as a lewd compound of pertness, vanity, and obscene buffoonery.

The Chinaman also attacked the brutality of the criminal law (that of his own country being so mild), and generally inveighed against the state of society. The Letters are an unflattering picture of the times. By 1761 Johnson had made the acquaintance of Goldsmith, and henceforth Goldsmith had not to complain of neglect from wits and authors. In 1764 he published his moral and contemplative poem "The Traveller"; with his "Deserted Village" it is perhaps the last good thing of the old school of poems in rhymed heroic couplets. The dedicatory preface to the author's brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, tells us that, as society becomes refined, painting and music "offer the feeble mind a less laborious entertainment" than poetry, which they supplant, while "what criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse, and Pindaric Odes, anapests (sic) and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence! Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it!"

Goldsmith, in social matters rather a Socialist, is, in poetry, opposing the slowly dawning freedom, and upholding the school of Pope. But there is, in both of his longer poems, a kind of softness in the versification, and of sincerity in the sentiments and descriptions of Nature, which we miss in Pope, while each piece, as the man said of "Hamlet," "is made up of quotations," of lines which live in many memories like household words. The pictures of the parish clergyman, of the schoolmaster, of the harmless old rustic ale-house, in the "Deserted Village," may be called imperishable; and Goldsmith cries "back to the land" and denounces "landlordism," and forced migration to North America,

Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey.

Goldsmith, in fact, never revisited "the decent church," "the hawthorn bush," the harmless pot-house, and other scenes of his infancy: in his poem he blends an ideal Irish with an ideal English village, and ascribes the result to a tyrannical, landlord with admirable pathetic success.

Of his other poems "The Haunch of Venison," imitated from Horace, and the witty and kind raillery of "Retaliation," in which his pen supplies the wit that often failed his tongue in the wit-combats of "the Club," are both in "anapests" and are the most important. The "Lament for Madame Blaise" is a lively adaptation from the French, and the "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" is a most vivacious piece. As a ballad "Edwin and Angelina," though popular, is too unballad-like.

The works on which Goldsmith's fame depends are not his essays, histories, or view of "Animated Nature," genially unscientific, but his "Vicar of Wakefield" (written earlier, but sold by Johnson for while Goldsmith was in a sponging house in 1764), and his two plays "The Good Natured Man," and "She Stoops to Conquer" (1768, 1773).

"The Vicar of Wakefield" drew the highest possible praise from Goethe, and the most furious of attacks from the critical pen of Mark Twain. Nobody says that it shines in construction, but its humour and sweetness, the goodness, the simplicity, the true wisdom, and the learned foibles of the Vicar, with the humours of his wife, daughters, and wandering scholar son, an usher, a dweller in Grub Street, make "The Vicar of Wakefield" a book to be read once a year. "Finding that the best things had not been said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new... the learned world said nothing to my paradoxes, nothing at all, sir." In the son's narrative Goldsmith has his usual flout at art and amateurs of art, and Pietro Perugino.

The plays are too well known for comment, with Croaker and Lofty, the Bailiffs, Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle, the revellers at the Three Pigeons, and young Marlow, they are at least as familiar on the amateur as on the professional boards. They brought to Goldsmith fame, some money and more credit, but he was still a drudge, still working for booksellers, and deep in debt, when his death on 4 April, 1774, made Reynolds for once lay down his brush, saddened the Club, and filled the stairs of his chambers in Brick Court with poor weeping women to whom he had been kind,--their only friend. "Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit," wrote Johnson in his epitaph, adding a new phrase to Latin proverbial philosophy.[1]

Edmund Burke.

"It seems probable," says Burke's biographer, Lord Morley, "that Burke will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years" (from 1899) "than he has been within the whole of the last eighty." Yet we do not find many references to Burke, who, living, speaking, and writing through some thirty years of discontents and revolutions (the American and the French) and bringing to problems like our own a masculine judgment, and a lucid and energetic style, might seem worthy of general study.

In a sketch of the history of literature space for the works of Burke, saturated with politics as they are, and only to be understood in the light of ample historical knowledge, cannot be provided. The speeches of most successful orators are brilliant, and persuasive for the hour, with crowds who wish to be persuaded. The speeches of Burke are sometimes, when his pity and indignation are stirred (as by the fate of Marie Antoinette, or the alleged infamies of Warren Hastings), rich in floral components, in impassioned rhetoric. But, as a rule, his best orations required to be read if they were to be appreciated; they are too full of thought and knowledge and too logically built to be generally effective at the moment.

Whatever our political opinions may be, we cannot but find Burke's "Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies" (22 March, 1775) a very great and noble literary work. For its purpose it was futile; fierce peoples are not to be guided by all the eloquence and all the wisdom of the wise. "We are called upon, as it were by a superior warning Voice, again to attend to America; to attend to the whole of it together; and to review the subject with an unusual degree of care and calmness. Surely it is an awful subject; or there is none so on this side of the grave."

It was an awful subject; but it was also a party question. Knowledge, care, and calmness were, therefore, put out of action. On an infamous proposal to "reduce the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies" by proclaiming the freedom of the black slaves and raising a servile war, Burke said: "Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?"--the Slave Trade. The idea of sending, in the same ship, samples of fresh "black ivory" and a proclamation of freedom for all blacks, not unreasonably seemed absurd, to Burke.

This speech, so moving to the reader, is said to have driven members out of the House; the gestures of the orator being clumsy, his tones harsh, and his delivery hasty. Johnson said that his wit was "blunt"; Goldsmith, on the other hand, that he "cut blocks with a razor". He "to party gave up what was meant for mankind," but, save through party, mankind is not to be helped by the politicians.

To glance at the main facts of Burke's life, he appears to have been, as far as his name shows, of Norman but long Hibernicised stock on his father's side; of native Irish blood on that of his mother, a Miss Nagle, a Catholic. He was born in Dublin, apparently on 12 January, 1729. His father was a solicitor. After two years at a small school kept by a learned Quaker, Burke went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he showed eager intellectual appetites, without paying much heed to the academic round of studies. In 1750 he went to London, to the Middle Temple, and studied law, but did not practise. In 1755 his father cut off his allowance, in 1756 he married. He cannot have made money by his "Vindication of Natural Society" (1756), written in the rhetorical manner of Bolingbroke. The book is an ironical reply to Bolingbroke's argument for "natural" against "revealed" religion. Transfer the view to society: our religion may have its anomalies, yet our society has far more and worse. Do you propose, therefore, to return to "natural society"? "Natural" society was then supposed by the wise and learned to be a happy go-as-you-please innocent communism. In fact, if savage society be "natural" society it is emmeshed in the strangest and most artificial, cruel, and filthy set of laws and customs: the marriage laws, when carried (as they sometimes are) to their logical conclusion, make marriage impossible! All this was not understood, but Burke, while arguing against a sudden and violent break-up of society, did perceive and state brilliantly, the glaring injustices of our society, as Goldsmith did in "The Deserted Village".

Burke's "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1756) is a study in the science of "Æsthetics," a science which, if it has reached no very conspicuous results, is now pursued with instruments and by a method not extant in Burke's day. He only sought for "the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". He went into the psychology of pain and pleasure, and found Beauty to be "some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses". But what is the quality and why does it automatically produce the effect? The qualities which automatically excite in the mind the apperception of the beautiful are comparatively small, smooth, varied without angularity, delicate, and in colour clear and bright, but not strong or glaring. But a mountain, or fire, is beautiful yet--does not present the six qualities. Consequently we must not call a huge rough mountain beautiful but sublime.

Burke does not pretend to know "the ultimate cause" of the emotions produced in the mind, and he censures the daring of Sir Isaac Newton in accounting for things by Ether. But Ether seems to prosper in modern scientific thought.

We cannot follow Burke into metaphysics, but the ordinary reader may test, by experience, his description of a lover in the presence of the beloved. "As far as I could observe," says Burke, "the head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the Object; the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly by the side." Thus it seems probable "that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system". On the other hand, the Sublime ought to string up the solids, and we do hear of sublime objects which "petrify" the percipient. Burke sought, at all events, for the answer to his problem in the nature of man, in psychology.

The nature of Burke's financial resources, beyond what he made by writing in the new "Annual Register" (1759,--a hundred a year from Dodsley the publisher) is as mysterious as the address of his fellow-countryman, The Mulligan, in Thackeray's book. In 1759 the so-called "Single Speech Hamilton" employed him; in 1761 he went to Ireland with Hamilton, who was secretary to Lord Halifax. Hamilton treated him badly, and in 1765 he became secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, entered Parliament as member for Wendover, a pocket borough, made his mark at once; wrote "Observations on the Present State of the Nation" (1769), and the admirable "Thoughts on the Present Discontents," a book always in season. How Burke, in 1768, contrived to buy Beaconsfield in Bucks (£22,000) and to live at a rate of £2500 a year, the rental being £500, is a mystery deeper than that of "The Man in the Iron Mask". Apparently there was a suffering Marquis in the background: at least Burke owed large sums to Lord Rockingham, who forgave the debt. No discreditable source of Burke's fairy gold can be conjectured or conceived, as Goldsmith said he was

Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit,

"too nice" meaning "too scrupulous".

Burke did not hold office, save for one year (1782-1783). Though a Whig and a "Pro-American," Burke never liked, never approved of the French Revolution. Early in 1790, he spoke in Parliament, breaking away from those enthusiasts for Liberty in her wildest mood, Fox and Sheridan.

His "Reflections on the French Revolution" (1790) had a large sale and wide influence. People will judge Burke's influence, conduct and eloquence, at this time, in accordance with their politics and prejudices; his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," and other work of his last years cannot be discussed without partisanship. He died on 9 July, 1797. "The age of chivalry is gone," is one of Burke's best-remembered phrases. When was there an age of chivalry? If no swords leaped from their sheaths for Marie Antoinette, in 1793, not one was drawn for Jeanne d'Arc in 1431, not one for Mary Stuart in 1587.

The Revival of the Ballad.

Throughout the eighteenth century, despite the dominance of Pope and his followers, and the poetry of the Town; despite the sturdy resistance of Johnson; despite Goldsmith's complaints against Odes and "anapests" and "blank verse" and "happy negligence," there were streams of tendency making for literary freedom. Addison had lovingly praised both the blank verse of Milton, and the purely popular art of the ancient ballads. Men were beginning to look back with personal interest at antiquity; not only at Spenser, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, but at all the art and poetry of times past. As early as 1706-1711 Watson's "Choice Collection" of old Scottish poems was published: and Allan Ramsay gave old things mixed with new in his "Evergreen," and "Tea Table Miscellany" between 1724 and 1727; others appeared in d'Urfey's "Pills to Purge Melancholy" (1719), others in "Old Ballads" (1723).

We have seen the antiquarianism of Gray, in his translations from the Norse, and his interest in Macpherson's so-called "Ossian" (1760-1763). Though there was no written Highland epic in existence, there were, and are, "Ossianic ballads" in Gaelic, late popular survivals of Irish poetry. Working in his own way on these, and on prose legends, apparently, Macpherson led men's fancies back to the racing "sounds" of the north; back to the Highland beliefs that had already fascinated Collins; and emancipated poetry from the chatter of the coffee-house and the tavern. The charlatanism of Macpherson disgusted Johnson; any one could write Ossianisms, he said, who abandoned his mind to it, but Macpherson, at least, pleased thousands, including so enthusiastic a student of Homer as Napoleon Bonaparte, and stimulated Gaelic researches.

In 1765 the publication of an old and famous manuscript folio by Bishop Percy ("The Reliques") not only gave a new and popular source of pleasure in ballads and old relics, but caused a noisy controversy, which, again, led to close research. Percy "restored," altered, added to, and omitted from his materials as taste and fancy prompted; arousing the wrath of the crabbed antiquary, Joseph Ritson, who denied that the manuscript folio existed. Had Percy published it as it stood (which Furnivall and Hales at last succeeded in doing) the book would have been unread except by a few antiquaries. Arranged by Percy, the ballads became truly popular. They were followed, from 1774, by Thomas Warton's "History of English Poetry," the work of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (1757-1767) who, in a lazy University, was a serious student.

Nothing is more ruinous to literature than ignorance, excitedly absorbed in the momentary present. In the manner briefly described, men's minds became awake to the merits of the English literature of many remote ages, and even to the interest of chivalry and chivalrous romance, to the beauty of all art that had been discredited as "Gothic" and "barbarous".

Horace Walpole.

A man who, if in an amateur and dandified way, assisted the advance in literature, was the son of the famous and far from literary Whig Minister of George I. and George II., Sir Robert Walpole. Born at the end of September, 1717, Horace Walpole went to Eton in 1727, where he won the friendship of Gray and prided himself on avoiding cricket and fights with bargees. For Conway (Marshal Conway) and George Selwyn, famous later as an eccentric wit, he had a life-long affection. From Eton, Walpole went to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied French, Italian, and painting, being congenitally incapable of the mathematics, like Tennyson and Macaulay. His letters were already witty and amusing. He began his tour with Gray in 1739, and, at Rome, was "far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc. ... I would buy the Coliseum if I could". Though he wrote fleeringly of his own tastes, he was, in fact, far in advance of his age in appreciation of the best old art, whether of classical Greece and Rome or of the early Italians. To collect, to study society, to write his famous correspondence with Horace Mann and many others--an informal social, political, and literary history of his time,--was the business of Walpole's long life. He gave himself dandified airs; he knew that he was not in the strict sense a scholar, but he had an eagerly inquiring mind, and we owe more to him than to Mr. Pepys. He practically began neo-Gothic architecture--with all its faults he meant well,--by the building of his Villa, Strawberry Hill, and "in a concatenation accordingly" wrote the earliest pseudo-historic novel of supernatural terror, "The Castle of Otranto" (1764). Like stories of R. L. Stevenson, and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the tale is based on a dream. The author found himself in a Gothic castle, and "on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour". The rest, with its odd horrors and comic interludes of the servants, Walpole wrote without plan: making his characters natural, not "heroic," his events as much "supernatural" as he could.

From this fantasy came the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe (whose habit of explaining the supernatural away Walpole derided), and, from Mrs. Radcliffe, in part, came the impulse of Scott, and the moody heroes of Byron. From the mustard seed of "Otranto" grew "a tree with birds in all its boughs".

Walpole's play "The Mysterious Mother," was even morbidly romantic in conception (1768). His "Historic Doubts" on Richard III. show a new spirit of historic scepticism, and a desire to trace accepted historical ideas to their ultimate sources of evidence. Such minute inquiry was not common, when Hume and Smollett were our historians. Walpole, who had succeeded to the Earldom of Orford, died on 2 March, 1797.

His "Anecdotes of Painting" and "Royal and Noble Authors" are all they aimed at being; his Letters, in extent, observation, inner knowledge of society, and wit, have no rivals in English, but his real position in literature and taste is that of a pioneer. The true, the essential Horace was very unlike Macaulay's splenetic portrait of him, and did not deserve Thackeray's nickname "Horace Waddlepoodle".

Under his many affectations he was a true friend and a good patriot, a delightful wit and an agency in the advance of literature and taste. Between him and Dr. Johnson, of course, there was a gulf that neither man dreamed of trying to cross.

Laurence Sterne.

Laurence Sterne can scarcely be ranged in any species of writers. He was not a novelist, though his most humorous and exquisitely finished characters, Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Obadiah, Dr. Slop, Yorick, and Mrs. Shandy appear in what professed to be a kind of novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy," Gent (1760-1767). These characters are really studies like those of Addison, but they appeared in a long succession of volumes which obtained their great vogue first of all, perhaps, by wild eccentricity--with blank pages, asterisks, erasions, and even pages of marbled paper; next, now by an undercurrent, now by an overflow, of indecent or indecorous story or suggestion; thirdly, by the fact that these were the recreations of a country parson. These allurements, were the first and transient causes of Sterne's popularity, these and a quantity of odd anecdotes, often borrowed wholesale from Burton's then forgotten "Anatomy of Melancholy," as the lewd anecdotes were taken from French collections of the sixteenth century. But while these baits, this "merriment of a parson," allured the town, every reader of taste had the noblest excuse for reading the book. It contained the grave and logical humours and exquisite intellectual caprices of Shandy the father; the patient, kind, dull tolerance of Mrs. Shandy (whose unexpected associations of ideas resemble those of Mrs. Nickleby), the gallantry, simplicity, and noble goodness of Uncle Toby (a person not wholly unlike a Colonel Newcome of the eighteenth century), the similar qualities of his more chivalrous Sancho, Corporal Trim; the wiles of the Widow Wadman; and, what is pleasing to reflective minds, the Curse of Ernulphus, bestowed "on him, Obadiah". "Our men swore terribly in Flanders," said Uncle Toby, but the ancient formulæ of Catholic curses went far beyond our men. For the sentimental there was the death of Lefevre, which, in school reading books, but ineffectually appealed for tears to men now old.

Thus much of "Tristram Shandy" is as good as good can be, and might be collected, with explanatory passages, and exhibited without harm or offence to any reader. But, so presented, it would lose the attraction on which Sterne deliberately counted; the intermixture of insinuation and buffoonery with character and sentiment. Great parts of "Tristram Shandy," once, it seems, essential to its success, are now detrimental to its general diffusion: all the more because the high and low tumbling is that of a clergyman.

The author (born 1713) was English by family and descent, grandson of a Cavalier English clergyman of the Great Rebellion, and Archbishop of the Restoration. We meet his father, Roger Sterne, an ensign in a regiment of foot, in Thackeray's "Esmond," where, in his wild way, he makes a very sensible remark, when the exiled King, fighting for France, rides up to the English lines. For several years, Laurence Sterne followed the drums of his father's regiment, till, at 10 years old, a kinsman sent him to school at Halifax (1723), and the life of a camp where men swore terribly inspires his pictures of soldiers, but was not the most chaste school for a little boy.

In 1733, rather old, he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and made the friendship of John Hall (Stevenson) of Skelton Castle. A humorist, a reckless liver, he had a great and unholy influence on Sterne, who took orders and two small livings in Yorkshire, and (1741) married a lady of some property, after a sentimental wooing. Sentiment did not last; Sterne, an accomplished philanderer, became "passing weary of her love," and the pair were only kept together by Sterne's affection for his daughter, Lydia.

Not till 1760 did the first volume of "Tristram Shandy" appear: born of a casual spite against Dr. Slop (Dr. Burton, a Jacobite physician of York), "Tristram" instantly made Sterne a "lion" in London, a friend of the great, and a diner-out. In winter he wrote more "Shandy," and published sermons on the strength of his success; in the summer he worked at home, till a consumptive tendency sent him to the least desirable parts of Southern France (by way of Paris where he met everybody), and, later, to Italy. He died in London, alone (1768) save for the lodging-house keeper, and a footman, a Macdonald of the Keppoch branch, whose father followed Prince Charlie, and whose own childish adventures, in 1745, as he has described them, were a subject made for the hand of the expiring humorist.

He had kept on publishing, with varying success, new volumes of "Tristram Shandy" almost to the end, when he had the happy thought of beginning his "Sentimental Journey," with its bewildering mixture of the old favourite matter with pretty vignettes of southern scenes and manners, pictures with the prettiness and other qualities of the French painter, Greuze. Here we have both the admired hungry donkey, fed by Sterne with macaroons, and the sentimentalized dead donkey, which provoked the scepticism of Mr. Samuel Weller. Sterne sketched the French as Hogarth did, but with infinitely more sensibility and sympathy, he is a classic in France, no less than in England. Sterne's letters and "Journal to Eliza," a very characteristic piece, are collected in Mr. Lewis Melville's "Life and Letters of Sterne". His biographer (Mr. H. D. Traill, 1882) says that Sterne "undergoes, I suspect, even more than an English classic's ordinary share of reverential neglect". If this be so, Sterne himself, with his acrobatic clowning, is to blame, but the loss lies on the readers of mature age who neglect this contemplator of human life, this creator of characters, this painter of manners irrevocably past.[2]

David Hume.

David Hume, a younger son of the laird of Ninewells in Berwickshire, was born in April, 1711. He attended lectures in the University of Edinburgh at a very early age, and, when about 17, devoted himself entirely to solitary study, classical, poetical, and philosophic. The ruling passion of his life was the desire of literary fame, of which, with all his success, he never obtained more than he wanted. Various attempts in other professions ended in his return to his studies; he was only 25 when he wrote his "Treatise of Human Nature," he published it in 1739; was disappointed by its reception; affected to disavow it, but reproduced, in more finished literary form, many of its doctrines in his later essays. The earlier essays, of 1741-1742, were successful: the Philosophical Essays (1748), were attacked by orthodox divines, whom the "Essay on Miracles" (of which the central idea occurred to Hume while arguing with a Jesuit in France) was not apt to conciliate. Some essays he left for posthumous publication; he was in evil odour on account of his opinions, and obtained no better post in Scotland than the keepership of the Advocates' Library. But in Scotland his geniality, good humour, and practical wisdom, made him dear even to those who thought his opinions dangerous. By great frugality he made himself independent of the great, while his "History of England" begun in 1754, though, like most honest histories it at first offended all parties, proved not unprofitable and greatly increased his reputation. In 1765, he was made Secretary of Legation in Paris; later he obtained the post of Under-Secretary for Home Affairs; and finally returned to Edinburgh "in opulence," as he said, with £1000 a year. He had many friends among the preachers of "the Moderate party," and died in 1776, contented, and not without some parade, Dr. Johnson thought, of his philosophic fearlessness. In Paris he was highly popular; but, though England had done much for him, he used to express great dislike of the English. He laboured, none the less, to purge his style of Scotticisms, of which he drew up a list--"allenarly" and "alongst" are to be avoided; and he determined to write "a pretty girl enough" in place of "a pretty enough girl". Hume's philosophical ideas belong to the history, not of literature, but of philosophy. His position, in a continuation of Locke, was sceptical, and had immense influence in causing a reaction and a closer criticism, first in Germany, then in England. Professor Huxley, Hume's biographer, has exposed many of the fallacies in his "Essay on Miracles," and others are glaring. Of "The Natural History of Religion" he wrote unembarrassed by much knowledge of the subject, for early men, as far as we know, often reasoned otherwise than Hume thought that they would necessarily reason. Philosophy and history are always in a state of flux, through the influence of criticism, of new discoveries, and of historical documents, with which Hume had little acquaintance. But a study of modern metaphysics must still begin with the works of Hume, though no one can go to his History for full and accurate information. Unable, or reluctant, to speak his mind quite freely, he adopted the ironical method, without the sometimes elephantine frivolity of Gibbon. Like his fellow-countryman, Dr. Robertson, he was no enthusiastic worshipper of the heroes of the Reformation; and, though nothing less than a Jacobite, he was Tory enough to be tolerant of the Stuart Kings, or rather to study them in the light of the conditions under which they lived. It is in the same light that Hume and his philosophy must be regarded. His letters are among his most interesting works, and his attack on Macpherson's "Ossian," with his defence of the "Epigoniad," the Theban epic of his friend Professor Wilkie, in themselves give a correct and rather amusing view of his tastes and limitations.

Robertson.

William Robertson (1721-1793) the son of a parish minister in Midlothian, was also a minister of the Church of Scotland, and the leader of the moderate party, as against the enthusiastic spiritual descendants of the Covenanters. The moderates aimed at taste, learning, and the acquisition of a style free from Scottish idioms. This style Robertson displayed (1759) in his history of Scotland. A topic could scarcely be more unpopular than his, the publisher said, but his book had a very wide success south of the Border, and his later works on the reign of Charles V. and on American history were not less popular. His manner is calm, reflective, and studiously destitute of enthusiasm. Both he and Hume viewed the religious history of their country with a critical tranquillity very unlike the spirit introduced by Carlyle. His defect lay, not in the art of clear and definite presentation, but in limited knowledge of original documents.

Edward Gibbon.

"The old reproach, that no British altars had been erected to the Muse of History, was recently disproved," says Gibbon, "by the first performances of Robertson and Hume, the histories of Scotland and the Stuarts.... The perfect composition, the nervous language, the well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson, inflamed me to the ambitious hope that I might one day tread in his footsteps: the calm philosophy, the careless inimitable beauties of his friend and rival" (Hume) "often forced me to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair." After ten years' work by Gibbon at his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" "a letter from Mr. Hume" (1776) "overpaid the labour, but I have never presumed to accept a place in the triumvirate of British historians."

The fondness of Caledonian patriotism cannot accept the compliment paid to Robertson and Hume by the modesty of the author of "The Decline and Fall". The works of the two Scottish historians, though still very readable, and distinguished in style, are superseded by histories much more learned and based on documents not accessible to the Scots. But the monumental edifice of Gibbon is "a possession for ever".

Born at Putney, early in May, 1737, Edward Gibbon came of an ancient though not historically distinguished family, whose wealth was impaired by the connexion of his grandfather with the South Sea Bubble, and by his father's lack of economy. Gibbon's health, in boyhood, was bad, and his education irregular: he was a sufferer in an age when "the schoolboy may have been whipped for misapprehending a passage" (in Phædrus) "which Bentley could not restore, and which Burman could not explain". Thus he writes in his Autobiography: in this work he affects to compose with artless effort, but the rounded periods of his great book come unbidden to his pen, or rather, he devoted elaborate care to the six drafts of his memoirs.

In two years passed at Westminster School, Gibbon did not master Greek and Latin. His next three years were passed in wide desultory reading, in translation of the classics, and in modern history, which from boyhood was his passion. Going to Magdalen College, Oxford, before he was 15, "with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed," he was disgusted by the indolent ignorance of the Fellows of his college, "decent easy men," at whose table as a gentleman commoner he dined. In close grammatical study under his tutor he found neither profit nor pleasure; he lived in or out of Oxford as he pleased; read Catholic books, professed himself a Catholic--"the offence," says Blackstone, "amounts to High Treason". It amounted to petty treason; Gibbon's father removed him from Magdalen to the tuition of Mallet, a free-thinker, and thence he was carried to Lausanne and the house of a Calvinist minister, who in two years brought him within the Presbyterian fold. After such a series of theological adventures it is not strange that Gibbon's aversion to Christianity declares itself wherever he has a chance of sneering at that religion. He returned to England in 1758, after sighing as a lover and obeying as a son, when his father commanded him to resign his passion for Mademoiselle Curchod, later Madame Necker, the mother of Madame de Staël. At Lausanne he had studied very widely and with elaborate organization of his work: in England he still read, "never handled a gun, seldom mounted a horse," but devoted himself to his duties as an officer in the Hampshire militia. Here he acquired some practical knowledge of military affairs which was valuable to him in his remarks on the discipline of the Roman Army: he meditated several historical topics; returned to the Continent, and at Rome (15 October, 1764) conceived, as he has told us in imperishable words, the idea of writing "The Decline and Fall," "as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter". The distractions of society, and of politics, for he had a seat in Parliament, and belonged to White's, Boodle's, Brooks's and The Club of Dr. Johnson, did not draw Gibbon from his great ambition. He had studied style till, in conversation, "his polish was occasionally finical... he moved to flutes and hautboys". George Colman the Younger has left a portrait of Gibbon in verse, which is corroborated, as far as his manner in conversation went, by a letter of his own (1764).

His person looked as funnily obese As if a Pagod, growing large as Man, Had rashly waddled off its chimney-piece, To visit a Chinese upon a fan. Such his exterior, curious 'twas to scan! And oft he rapped his snuff-box, cocked his snout, And ere his polished periods he began, Bent forwards, stretching his forefinger out, And talked in phrase as round as he was round about.

Roundness, meditated balance, are the characteristics of Gibbon's style. "Before he wrote a note or a letter he arranged completely in his mind what he wished to express." He says: "It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it in my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of my pen till I had given the last polish to my work". As one consequence, "my first rough manuscript, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press". Gibbon's History, in the vast whole, as well as in each sentence, was thus premeditated, under his ruling philosophic idea of what such a history should be. He had completely assimilated his mass of materials, and each topic was reduced to its proper dimensions, without encumbering details, while all marched to the flutes and hautboys of his rounded music. We may think it occasionally monotonous, and marvel that so many periods should conclude with a clause introduced by the preposition "of". But this is a trifling criticism, he had chosen his vehicle; and, though we should not imitate his style, yet a style it is, admirably adapted to its purpose. His reading was enormous in every branch of learning, including the science of coins; he constantly refers "to the medals as well as the historians". It may be curious to note that while he devotes four pages to the criticism of the iron cage of Bajazet (1402) he neglects to mention that such cages or huches were commonly used for the safeguarding of important prisoners of war by the contemporary chivalry of France and England.

It is, of course, impossible, it would not be easy for the most learned of historians, to criticize in a few words a historical work of such vast survey, and concerned with so many and such various topics, with the affairs of so many races and religions, throughout so many centuries. The faults which have been chiefly criticized are Gibbon's total inability to be generous towards Christianity; and the bad taste of some of his notes; which appear to be the refreshments of a natural fatigue. In his day, he says, "History was the most popular species of composition," and he "is at a loss how to describe the success of the work, without betraying the vanity of the writer". He ended his task, and he has described his emotions when all was done, on 27 June, 1787, at Lausanne, the place of his boyish exile and of his solitary affair of the heart. He died in 1794, having been mainly busy with the drafts of his Autobiography. These drafts, with his most interesting letters, have been published by the piety of the Earl of Sheffield, the grandson of his devoted friend, John Holroyd, first Lord Sheffield. In his early letters Gibbon is no purist, "I tipped the boy with a crown," he says, an early use of a familiar modern term.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), like Burke and Goldsmith, was an Irishman by birth; his family provided Prince Charles, in Sir Thomas Sheridan, with a most inefficient tutor, and an unfortunate comrade in war. Sheridan's own family was Protestant, his grandfather was a friend of Dean Swift in Ireland, and a humorist. His son, though in Dr. Johnson's set, was regarded by the great lexicographer as a prodigy of natural dullness, highly cultivated and improved by art. Educated at Harrow, young Richard never gave any cause for the complaint that he was dull. At twenty-one he eloped from Bath with the beautiful Miss Linley, a charming singer, the Saint Cecilia of Reynolds's painting. In 1775, Sheridan produced "The Rivals" at Covent Garden; one of the few plays of the eighteenth century which still live on the stage, and perhaps can never cease to amuse, thanks to Mrs. Malaprop's exquisitely well-chosen derangement of epithets, and the unexpected variety of her parts of speech. Malapropisms may be styled a mechanical form of humour, but Mrs. Malaprop's own are happily expressive of her character. To know Lydia Languish is to love her; and Sir Lucius O'Trigger scarcely caricatures the ideas of his duelling fellow-countrymen; whilst Bob Acres is the most sympathetic of all the comic poltroons of the stage, though too sanguine in his belief that "damns have had their day". Sir Anthony Absolute is a delightful variation on the stock character of the Angry Father; and these diverting figures make the sentimental parts of the serious lovers, Falkland and Julia, rather ungrateful. "The School for Scandal" may be called conventional in the contrast of hypocrisy and reckless goodness of heart in Joseph and Charles Surface; but convention is permitted to the stage, while Sir Peter and Lady Teazle, with the happy high spirits of the whole farcical comedy, and the varieties in the candour of the scandal-mongers, make the play at least the rival of "The Rivals," as it is far more provocative of mirth than the wit of Congreve. "The Critic," again, in its delicious nonsense and satire of authors, actors, and critics--Sir Fretful Plagiary is as diverting as realistic--infinitely surpasses its old model, "The Rehearsal". We laugh aloud as we read, and are convulsed as we look on when the piece is acted. Who forgets the nod of Lord Burleigh in the drama of the Armada, and the exquisite reason for which the characters cannot behold the galleons of Spain, and the romantic demeanour of the two Tilburinas, and the Governor who remains fixed, while the Father is moved? Of Sheridan's other plays "St. Patrick's Day" is not seen on the stage, while "The Duenna" does not "attain unto the first Three".

As manager and owner of Drury Lane Theatre, Sheridan proved himself to be not more skilled in finance than Balzac; in debt always, he somehow kept afloat. You would have said that "he was not the stuff they make Whigs of"; any more than Charles Fox. In Parliament, however (1780), he attached himself to that statesman's party; attacked Warren Hastings, and amused the Prince of Wales (George IV.) who certainly appreciated literary genius, from Sheridan and Scott to Miss Austen.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Born a Pierrepont, daughter of the Earl of Kingston (1689-1762) and wife of Edward Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, a toast at eight, lived through the great age of Anne and Pope, her absurd admirer before he was her shameless satirist. She was equally celebrated for her beauty, her wit, and her introduction of inoculation against small-pox, from Constantinople, where her husband was English ambassador (1716). Her light verses are sparkling and malicious; her fame rests on her letters, from the East, from England among the wits, to her sister (who married the Jacobite Earl of Mar, and lived in France), and, in later life, to Lady Bute, from Avignon, with its Jacobite colony, and from Italy, where she read and remarked on the great novelists of the day. Even Walpole's letters are scarcely more entertaining, and more brilliant records of society in the eighteenth century do not exist. Lady Mary was not sentimental, and laughed at Pope's lightning-stricken lovers; or rather at the artificiality of Pope's sentiment concerning them.

Junius.

Stat Nominis Umbra. Because we do not know who wrote the letters of political invective signed "Junius," and published by Woodfall in "The Public Advertiser" (1768-1773), much has been written about the mystery of the author's identity. From Sir Philip Francis (who seems to be the favourite, like Matthioli for the Man in the Iron Maskship) to the wicked Lord Lyttelton and Edward Gibbon, there have been about a score of candidates. Matthioli was certainly not the Man in the Iron Mask, and perhaps Sir Philip Francis was not Junius, who gives himself--very cleverly if he were Sir Philip,--the air of being some great one. The letters, except to the professed historian, are repulsive. The worst quality of satire, spite masquerading as virtuous indignation, is their chief characteristic, their style is that of antithetical rhetoric, highly inflated; their subject is party politics and personal invective.

[1] There was scarce a literary form which he did not touch, none which he touched did he fail to adorn.

[2] The writer observes that Sterne is unmentioned in Mr. Pancoast's "Introduction to English Literature," Third Edition, Enlarged, New York, 1907. "Alas, poor Yorick!"

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XXXII. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

Coleridge.

The so-called Romantic Movement in the English Literature of the early nineteenth century, was, first, the result of a tendency to expansion in every conceivable direction. There was delight in the freedom of the open air and of Nature: in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most men who were not fox hunters were devoted to "the stuffy business of living in houses," and passed the greater part of the day in coffee houses and taverns, drinking wine, tea, chocolate, and ceaselessly conversing. The fat Georgian faces of Hume and Gibbon, the early corpulence and early gout are indications of the life led, when they could afford it, by men of letters. "The Return to Nature," in poetry implied a reaction against these habits.

Politically, there was, in connexion with the French Revolution, expansion in the direction of Universal Brotherhood. "Be my Brother or I will cut your throat" (Sois mon frère, ou je te tue) was the motto of extreme philanthropists.

It's comin' yet for a' that That man to man the world o'er Shall brithers be for a' that,

wrote Burns while the guillotine was in the making, and the thunder was approaching of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

These emotions of hope for the near future entered, no less than the love and study of Nature, into the Romantic literature, and the minds of the poets also expanded in theological and mystical speculation, half German, half in the style of Greek Platonic philosophy.

The sentiment of human unity also turned to the past; history was revivified; mediaeval art was appreciated; chivalry was an ideal--and a very excellent ideal, were human nature capable--of carrying it into practice. Verse was emancipated, all that Goldsmith protested against,--sonnets, blank verse, happy negligence, "anapests"--flourished, and the characteristics of the new age were variously illustrated by men all born within some five years of each other, in the north or the south, William Wordsworth (1770), Walter Scott (1771), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772), Robert Southey (1774), and Charles Lamb (1775), to whom we may add Walter Landor (1775).

Of these the most inspiring influence was probably that of the man who produced the least in bulk of great literature, Coleridge. He was, as it were, the Socrates of the time, the talker. Coleridge was born at the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary, in the Devonshire which Herrick and Keats so much disliked, on 21 October, 1772. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was vicar and master of the Grammar School, and for goodness, learning, and ignorance of the world was compared by his son to Fielding's Parson Adams. Coleridge describes himself as a dreamy child, useless at games, "timorous, and a tell-tale," "despising most boys of my own age". "You can't think how ignorant these boys are!" said Scott, when asked, as a child, why he was not playing with his little neighbours. Like R. L. Stevenson, Coleridge suffered from night fears and visions of fever, born of "The Arabian Nights". He "had seen too many ghosts to believe in them". After the death of his father, who appreciated him, Coleridge went to Christ's Hospital in London (1782), and Lamb has described his life, and his early home-sickness at that painfully Spartan academy. Though he revived

by internal light, The trees, the meadows, and his native stream,

while a schoolboy Coleridge's spirits were high; he made friends enough, Charles Lamb being the first; read widely; dipped, like other curious boys, into the dreams of the post-Christian Neoplatonists,--Iamblichus, the great authority on spiritualism, and Plotinus, so good in parts--and adored, at 17, the Twenty Sonnets of the Rev. Mr. Bowles (1762-1850), afterwards the opponent of Byron in the question "Was Pope a poet?" Bowles, at all events, handed the torch of non-Popeian poetry to Coleridge, who won scholarships and exhibitions that maintained him at Jesus College, Cambridge (1791). Here he met Wordsworth of St. John's, already a printed poet, at a meeting of an Essay Society. But Coleridge had not written his essay!

He now fled from Cambridge "to be a dragoon," which did not suit his genius. He returned to Cambridge: visited Oxford in 1794, met Southey of Balliol, and with him made a plan to migrate with kindred souls to the States, and found a pantisocratic society, wherein all should be brothers and equals. Coleridge was as fit to be a farming colonist as Mr. Micawber, and, being just off with one love, he presently engaged himself to another, Miss Sara Fricker, a sister of Southey's bride. Coleridge at this time wrote a good deal of verse and described his own hand as "graspless"; his genius as "sloth-jaundiced all," while, elsewhere, he spoke of his "fat vacuity of face," an eighteenth century face, with full lax lips, redeemed by dark intelligent eyes. Coleridge was

Like some bold seer in a trance Seeing all his own mischance.

He left Cambridge without a degree, married on the prospects of his poetry; started a weekly serial, "The Watchman," and (1796) published "Poems". Some of them were written at school; many of them are full of Gray's allegorical figures, one, "Religious Musings" in blank verse, is on the Nativity and the evils of Society, others are imitative of Bowles, an "Ode to a Young Jackass," is reminiscent of Sterne's donkey. Perhaps some stanzas named "Lewti, or the Circassian Love-chaunt" alone suggest the essential qualities of Coleridge.

In 1796-1797, Coleridge took a cottage at Stowey: "The Light shall stream to a far distance from the taper in my cottage window". He was busy with an unfinished poem on Jeanne d'Arc, in blank verse (fragments appear in "The Destiny of Nations"). He represented her as seeing her Saints first when of the age of 20, to which she never attained: her eyebrows were "wildly haired". The Voices, in Coleridge, spoke to Jeanne about the Pacific Ocean, the Protoplast, Leviathan, and kindred matters, not much in her way. Jeanne has suffered as much at the hands of poets as from her French judges. Lamb induced Coleridge to abandon these absurdities.

In midsummer, 1797, Coleridge met Wordsworth and his "exquisite sister," Dorothy, who paid a visit to Stowey, and settled near him. A play, "Osorio," was not accepted for the stage: the two poets formed various projects of collaboration, one resulted in "The Ancient Mariner" (March, 1798) the quintessence of romance. In 1798 Coleridge met and carried captive Hazlitt, who later broke his bonds with a glee and fury unworthy of him. By this time, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge had made experiments in opium, of which the bondage was never broken.

In 1798 the famous volume, "Lyrical Ballads," by Coleridge and Wordsworth, challenged the world with Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy" and "Tintern Abbey," examples of the opposite poles of his genius; with "The Ancient Mariner," among other things. In 1798-1799 Coleridge was studying in Germany, absorbing philosophies: in 1800 he removed with his family to Greta Hall near Keswick, or to Windermere, while the Wordsworths were at Grasmere; hence the name of the Lake Poets.

Coleridge was now working at the second part of the never-to-be-finished "Christabel," begun at Stowey. Sir John Stoddart read or repeated some stanzas of "Christabel" to Scott, who followed the metres of Coleridge in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805). Coleridge (who did not publish "Christabel," and the extraordinary fragment composed in sleep "Kubla Khan," with "The Pains of Sleep," till 1816) was not unjustifiably annoyed by the anticipation, of his metre, which was not new, but was first used by Coleridge in romantic poetry. Scott seems to have been quite unconscious of sin.

Despite the large number of Coleridge's poems, it is generally confessed that only "The Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love,"

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

"Youth and Age" (1822-1832), "Time, Real and Imaginary," with "Dejection" (an ode, 1802), and parts of "France" (an ode, 1798) represent that in the poet which was absolutely his, and his alone. The vision, supernaturally clear, the music, the glow, the strange beauty, are present in these poems, things inimitable and unequalled. Coleridge was always a "teacher" and had been a Unitarian preacher: his early poems are constantly didactic, but, in his poems which live, there is no "lesson" (unless we regard "The Ancient Mariner" as a tract for the prevention of cruelty to animals). The great poems appear to have been given to him in flashes of vision, as "Kubla Khan" certainly was given in sleep, and broken by the arrival of "a person from Porlock" on business. It is fairly apparent that "Christabel" had its germ in a brief vision of the meeting of the innocent heroine with a being beautiful and horrible,

I guess,'twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she-- Beautiful exceedingly.

We may even conjecture at the close of the vision, a thing so grotesque as well as terrible, that the poem could never find a conclusion.

It is not clear that Coleridge's poems had much effect on those of younger contemporaries. Without Coleridge, Shelley would have written as he did write; if anything by Keats is influenced by Coleridge it is "La Belle Dame sans Merci". To Scott, Coleridge gave only the idea of the metre of "Christabel". In close intimacy Coleridge and Wordsworth stimulated each other. In other respects Coleridge's critical and philosophical ideas welled from him in lectures, orally delivered; his Shakespearean criticism was of the highest merit in spiritual appreciation. In "The Friend," an unsuccessful and unexhilarating periodical; in his "Biographia Literaria" (1817-1818) which is not so biographical or so literary as it is reflective, and critical of Hartley's philosophy and Wordsworth's poems, he is too discursive to be easily read; and the systematic works on philosophy about which he dreamed and talked were never produced.

His life, after his visit to Italy and Malta in 1804-1806, was desultory; his friendship with the Wordsworths was interrupted; Lamb, always true to him, could describe him as "a damaged Archangel"; Hazlitt, furious with Coleridge's later conservatism, insulted his "Christabel" in the "Edinburgh Review": and declared that the praises given to it by Scott and Byron were inspired by desire of praise from Coleridge. From 1816 to his death in 1834 Coleridge lived quietly and more happily with Mr. Gillman at Hampstead, much visited by people who hoped to be instructed as well as charmed by his conversation, or rather by his monologues.

In 1820 Keats met him and walked two miles with him. "He broached a thousand things--nightingales, poetry--on poetical sensation--metaphysics, different genera and species of dreams--a dream accompanied by a sense of touch, a dream related--first and second consciousness--the difference explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking" (that is detecting) "the second consciousness--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids, Southey believed in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story!"

"The second consciousness" may be the "subconsciousness" or "subliminal self" of modern psychologists. "He is a kind good soul," says the sardonic Carlyle, "full of religion and affection, and poetry and animal magnetism." Scott met "this extraordinary man" at dinner. Coleridge (after dinner) lectured on the Samothracian Mysteries as the origin of all fairy tales; and on the "Iliad" as a miscellany contributed to by many authors during a century. "Zounds, I never was so bethumped with words."

Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott, descended from the Harden branch of the great clan that had kept the Marches through centuries of English wars, was born in Edinburgh on 15 August, 1771. Neither from his father (the father of Allan Fairford, in "Redgauntlet") nor from his mother, of another Border clan, the Rutherfords, can he be supposed to have drawn his genius, though Mrs. Scott appreciated literature. In early childhood a mysterious malady inflicted on him a life-long lameness, in contrast with his great physical strength, and his preference for the profession of arms. His early childhood was passed in the heart of the Borders, at Smailholme tower, overlooking Tweed, Teviot, and the scenes of a hundred battles. The old ballads were his earliest reading, and tales of Prince Charles's war, told by veterans of the Forty-five, his great delight. At school he flashed from end to end of the form, rising by his general information, and falling by his indifference to grammar. He was an omnivorous reader, forgetting nothing, a teller of tales, a roamer on foot through the country-side, and he left the High School of Edinburgh, quite Greekless, for the University,--where he learned no Greek. But of Latin, including mediaeval Latin, he had enough for his purposes (his quotations show indifference to quantity and metre); and French, Italian, and German he acquired for the purpose of reading their poetry and romances. His native appreciation of verse astonished people in his childhood; love of the past was his dominant passion; and in nature the historical memories of places were even more to him than natural beauty.

After the customary training in his father's office, he was called to the Scottish Bar, enjoying little practice, but making friends in every rank, and enduring a disappointment in love, by which his heart, though fairly mended by his marriage in 1797, to a Miss Charpentier, was broken but not embittered.

His earliest published verses were translations from German ballads, including the famous "Lenore" of Bürger, and he published a translation of the "Götz von Berlichingen" of Goethe. These essays attracted little attention: more was paid to such imitations of the old ballads as "Glenfinlas," and "Cadzow," and "The Eve of St. John," abounding in poetic spirit, though not archaic in diction.

He obtained a long-deferred reversion of a place as Clerk in the Parliament House, and the Sheriffship of Selkirkshire (the Forest of Ettrick) where in summer he resided, first at Ashestiel on Tweed, the centre of the beauties and legends of the Border. In yearly raids into almost roadless Liddesdale, he learned to know the Dandie Dinmonts, and collected the traditions, and the ballads of "The Border Minstrelsy," of which the first edition, with copious historical and antiquarian notes, was published in 1802.

The famous False Alarm of invasion of 1803, described in "The Antiquary," sent him on a ride of a hundred miles, to Dalkeith, the house of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, and the trysting-place of the Borderers. A command of the Duchess suggested a ballad on a tradition of a goblin page; parts of Coleridge's unpublished "Christabel," which he had heard recited, gave the model of the irregular octosyllabic verse, and in 1805 the result, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," made Scott by far the most popular of poets. "The Lay" was the most spontaneous, and in many ways the best, of his romances in verse. "Marmion" (1808) more studied, more tragical, and fortunate in the magnificent canto on the battle of Flodden: and "The Lady of the Lake" (1810), with its blending of Highland and Lowland characters and scenes in the reign of James V. (about 1535) only confirmed his popularity and success. "Rokeby" (1812) was, despite its excellent songs, and a highly Byronic outlaw preceding Byron, less favourably received; and "The Lord of the Isles" (1815), on the adventures of Bruce, a subject long meditated, was not saved by its battle of Bannockburn, a fight only inferior to the Flodden of "Marmion". Byron, with his modern romance and his living celebrity, had defeated the historical Muse; and Scott did not put forth his strength in "Harold the Dauntless" and "The Bridal of Triermain".

He was the best judge of his own poetry, written "for young people of spirit," he said, though he did not allow his own young people to read it; a deprivation which they took very unconcernedly. It is not to Scott's poetry, except in some of his lyrics, that we look for deep reflection on human destinies, or for delicate subtlety of phrase,

All the charm of all the Muses Often flowering in a lonely word.

His reflections he kept to himself; he told his story in his galloping "light horseman" style of verse; he made the dead past live again; he repeopled with their dreams the roofless towers of the Borders, the Highland caves and bothies, the deserted palaces and castles, whose last native king was then dying, a priest, in Rome. His verses, read aloud to Wellington's men in Spain, inspirited them in the charge, as they awoke among all men what had long been slumbering, the love of poetry. Scott, like Yama, the first of men who died, "opened a pathway unto many": inclined men to give an ear to verse. He set Byron the model for his popular versified tales of Oriental adventure; and he was unceasing in recommending the poetry, so unlike his own, of Wordsworth, and in applauding Byron with unfeigned generosity; while his devotion to the old English drama displays itself in quotations in his prose, and in imitations, improvised chapter-headings, in his novels. From his first translations of ballads, to the snatches sung by Madge Wildfire, the song of "Proud Maisie," and the ringing lyric of "Bonnie Dundee," he first awoke and then kept vigilant the spirit of ancient popular minstrelsy.

In short his poetry was such as came to a man of his genius, during his "grand gallops among the hills, while he was thinking of 'Marmion'". His laxities in form are, indeed, less glaring than those of Byron, but, from the first, were conspicuous to himself and to his critics. His appeal to names of hill and loch and sea-strait, rivers and burns and towers and glens, makes half of his charm in the ears of those to whom the places are dear and familiar. He was "the latest minstrel," the Homer, the creative and unifying successor of many nameless men who left great verse unto a little clan. Above all he was a narrator, at story-teller, a creator of characters, a Humorist, and his essential genius, his dramatic gift, his knowledge of the past and the present, found its true vehicle in the prose of his novels.

Scott's career falls naturally into two parts: first from the "Minstrelsy" (1802) to "The Lord of the Isles" (1815), and next from "Waverley" (1814) to the authors death in 1832. But in the earlier years were sown the seeds of disaster; Scott had, before 1813, been entangled in financial troubles, owing to his association with the printing and publishing affairs of his old friends, James and John Ballantyne. Despite his common sense, Scott was sanguine and unpractical as a publisher; his enterprises were dominated by preferences, personal or antiquarian; his hospitality and his tastes were expensive, and his associates were not the men to control and direct him; or even to keep the commercial books of the concern. In fact shipwreck, once at least, seemed inevitable, before Scott struck a vein of fairy gold in prose romance.

Before speaking of Scott as a novelist it should be said that he was the most copious, various, and readable of the critics and general writers of his time. His great edition of Dryden, now reinforced by the notes of Mr. Saintsbury, still holds its ground, in despite of the contempt of Leigh Hunt; and his "Life of Swift" is still the most valuable, for the judgment of so sane and generous a mind on the mystery of Swift's character and career. Scott's many essays, collected from periodicals, mainly from "The Quarterly Review," which he practically founded, are treasures of information and anecdote. His criticism for example in the "Lives of the Novelists" errs most in the direction of generosity. His "Tales of a Grandfather," written for his little grandson, John Lockhart, who died in childhood, combines delightful versions of historic legends of early times with the most impartial treatment of such difficult and disputable periods as the Reformation and the age of the Covenant. Scott had strong sentimental leanings towards Mary Stuart, the Cavaliers, and the Jacobites, but, in writing history for the young, he deliberately corrected his bias. A life of Mary Stuart he refused to write, because his reason was at variance with his feelings. His "Napoleon" was a piece of task-work, executed with cruel rapidity, and, of course, he had not access to many sources of information now open. Of course, too, like any man who had lived through the Napoleonic wars, he was a partisan, in his case of his country's party. But he did not carry political partisanship into literature; he had no part (despite ignorant assertions) in the attacks on "the Cockney School"; he tried to tempt Charles Lamb to visit him at Abbotsford; and he seized an opportunity of applauding Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" because he believed it to be by Shelley.

William Wordsworth.

The contrast between the friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, was that which poets observe between the South and the North. The child of the soft enervating air of Devonshire, Coleridge, according to his own early diagnosis already quoted, had every other gift, mental and moral, but lacked energy and resolution, his hand was "graspless". Wordsworth, on the contrary (born at Cockermouth, 7 April, 1770) was a child of the North and of the Border, and a grandchild of Dorothy, born Crackanthorp, a member of a family which, in the old Border laws, is named among the Watchers of the Fords, against the Scottish raiders. To a genius as great if not as diversified as Coleridge's, Wordsworth united an iron will to be a poet and, as he said, "a teacher,". With the keenest love of universal nature from the mountains and the storms to "the meanest flower that blows," he combined that sense of unity with Nature, and with "something still more deeply interfused," which Coleridge speaks of in a poem (1795) composed before he and Wordsworth became intimate. Says Coleridge

O the one life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a soundlike power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.

Coleridge adds that when he lies at midday on the side of a hill, his fancies traverse his brain

As wild and various as the random gales That swell and flutter on this subject lute,

namely an Æolian harp placed in the open window.

Wordsworth, to the same emotions as of a conscious Æolian harp vibrating to the universe, added an invincible resolve to extract the moral out of every vibration, and to register it in verse. In this task he knew no slackness, he was daily observing, daily composing, consequently the mass of his poetry is very great, and very unequally inspired, since "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill" of the poet, while Wordsworth was busy at all moments.

After a boyhood happily passed, when he was out of school, in angling, skating, boating, and setting springes for woodcock, Wordsworth went to St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1787, taking his bachelor's degree in 1791. He was an orphan; his father, a solicitor, had been far from prosperous, and it was perhaps to the generosity of his uncle that he owed the advantage of being allowed to "mew his mighty youth" in what the world calls idleness. He had the same intense consciousness of and reverence for his own genius as Milton and Tennyson possessed: he would be a poet and nothing but a poet, for the position of Stamp Distributor which he later enjoyed was a sinecure. Concerning all his poetic childhood and boyhood, and residence in France (from the end of 1791 to the opening of 1793),

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven,

down to his "wantoning in wild poesy" with Coleridge (1797), he has told his tale in "The Prelude" (1799-1805).

This extremely long poem in blank verse was regarded by Wordsworth as "subsidiary to the preparation" for "the construction of a literary work that should live". After thus "investigating the origin and progress of his own powers as far as he was acquainted with them," Wordsworth intended to produce "a philosophical Poem... having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement". This poem, also in blank verse, was to be called "The Recluse"; whereof only a few hundred lines exist, but "The Excursion" was designed for the second part. "The Recluse," Wordsworth says, was to be a kind of Gothic Cathedral: "The Prelude" is the "antechapel"; and the lyrics, sonnets, and other poems not so large as the antechapel "may be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in these edifices". These oratories are the most favourite portions of Wordsworth's cathedral; and all his poems, long or short, except the tragedy "The Borderers," "have for their principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement," but listening with a keen ear to hints and murmurs of the world.

From enthusiasm for the French Revolution, Wordsworth, like Burns, "when haughty Gaul invasion threats," turned gradually to patriotism, as the French armies of emancipation conquered Switzerland, invaded Spain, and menaced England. Now, like Glenbucket at the battle of Sheriffmuir (1715) he prayed "for one hour of Dundee!" This unprincipled change of sides caused Wordsworth's poems to be insulted by Hazlitt, and in "The Edinburgh Review". He was constant, indeed, to his sympathy with poverty and toil, detested the factory system, and loved his mountains and lakes not only for the beauty of the clouds, mists, and gleams of sunlight, but because

Labour here preserves His rosy face, a servant only here Of the fireside or of the open field, A Freeman therefore sound and unimpaired --("The Recluse").

But Wordsworth had not a noble scorn of "militarism"; he sang of Nelson, and "The Happy Warrior," as well as of "The Lesser Celandine," and was attached to the Anglican Establishment; these things were not forgiven to the poetic renegade by Whig critics, or to Coleridge, or to Southey, while Scott, it was admitted, had never turned his coat.

Wordsworth was singularly fortunate in the ideal affection of his sister Dorothy,--whose eye for natural beauty was as keen as his own,--and in his wife, to whom he attributed two lines in "The Daffodils"--

They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude.

Of his friendship with Coleridge, and of their volume "Lyrical Ballads," we have spoken. They contain examples of his theory, first given in the preface of the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," that "the poet ought to imitate and, as far as is possible, adopt the very language of men... I have taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetical diction as others ordinarily take to produce it". But Wordsworth could not, of course, keep up to his own standard. Asked "What has become of the wild swans?" no mortal could reply

The Dalesmen may have aimed the deadly tube --("The Recluse").

Thus, in "Lyrical Ballads," in "The Idiot Boy," Wordsworth wrote (and "I never wrote anything with so much glee"):--

And he must post without delay Across the bridge and through the dale, And by the church, and o'er the down, To bring a Doctor from the town, Or she will die, old Susan Gale.

Dr. Johnson had anticipated this theory of non-poetic diction in poetry:--

As with my hat upon my head, I walk'd along the Strand, I there did meet another man With his hat in his hand.

Wordsworth stood courageously--all the more stiffly because he was laughed at--by his theory. In practice he made the poor woman of "The Affliction of Margaret" talk of "the incommunicable sleep" of the dead, here the not ordinary word has a meaning not ordinary.

"The Lyrical Ballads" contained poetry so remote from "The Idiot Boy" as the lines on Tintern Abbey; with

A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Mens agitat molem: it is the philosophy of Virgil. The consciousness of this unity with nature and of both with that which is divine had been with Wordsworth from his childhood, as he records in "The Prelude" and elsewhere, and this aspect of his thought even affected Byron, in the last part of "Childe Harold".

Wordsworth's life was uneventful. He made tours, very fruitful in poetry, to Scotland (1813, 1814, 1831, 1833); they are dated by "Yarrow Unvisited," "Yarrow Visited," "Yarrow Revisited". The tour of 1831 gave occasion to the noble and tender sonnet "A Trouble not of Clouds, or Weeping Rain," on the departure of the dying Scott for Italy. With this (1831) in our memories we cannot say that save for the ode "Composed on an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty," "all Wordsworth's good work was done in the decade between 1798 and 1808". His poems of the year 1807 are, no doubt, the least lacking in uniform success. Among them is the ode "On intimations of Immortality". But "The White Doe of Rylstone," published in 1815, and proclaimed by "The Edinburgh Review" to be the very worst poem that ever appeared in quarto, was written in 1807: written in such stress of the spirit that the poet was not punctual to the dinner bell, as he informs us. The poem was an excursion into Scott's metres, and one of Scott's historic periods, but its intention was purely spiritual, and very unpopular.

The "Laodamia" (1814), the meeting of the heroine with the spirit of her lord, the first man slain at Troy, has been highly praised by an excellent judge (Mr. F. W. Myers). But when the Appearance says "thy transports moderate!" we are in touch with the poetic diction of the eighteenth century and far from the inspiration of the Greek "thrice I sprang toward the shadow of my mother dead; thrice she flitted from my hands as a shadow or even as a dream". It is, in fact, true that after 1808, with forty-two years of life and poetry before him, Wordsworth often failed.

Hail, Orient conqueror of gloomy night

is an address to the sun which any follower of Pope might have written ("Ode for the Morning of the General Thanksgiving 1816").

Many of Wordsworth's most inspired passages are to be found in the long, lofty, and rather bleak antechapel and nave of "The Prelude" and "The Excursion". But lovers of poetry are most apt to kneel in his chapels and oratories; and to read, with unceasing delight and gratitude "In the Sweet Shire of Cardigan," "I Heard a Thousand Blended Notes," "There was a Boy, Ye Knew Him Well, Ye Cliffs"; "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways," "Lucy Gray," "Beggars," "Sweet Highland Girl," "To the Cuckoo," "The Ode to Duty," "The Happy Warrior," and the multitude of sonnets of the highest and most varied excellence, in which his genius, like the follet of Molière, rides his pen and his power comes to its own.

Science or stupidity may some day try to compile the statistics of "inspiration" in poetry. Inspiration cannot easily be defined, but may be described as represented, in a poet's work, by the passages in which, according to the common consent of readers, he reaches a level immeasurably higher than that of versified matter in general, and of his own efforts in particular.

In any such calculation the proportion of Wordsworth's inspired verse--of verse of the very highest and most singular merit--is far above the proportion in Coleridge. Few readers who may amuse themselves by trying to "place" modern English poets after Milton will give Wordsworth anything lower than the second, while very many will give him the foremost rank. But the amount of his uninspired verse--of verse immeasurably below his best--is enormous, and this, with some other circumstances, accounts for the opposition, the refusal to accept him or take him seriously, which he had to encounter in his long life (7 April, 1770-23 April, 1850).

Another obstacle, to be plain, was the infinite number of occasions in which the little, pronoun "I" occurs in his poetry. Great, beneficent, and unique as was the genius of William Wordsworth when he conceived "The Prelude" as only the beginning of what he wanted to say about himself, and about the universe as mirrored in his own intelligence, it became only too manifest that he was, in an unexampled degree, destitute of humour. Amusing anecdotes are told, by Lockhart, of conversations between Wordsworth and Scott in which Wordsworth's poetry was the sole theme, by no means to Sir Walter's discontent. On no contemporary but Burns and Coleridge did he bestow his approval: it may be doubted if he had spent half an hour with Byron's, Shelley's, and Keats's verse. To be sure this self-absorption is a malady most incident to poets!

In later life (1820-1837) Wordsworth visited the Continent, even reaching Italy. In 1839 he received a noble welcome and an honorary degree from Oxford; in 1843, on Southey's death, he accepted the Laureateship, which, before Southey's appointment, Scott had refused; and on 23 April, 1850, he passed away, leaving to Tennyson the laurels. He wished to teach us wisdom; he did something better, he gave us happiness.

Robert Southey.

The name of Robert Southey (born at Bristol, 12 August, 1774) was always connected with the names of the Lake School of poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, though his theory and practice in poetry were quite distinct from those of the authors of "Lyrical Ballads". Southey was educated at Westminster, where his troubles began in his editorship of a little paper, "The Flagellant," which was opposed to flogging. On entering Balliol College, Oxford (1792), he declared himself a rebel, wearing his hair long, as becomes men of genius, while women of genius commonly wear their hair short. He also despised his Dons, and, nearly twenty years later, on meeting Shelley, then aged 19, he found in Shelley the counterpart of his undergraduate self. Shelley, however, did not, when at Oxford, contemplate taking Holy Orders. Southey soon abandoned the idea, and, meeting Coleridge at Oxford in June, 1794, devised with him the scheme of a "pantisocratic" community in America.

With Coleridge, Southey wrote "The Fall of Robespierre," and, by himself, an epic in blank verse on Jeanne d'Arc. Of this boyish effort--ambitious, and, in history, ill-informed--he had a high opinion, writing, in 1800, "my Joan of Arc has revived the epic mania... but it is not every one who can shoot with the bow of Ulysses, and the gentlemen who think they can bend the bow because I made the string twang will find themselves disappointed". Southey was always twanging the string of epic poetry. Even at school he had contemplated a series of epics, to be written at the fate of one a year; on the mythological legends of the world. In 1795 he married Miss Edith Fricker, a sister of the wife of Coleridge, and visited Portugal, acquiring, then and on a later visit, an unusual knowledge of the languages and literatures of the Peninsula.

After an attempt to study law, he went to live at Westbury, near Bristol, began "Madoc," an epic in blank verse on a legendary Welsh prince who discovered America, and fought the Aztecs, and he also began "Kehama," an epic on Hindoo mythology, and "Thalaba, the Destroyer," an epic based on the mythology of Islam; while "Madoc" deals largely with the sanguinary religion of Anahuac.

In "Madoc," which was not completed till after Southey settled at Keswick, near Wordsworth, but not too near, he had chosen for a theme perhaps the most romantic adventure in human history. He assigns to his fabulous Welsh prince the part actually taken by Cortes, the Cymri defeated the Aztecs as did the Spaniards.

Southey's blank verse is somewhat Miltonic, though he was no such "inventor of harmonies" as Milton, while in descriptions of adventure among unknown peoples, and fighting with Aztec weapons, he reminds the reader of some of the romances of Mr. Rider Haggard. Books XIV.-XV. ("The Stone of Sacrifice" and "The Battle") cannot but delight any boy who reads them, they are full of spirit and abundantly picturesque; while the notes are as rich as Scott's in the charm of strange lore, and delightful passages from forgotten books. Thus from the Jesuit missionary, Lafitau (for Southey fully appreciated the virtues of Jesuit missionaries), he culls a Red Indian legend, one of the world-wide variants of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Sir Walter Scott, in 1807, wrote to Southey "I have read 'Madoc' three times since my first cursory perusal, and each time with an increasing admiration. But a poem whose merits are of that high tone does not immediately take with the public at large."

In fact "Thalaba," written in a strange unrhymed measure, devised by Dr. Sayres, deals with topics of no earthly interest, the feud of Thalaba and the demons of Domdaniel. Southey himself said that "Thalaba" was like highly seasoned turtle soup, while Wordsworth's poems were like asparagus and artichokes, wholesome, and edible with the aid of melted butter. But the world did not care for "Thalaba," nor for the monstrosities of Hindoo mythology in the eccentric measures of "Kehama". Landor, whose "Gebir" Southey heartily admired, offered to pay for the printing of as many epics as Southey chose to write; he cast a longing eye on Zoroaster; but Southey had a wife and family, "a sacrifice was made," "Kehama" was his last epic, unless we reckon "Roderick" as an epic poem. Southey was not destitute of poetic genius; passages in his epics, and among his lyrics, "My Days among the Dead are Past," and "The Holly Tree," attest his gift, but the Epic has seldom indeed been written with success, and never anywhere in such measures as those of "Kehama" and "Thalaba".

It was necessary for Southey to turn his hand to prose, and he supported his family and bought his books by reviewing and political writing, first in "The Annual Register," then in "The Quarterly Review," though it was against the grain that he wrote in a political serial. He was a friend of his country as against Bonaparte; he was a friend of order, while he was clear-sighted about the oppression and abuses which sheltered themselves under the shield of order; and he was a religious man. Like Scott he was anxious that the "Quarterly" reviewers "should keep their swords clean as well as sharp," but the political blades of both the "Quarterly" and the "Edinburgh" were dirty and poisoned, and were wont to slash about in literary criticism. Southey was the common butt of abuse from Liberal reviewers, and was supposed by Shelley and Byron to have attacked them in criticisms to which he was a perfect stranger: though of "the new morality" of both poets he expressed his opinion privately, and publicly struck back at Byron for his brilliant assault on Southey's English hexameters concerning the admission of George III. to heaven. Southey must have been deserted by the sense of humour when he wrote that astonishing piece of verse in the capacity of Poet Laureate. This little piece of preferment Southey obtained in 1813. Sir Walter, to whom it was offered, despite the "rapacity" of which Macaulay accused him, had declined the laurels, and, believing that the post was much better paid than it is, had suggested the appointment of Southey. The little salary, under a hundred pounds, enabled Southey to provide for his family by insuring his life. In answering Scott's letter--"I am not such an ass as not to know that you are my better in poetry"; Southey said "there has been no race; we have both got to the top of the hill by different paths".

There is something very winning in Southey's noble simplicity of nature. Neither he nor Scott had won to the top of Parnassus hill, and Scott was well aware of it. But Southey to the last, in spite of public neglect, believed in his own success as a supreme poet; yet abandoned his epics for the homely task of winning a poor competence for his family by reviewing, and by doing job-work for the publishers. As his prose was of the first quality he was able to earn £300 by his masterpiece, the immortal "Life of Nelson". As an article for the "Quarterly" it brought a hundred, another hundred when enlarged, a third when published in "The Family Library". His "Life of John Wesley" was only second to his "Nelson" in merit. His "History of Brazil" could not expect a due reward; his general writings, though full of pleasant erudition and fanciful humour, were not popular; towards the end of his life the revenues which he derived from a score of books amounted only to £26. He mentions the fact without bitterness, without complaint. His long and noble life of industry ended in 1843; for some time he had sat in the library which he had made without the power to read his books.

Shelley.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (born 4 August, 1792, at Field Place, Horsham, the seat of his father, Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart.) seems to have incarnated the spirit of the Revolution. He had no brothers to check his tastes and impulses; he ruled his sisters, was lonely at a private school, but at Eton, where he already defied tyrants,--boys and masters,--he seems to have become popular, despite his eccentricities. Like many other boys he made chemical smells and explosions in place of mastering his Greek grammar. He read Godwin, in whom he invested his great natural powers of belief to the neglect of more orthodox securities, and he combined Godwinism with the romantic mechanism of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels in two schoolboy romances, "Zastrozzi," the more amusing of the pair, and "St. Irvyne". He is said to have received some money for "Zastrozzi"; if he did the case was unparalleled in his later experience. When at University College, Oxford, he published "Poems by Victor and Cazire" (his sister Elizabeth) and a little incoherent volume, "Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson," a maniac who aimed at murdering George III.

He had no intimate friend except his future biographer, Thomas Hogg, a sceptic, but a Tory; and his studies were desultory, self-directed, and much concerned with efforts to retain or ruin some remnants of belief. His little thesis on "The Necessity of Atheism," and his distribution of the paper, were perhaps as much inspired by his humourless love of practical jokes and aversion to the authorities as by conviction. His expulsion, which Hogg insisted on sharing, was the rash reply of dons who were tired of being baited; and Shelley, now a martyr, rejoiced in proclaiming the ideas for which he and Hogg had suffered.

On ill terms with his father, he married Miss Harriet Westbrook, a very young girl, more from a sense of duty and honour than from love; and in various rural places he lived, wrote, read Godwin, corresponded with him, preached his ideas in Ireland, and idealized and quarrelled with various friends of both sexes, till he met Mary Godwin, the very young daughter of the philosopher.

Shelley had grown passing weary of his wife, who now declined to live with him as a sister while Mary took her natural place; he retired with Mary and her stepsister, Jane Clairmont, calling herself Claire, to Switzerland, and returned to England--because the stove in his room smoked badly.

Reconciled to Hogg (whom he had accused, truly or falsely, of trying to put his own ideas of free love into practice with Mrs. Shelley), he wrote "Queen Mab" (1813), (in which his natural genius shines unmistakably,) and "Alastor" (1816), the story of a lonely spirit fleeing from itself through scenes of grandeur and desolation; homeless, like Shelley, and like him unsatisfied. His own wanderings were restless rather than remote; to Geneva, where Claire Clairmont carried out his ideas with the aid of the reluctant Byron; back to Great Marlow; and thence, after marrying Mary Godwin, on the suicide of his injured wife, to various parts of Italy, Claire being still his camp-follower.

He had become the friend and benefactor of Leigh Hunt; Godwin's demands for money followed him like harpies; he was deprived of his children by his first marriage; his long romance in Spenserian stanzas, "Laon and Cythna," though expurgated and rechristened "The Revolt of Islam" (1818), attracted little but unfriendly attention, despite its many and extraordinary beauties and radiant visions of storm and rainbow, clouds and winds and fire. With unwonted humour Shelley said that you might as well ask for a leg of mutton in a gin shop as apply to him for studies in human nature. Madness, said Medwin, a man who was much in his company, hung over Shelley like the sword of Damocles.

In his earlier years he was like an Æolian harp on which all the winds of the spirit played, making strange music and strange discords. He was even too fluent, Keats told him; as Jonson said of Shakespeare, sufflaminandus erat. Ideas of beauty springing up in his mind, he followed them, followed the cloud, the shower, the meteor, the evanescent loveliness, was borne up by the "wild west wind, the breath of autumn's being," leaving his narrative of human fortunes. He was a born visionary and mystic, beholding things unapparent; believing in experiences that never were actual. Yet withal, when control was needed, he could control himself wonderfully, as was especially notable in his difficult and dangerous relations with the wild Claire Clairmont and Byron.

In his poetic art, this growing power of control is especially manifest in his drama, "The Cenci" (1819), and his swan-song, the matchless "Adonais" (1821), the lament for Keats. But "The Cenci," a drama on a theme which was made to the hand of Ford or Webster,--the story of a soul more devilish in limitless cruelty and desire of evil than the soul of Volpone; of a maiden martyr more cruelly entreated than Jeanne d'Arc,--was not possible on the modern stage.

The polemics of "Prometheus Unbound" against the world as it is, and in favour of suffering and oppressed humanity, lost themselves, the contradictions vanished unreconciled in the music of the immortal lyrics. The escape from a world in which "as God made it ye canna hae everything as ye wad like it," to reach an undisturbed haven of love and loneliness, "to live for climate and the affections" inspires "The Witch of Atlas" (1820) and "Epipsychidion" (1821). Shelley's soul was always seeking its predestined and ideal mate, with whom "the wilderness were paradise enow," and then these ideal friends or mistresses, in a moment, became horrors to him,--and Mary remained; Mary and "a song in the ears of men yet to be born".

In his many immortal lyrics the poetry of Shelley is most accessible to all; in them he is not baffled and foiled by the world as it is. What his powers might have become, for they were maturing rapidly, cannot be guessed. By a death in strange harmony with his genius, portended by omens, and predicted in his own words, he "was borne darkly fearfully afar," being drowned in a brief sudden tempest in the Gulf of Spezzia (19 July, 1822). The fire received what the water returned to earth, and his ashes sleep beside those of Keats in "a place so beautiful that it makes one in love with death".

Byron.

George Gordon Byron (born 1788) who succeeded in boyhood to the title of Lord Byron, was the son of a wild father, John Byron, and of a mother as much wilder as the blood of the Gordons of Gight, in Aberdeenshire, could make her. Of all "the gay Gordons" her family carried to the most extreme point the least estimable and more ferocious qualities of their glorious fighting clan. It is impossible to judge by a common measure the child of John Byron and Catherine Gordon. Byron was a man of all-conquering personal beauty, and great strength, marred by a painful and disfiguring blemish of lameness; and possessed by rather than possessing an intellectual fire that burned lawlessly where it listed.

At Harrow, Byron was, as always, inordinately conscious of his title; he was passionately affectionate, sullen, capricious, and, despite his lameness, played for the school against Eton.[1] When at Harrow, Byron, who from the age of 8 was often in love, lost his heart to a girl older than himself, Miss Mary Chaworth, who married Mr. Musters in 1805. On this affection, among others, he never ceased to brood and write verses: now protesting that he had been "jilted," and now denying the charge.

At Cambridge, Byron was most noted for insubordination, and contempt of the dons. His earliest volume of verse, "Hours of Idleness" (1807-1808, first privately printed in various forms), which showed, some promise, in places, was attacked in the "Edinburgh Review"; the trifle was noticed because the author had a title, and Jeffrey, in the words of Thackeray's bargee, "liked wopping a lord". This lord countered heavily, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809).

For a satirist of 21 this is a fine exhibition of hard hitting in every direction. On looking through a number of his works later, Byron pronounced his satire to be the best of them. Byron's feud extended to the whole of his mother's country, and he did not spare Scott, who merely remarked to a friend that the satirist was "a young whelp". Sir Walter was not the man to be dragged into a quarrel of words, and, in his own phrase, would rather meet an opponent "where the muircock was Bailie".

Between 1809 and 1811 Byron voyaged about the borders of the Grecian sea, doing and suffering what adventures and misfortunes nobody precisely knows. In 1812 appeared the two first cantos of his "Childe Harold," in Spenserian verse, and Byron, in his own phrase, "awoke one day to find himself famous". Here was a poetical satirical picture of Spain and the Levant, here was living romance with a living young lord for the hero; a peer of a reckless and defiant character; as beautiful as a fallen angel. This was more thrilling than lays of the moss-troopers and Scottish kingly adventurers of the remote past, and Scott frankly owned that he "was bet" by the brilliant young rival with whom he was, henceforth, on the best of terms. Sir Walter produced but one more romance in rhyme, while Byron was the most enthusiastic admirer of Sir Walter's novels. Indeed it is to Scott's descriptions, with their serene tolerance, sympathy, and charity, that we must look for the best portrait of Byron, at his best. Of Byron at his worst we have enough in some of his own letters, in a very few of Shelley's, and in the "revelations" published in an evil hour by Leigh Hunt.

While a "lion," as the term was then used, in society, a conqueror of hearts, a dandy, and a student of the noble art of self-defence under "Gentleman Jackson," Byron wrote and published his Oriental tales in imitation of Scott's measures. The history of these poems (1813-1816) is certainly a veiled revelation of Byron's life during these strange years. In 1818, two years after their separation, his wife wrote to another lady that "egotism is the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject with which his own character and interests are not identified"; but that he veiled "his poetical disclosures" by "introducing fictitious incidents, and changes of scene and time".

"The Giaour" (1813) grew, in successive editions (5 June-27 November), from 800 to more than 1300 lines, and the additions contained, like "The Bride of Abydos", cryptic references to Byron's own loves and attendant remorses during that period. To these affairs many dark references occur in his Letters and Journal, from August, 1813, to March, or later, in 1814. Byron always rushed into print at the earliest moment, in the new editions of "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos" (written in a week of passion, November, 1814), "The Corsair," "Lara" (1814), and the separate lyrics published with each of these. It is not very difficult, but it is neither pleasant nor profitable, to disentangle history from fiction in these "poetical disclosures". The "Siege of Corinth," and "Parisina" were written in Byron's year of married life. The famous passage in "The Giaour"--

He who hath bent him o'er the dead.

is compared, by Byron's latest Editor, with a passage in Mrs. Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho," and Mrs. Radcliffe appears to have been a common source of Byron's inspiration. Between "He who hath bent" and the poet's return to "He" and to the structure of the sentence, twenty lines interfere; so hurried is the composition. The magnificent rhetoric of "Clime of the unforgotten brave," the waking chant of Greek freedom, was an addition to the second edition.

None of these poems of 1813-1816 can perhaps now be read with the enthusiasm which greeted their first appearance. Of "The Corsair" 10,000 copies were sold on the first day of publication. The extreme rapidity of the composition, "the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse," as Byron says, adding that Scott alone "had triumphed over it," and something theatrical in the Giaours and Turks, Zuleikas and Leilas, no longer command intense interest. Byron himself saw the objections to the facile measures in narrative poetry; in blank verse he feared to find "a rough and barren rock," and in "The Corsair" he tried "the good old and now neglected heroic couplet". He always maintained that the age of the heroic couplet was the great age of English poetry, that Pope was its chief, and that the new "romantic" movement was a blunder. He was conscious that his strength lay in satire but his passionate nature, and the fashion set by Scott, combined to lead him into romantic narrative verse.

Early in 1815 Byron married Miss Milbanke, an heiress, at least in expectations, though his motive was not mercenary. He was instantly pursued by creditors; his temper and behaviour became insufferable; and, as soon as possible after the birth of a daughter, his wife returned to her own people, and early in 1816 left him for ever. Her whole conduct, and the conduct of all concerned, is difficult to explain on any theory, and Byron, under a heavy cloud, left England for Switzerland and the society, for a few months, of Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Clairmont. The party were pursued by curiosity, and scandalous rumour was as active on the Continent as at home.

The play of "Manfred," in which the mysterious hero, in his moods of romantic remorse about nobody knows what, courts peril among Alpine peaks, tempests, and glaciers, was supposed to represent the passions and the pursuits of the noble poet.

Goethe was much interested in "Manfred"; his own "Faust," partly translated to Byron by Shelley or Monk Lewis, was certainly one of the elements in the making of the poem.

Byron fed the public curiosity about himself and his wife and sister by various pieces of verse, including the admired "Dream," in which he displayed his moods repentant, or angry, but always annoying to the persons at whom he wrote. The third canto of "Childe Harold," written in Switzerland, was full of personal "disclosures," and contained the familiar stanzas on the Duchess of Richmond's ball on the eve of Quatre Bras. There are curious--traces of Wordsworthian influence, received through Shelley, in this canto. Byron proceeded to Venice, where he lived an unwholesome life for several years; finishing "Childe Harold" after a trip to Rome: in this part he introduced descriptions of many works of ancient art, and expressed his contempt for its critics. His ecstasies over the Venus de Medici were in accordance with the taste of a period that knew not the Greek art of the age of Pheidias, till the "Elgin marbles," reft (to Byron's natural and laudable indignation), from the Parthenon, had been studied. The Dying Gladiator was the motive of one of the most admired passages of the fourth canto of "Childe Harold".

The spirited "Mazeppa"; the lively "Beppo" (the verse fashioned on an Italian model), the dramas of "Marino Faliero," "The Two Foscari," "Cain" (dedicated to Scott), "Heaven and Earth" (much admired by Goethe), and the beginnings of "Don Juan," with, later, the continuation of "Don Juan," and "The Island" and several minor things, proved the astonishing energy of Byron, while living at Venice, Ravenna, Genoa, and elsewhere. "The Vision of Judgment," an attack on Southey through his poem on the death of George III., and "Don Juan," show the high-water mark of his powers as a satirist. Always ready at freedom's call, Byron went to inspire and direct the Greek war of national independence, and, after struggling to reconcile the feuds and jealousies of the patriots, died of fever, malaria, and the results of the climate, at Missolonghi, on 19 April, 1824.

The question as to whether Byron was a great poet, or merely a man of extraordinary mental energy, wit and rhetorical force, expressing himself in verse, must be decided by the taste of the reader. No discoverable rule seems to guide the verdicts of critics. The resonance of Byron's name, due in great part to his title, his beauty, his mystery, his love affairs, to "the pageant of his bleeding heart," and to his fiery attacks on convention, still echoes on the Continent. Byron's reputation abroad (especially among those who have not read much of him, and of Shakespeare have read little or nothing), is perhaps the highest that is accorded of any English poet. At home, if he "bet" Scott, it was rather in popularity than in performance. While Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge were neglected (though Wordsworth from the first had a small but constantly growing flock of devotees), Byron, by "Don Juan," and by the romance of his death, recovered a vogue that had been waning, till a new generation arose; and the contemporaries of Tennyson's undergraduate time declared, like Thackeray, that Byron "was never sincere".

It is impossible to conjecture what the reaction to the poetry of Byron will be in each reader's case. He was revolutionary; Matthew Arnold was not; but it is the placid Arnold who hails Byron as "the greatest force" in the English literature of the nineteenth century; and it is the revolutionary Swinburne whose copious vocabulary is over-tasked in the effort to find epithets of disdain and disgust. The intellectual energy of Byron is like a meteoric force of Nature, that is undeniable, whether we admire his poetry, or think it but rhetoric carried to an unexampled pitch in verse. It is for future generations and not for the ordinary critic to pronounce a verdict on so much humour, wit, and capricious genius. There is at this hour no complete and critical life of the poet: many letters and other documents remain unpublished. But if ever a biography, critical and complete, is produced, the discredit thrown on English hypocrisy because of English treatment of the poet will probably be seen to be based on ignorance and sentiment. Byron was, undeniably, dowered with "the scorn of scorn": it was his humour to mock at what was best in his own impulses and in the nature of man; and it is probable that his excellences were sincere while his mockery was an affectation; the result of inherited qualities, and of the amari aliquid always mixed with the cup whereof he had to drink. He was, unquestionably, in so far sincere, that his poetry was the reflection of his character, which never overcame the noble tolerance of Scott, though, at last, it repelled and disgusted the not intolerant Shelley. His poetry has now to meet the rivalry of contemporaries little heeded in his day,--Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth,--and of such successors as Tennyson; as careful as Byron was disdainful of form; so that new generations are not apt to begin with enthusiasm for the author of "Childe Harold".

Keats.

John Keats, born in London (1795), was the son of a livery-stable keeper. His education was not neglected, though he had no Greek, and in boyhood he could appreciate the magic of Virgil (which does not usually charm boys), and made some progress with a translation. In physique he was powerful, and no mean boxer, despite the inherent weakness of his constitution. He became acquainted with Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, who introduced him to some of the old English poets; Spenser he found out for himself, like Cowley, and revelled in "The Faery Queen," like a young horse turned loose in a pasture. Another friend of Keats was the witty John Hamilton Reynolds, whose parody of Wordsworth's "Peter Bell" was published before the original. Shelley and Keats were acquainted but were never intimate, Shelley advising Keats not to publish "his first blights," and Keats admonishing Shelley to write less rapidly and copiously and to "load every rift with ore". In no long time Keats discovered in Leigh Hunt certain unendearing qualities which never appear to have been noticed by Shelley; for of Hunt, which is strange, Shelley's good opinion never altered.

Keats, at first, by imitation, or through inexperience, rivalled the peay-greeny verdurousness of Hunt's urban rusticities,--which was unfortunate; and, as an intimate of Hunt, he was included by the noisy and brutal literary Tories of the Press in their assaults on the literary Radicals of "The Cockney School".

To appreciate Keats, and to understand the manly and resolute character which was falsely supposed to be effeminate, it is necessary to read his delightful correspondence. His first small volume of verse (1817) contains but occasional promise of his greatness; one suffices, the sonnet on first reading Chapman's Homer.

In "Endymion" (1818) he attempted a long narrative, holding that readers might like to wander here and there on Mount Latmos with him, even if they did not pursue the tale from cover to cover. Shelley declared that Keats seemed to have tried to make himself unreadable, and, indeed, if we read for the story's sake alone, we are more unfortunate than if we take up "Clarissa Harlowe" with the same purpose. On the other hand the frequent passages of beauty proclaim the author a poet, who has not yet arrived at his later perfection.

Keats was violently attacked as a Cockney and as an apothecary's boy, in "Blackwood's Magazine," and in "The Quarterly Review". These libels are as base as the assault on Coleridge in the "Edinburgh Review," though not nearly so abominable as what Byron wrote about Keats in private letters now published. The Scots who attacked Keats might have repented had they read his enthusiastically sympathetic appreciations of Burns, in the letters written during his tour north of the Border.

It was not criticism but the consumption which killed his brother Tom, increased in feverishness by a love affair, that slew John Keats, in Rome (13 February, 1821), a year after the publication of his third volume, "Lamia," which in brief compass contained verse that placed him in the first rank of the poets of England. His character had rapidly advanced in noble seriousness, high ambition, and sympathy with mankind. His best sonnets, as "On Reading Chapman's Homer," are on a level with the greatest by Milton and by Wordsworth. His "Odes to the Nightingale," to "Autumn," "On a Grecian Urn," and others have the classic beauty of Greek art of the Periclean age, with all the magic of romance, the mysterious charm of words that evoke visions of ineffable beauty. Romance herself inspires "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". Keats had divined and made his own all that is best in the Greek which he could not read, and in the early mediaeval French lyrics which in his day were unpublished.

In "The Pot of Basil" he exalts beyond itself the genius of Boccaccio, of a time when the classical revival was dawning in Italy, and in "Lamia" tells a story that had fascinated Burton in his "Anatomy of Melancholy". The fragment of "Hyperion," again, recalls Greek art as no other modern has succeeded in reviving its majestic simplicity, while the measure of "In a drear-nighted December" preludes to the music of Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine".

In all that is best of Keats we look, as in his own poem, through

magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

English non-dramatic poetry contains no greater example of pure inexplicable inspiration than the genius of Keats: while his character, some ebullitions of poetic youth, and of torturing ill-health apart, excites the strongest affection and admiration.

Walter Savage Landor.

Contemporary with all of these great poets, and with Tennyson and Browning, and the youth of William Morris, the two Rossettis and Swinburne, was Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), who thus, like Nestor, reigned through three generations. He was coeval with, but was not influenced by "the romantic movement," but followed his own path. He was a very copious writer both in prose and verse; he did not aim at and did not win popularity.

Landor is said to have prophesied that he would "dine late," but in good company,--that recognition when it came to him, would come from the best judges. The essay on Landor, by Swinburne, places his plays, such as "Count Julian," and his poem in blank verse ("Gebir") on "topless towers," of panegyric. To smaller, other eyes, those of the ordinary reader, "Gebir" (1798) seems well described as "concentrated and majestic," just as Mr. Wopsle's Hamlet was "concrete and massive". But "Gebir" is not, as a narrative, interesting or plausible; its blank verse is rather frigid, as a rule, and the poem is best remembered for the two lines on the shell held to the ear.

And it remembers its august abode, And murmurs as the Ocean murmurs there.

The blank verse is somewhat in the manner of Milton, with far less life and variety. The wrestling match between Gebir's brother, the piping shepherd, and the lovely lady unknown who lands from a boat and challenges the swain, indicated Landor's colossal lack of humour, which, to be sure, is no small part of a noble and haughty poetic nature. If the play, "Count Julian" be academic, if it have found even fewer admirers than "Gebir," Mr. Swinburne as an admirer was himself a host. The huge body of short verses, in which every reader will find many delightful things, is crowned by "Rose Aylmer," which would be a pearl of great price even in the treasure-house of the Greek Anthology. His lyric verse is always graceful, and occasionally moving.

Landor left Trinity College, Oxford, under the wrath of his dons. He had only fired a fowling piece out of his windows, at the shuttered windows of a room occupied by a noisy wine-party, and no harm was done. Many persons may remember similar excesses at Oxford which caused no expulsions, but Landor (the Boythorn of "Bleak House") was extremely explosive, and his dons, like Shelley's, took the first fair opportunity to send him down for a term. He "came to Oxford and his friends no more". In England his life was more or less turbulent and perturbed: most of his literary work was done in Italy, and the greater part of his abundant prose is written in the form of imaginary conversations. In one ("Southey and Landor") he says, "from my earliest days I have avoided society as much as I could decorously, for I received more pleasure in the cultivation and improvement of my own thoughts than in walking up and down among the thoughts of others". If Landor had remembered Lord Foppington's similar explanation of his own avoidance of books, and preference for "the sprouts of his own wit," Landor might have been less frank! In this conversation Landor and Southey compare Milton and Homer, and it is to be hoped that Southey had no sympathy with the purblind criticisms which are put into his lips. Landor ends "a rib of Shakespeare would have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since". It is certainly in his "Conversations," and in the long series of imaginary letters entitled "Pericles and Aspasia," that the late diners with Landor are most likely to find desirable things--lofty thoughts, impassioned language, and deep meditation. The conversations, naturally, differ in merit; that between Bothwell and Mary Stuart, after her abduction, is not in anything likely to have been their manner, and has no tragic touch (though no scene could be richer in the elements of tragedy), while in the talk of Jeanne d'Arc and Agnes Sorel two persons were brought together who were not likely to meet, especially at the moment when "many of our wisest and most authoritative churchmen," says Agnes, "believe you in their conscience to act under the instigation of Satan". When Agnes addresses the Maid as "sweet enthusiast," we are far away from the style of 1430! In the dialogues of even remote historic personages, more than half the mind of Landor is with his own day and its problems and politics; while he was perhaps the last Englishman who lived with the Roman genius so much that a good deal of his prose and verse is written in Latin. He even wrote a version of "Gebir" in the language of Virgil. He was the friend of, or was admired by, many of the best minds of his long stay on earth, Southey, De Quincey, Browning, and Swinburne. In two sentences Sir Sidney Colvin has put forward the character of much of Landor's work: "He drones. It is a classical, and from the point of view of style an exemplary form of droning, but it is droning still."

[1] By a strange coincidence the printed score of the match (the manuscript was burned in a fire at Lord's) docks Byron of half his runs, and apparently confers them on Mr. Shakespeare! Byron was a change-bowler.

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XXXIII. LATER GEORGIAN NOVELISTS

With the death of Sterne it might have been said that the English novel expired for the time, though of course, as Donne admitted in the case of the decease of Miss Drury, "a kind of world" lingered in existence. Indeed, plenty of novels were published and read. But they are forgotten. Experience proves that nobody need waste his time over the tales of Clara Reeve, such as "The Old English Baron"; and only infinite leisure and curiosity need try to disengage the qualities from the defects of Brooke's "Fool of Quality," while Beckford's "Vathek" is certainly worth notice as the ingenious and in places impressive feat of a millionaire. It is curious that the most poignant detail of the Hall of Eblis, the phantasms of lost souls, wandering each with his hand pressed to his heart, occurs in the mythology of an Australian tribe, the Euahlayi. Research might discover a wilderness of forgotten novels, probably quite as good, given the conditions of the ages, as the myriads of "masterpieces," which our newspaper critics daily receive with stereotyped formulæ of applause.

Frances Burney.

When a novelist did appear, a girl gifted with a delight in observing traits of character, and recording them from her early teens in a diary; when Fanny Burney came, she received such a welcome as warms the heart after all these years. Frances Burney (1752-1840) was born while the Elibank Plot for kidnapping the Royal family in the interests of the King over the water was maturing, and she outlived by eight years the author of "Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since".

The daughter of Dr. Burney, a teacher and historian of music, and a friend of the great wits, Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, and the rest, Miss Burney, from childhood, was observing mankind and womankind; was reading "The Vicar of Wakefield," and Sterne, the novels of the Abbé Provost and of Marivaux, and apparently of Smollett no less than of the moral Richardson. She was writing, too, in secret; but at the command of her stepmother, probably when she herself was about 16 or 17, she burned all her works, including a novel on which her first published romance, "Evelina" (1778), was based, or rather out of which it was developed. We cannot estimate the merits of those "first blights," as Keats says, but "the little character-monger," as Johnson called her, continued to make her sketches of character in her Journal and in letters to her kind old mentor, "Daddy Crisp," a man much older than her father, who had retired from society and the sorrows of the playwright to a hospitable country house near Epsom. As the favourite and assistant of her musical and historical father, the retiring observant girl lived till, at about the age of 24, she returned to her first love, and, under great difficulties, wrote, and copied in a feigned hand, her "Evelina". With secrecy enough for a Jacobite conspiracy the book was conveyed to a bookseller, accepted, and published in 1778. Among her burned works was "The History of Caroline Evelyn," a young woman of moving adventures, whose mother was a vulgar barmaid, married, for the second time, in France, to a Monsieur Duval. As Caroline died of a broken heart, leaving a legitimate daughter, Evelina, Miss Burney told the story of that daughter's fortunes, situated as she was between her well-born English father's kin and her barmaid Frenchified mother, with her grotesque associates. The scheme had great possibilities, of which the author took full advantage; her chief successes being the members of the City family, the Branghtons, their smart low-bred friend, Mr. Smith, and the naval Captain Mirvan, whose language is discreetly veiled, while his bullying of Madame Duval and other persons is rather more than Smollettian. Evelina, through all the dangers which then beset the fair at Vauxhall and other resorts of the gay, reaches the haven where she and Lord Orville would be, and all ends happily, as in a novel all ought to end. There is an extraordinary wealth of characters, Burke thought them too abundant. The novel set literary society on fire with delight and admiration, Dr. Johnson leading the chorus of praise, and Miss Burney was his darling, and was welcomed by Mrs. Thrale, Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Mrs. Montagu; even Horace Walpole, though he kept his head, applauded. The triumphs of Fanny are recorded in her Diary and Letters, a contribution to history even more delightful than her "Evelina". All the good fortunes that Miss Austen missed, or shunned, fell to Miss Burney, who well deserved them. Her later novel, "Cecilia" (1782) is not really inferior to "Evelina," but it is not "the first sprightly runnings". After her years as a tiring woman of Queen Charlotte (whereof the record in her Diary is at least on a level with her novels), her "Camilla" appeared, was subscribed for by all the world and Miss Austen, and was censured by John Thorpe in "Northanger Abbey". This immortal crown is hardly deserved by "Camilla". The story of Miss Burney's marriage to that amiable émigré, the Comte d'Arblay, is told in Macaulay's famous essay, which, again, is toned down and corrected by Mr. Austin Dobson ("Fanny Burney" in "English Men of Letters"). But the novels themselves, and the Diary, remain monuments, and not dull but delightful monuments, of social and personal history. We need not dwell on that lucrative failure, "The Wanderer" (1814). Miss Burney had opened the way, which was later to be trodden by the lighter feet of a far greater genius, whom some men have named with Shakespeare--Jane Austen.

Mrs. Radcliffe.

It is impossible to restore a faded popularity, and in a generation which sees at least two dozen new novels bloom every week, the desire to revive the taste for Mrs. Radcliffe's romances is a "vain hope and vision vain". None the less, Mrs. Radcliffe (Ann Ward, born in the birth year of Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," 1764, and married to a Mr. Radcliffe in 1787), was the grandmother, as Horace Walpole was the great-grandfather, of the Romantic school of fiction. Her first tale, "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789) is but a pioneer work: Mrs. Radcliffe knew nothing of the castles and manners of the Mackays, Sinclairs, and Gunns "in the dark ages". In 1790, with "The Sicilian Romance," Mrs. Radcliffe "found herself," and opened the way for all the terrors of Mr. Rochester's house in "Jane Eyre". The remarkable phenomena of the haunted Sicilian castle are not supernormal, but, till you discover that they are caused by the concealed wife of the proprietor (Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini), they strike terror; later they move pity. "Northanger Abbey" is the inspired parody of Mrs. Radcliffe's effects in this work, which also contains the germ of a thrilling scene in R. L. Stevenson's "Kidnapped". In "The Romance of the Forest" (1791) Mrs. Radcliffe struck the keynote of the novels about the Valois Court, which we owe to her spiritual descendants, Alexandre Dumas and Mr. Stanley Weyman. To "local colour" and the historical "atmosphere," Mrs. Radcliffe was indifferent; but she always had a story to tell, a story new and startling; and she managed her chiaroscuro with the touch of genius. She awakened curiosity, she struck terror; she skilfully interwove the many threads of her plots; she was far from being destitute of humour; and her Italian landscapes are designed after Poussin and Salvator Rosa. "Every reader," says Scott, "felt her force, from the sage in his study to the family group in middle life." Her "Mysteries of Udolpho" is hardly worthy of its reputation. But in "The Italian" she anticipates the manner of Hawthorne; her wicked Monk, Schedoni, is (as Scott himself saw and said), the original of Byron's Giaour, and his other darkling lurid heroes; and her comic valet, Paolo, who loyally follows his master into the dungeon of the Inquisition, is the model of Sam Weller, in the Fleet Prison, with Mr. Pickwick. Mrs. Radcliffe's genius is not appreciated merely because she is not read. The student who gives her a fair chance is carried away by the spell of this "great enchantress"; and "The Italian" is by far the best romantic novel that ever was written before Scott. He applauded her with his wonted generosity, but objected to her habit of explaining away her supernormal incidents. But this was done in homage to the stupid "common sense" of her age. After her masterpiece "The Italian," Mrs. Radcliffe deserted fiction; wrote "The Female Advocate" in defence of "Woman's Rights," and suffered from unhappy domestic circumstances for which she was in no way responsible. She died in 1823.

Maria Edgeworth.

A more fortunate and prosperous pioneer than Mrs. Radcliffe in the way of novel-writing was Maria Edgeworth. Born on 1 January, 1767, at Black Bourton, not far from, Oxford, Miss Edgeworth was the daughter of Richard Edgeworth, an Irish landlord and British moralist. In the words of "Hudibras" he

Married his punctual dose of wives

to the number of four, and had four families. They were wonderfully harmonious, and as Maria Edgeworth was of the first family, and only some twenty-two years younger than her father, she was the constant companion of an energetic and intelligent man, reckoned one of the leading bores of his age, and tinctured with the ideas of his friend, the humourless Mr. Thomas Day, author of "Sandford and Merton". Miss Edgeworth saw much of Irish life, fashionable and rustic, at Edgeworthstown, and very early began to write under the direction of her father, whose Muse was the didactic. She wrote the stories in "The Parents' Assistant" for her own little brothers and sisters, to whom, as to children generally, she was devoted. The self-consciously virtuous Frank is her father, idealized (we cannot believe that she consciously satirized him), and the ever-delightful Rosamond is herself. Modern children may rage against the cruelty of the mother of Rosamond, in the tale of "The Purple Jar," but probably children of an earlier date were too much interested in Rosamond and the jar to grieve over the heroine's lack of shoes. "Lazy Lawrence," "Simple Susan," "Waste Not, Want Not," and the rest, are all dear to persons who read them at the right age, and draw from the last-named tale an undying love of long, sound pieces of string, saved from parcels.

It seems to be a matter of ascertained fact that Mr. Edgeworth too often had his oar in the paper boats of his daughter's novels, that he altered, and transposed, and suggested, and inserted moral sentiments; and could not keep the maxims of Mr. Thomas Day out of the memorial. Miss Edgeworth had abundance of humour, and would not have made Sir James Brook lecture to Lord Colambie, a total stranger, "on all ancient and modern authors on Ireland from Spenser" (why not from Giraldus Cambrensis?) "to Young and Beaufort". In "Castle Rackrent" (1800) Mr. Edgeworth had no hand, and it is reckoned the best of Miss Edgeworth's books on Ireland. It is not a novel: Thady, an ancient peasant, merely tells the tale of four generations of O'Shaughneseys, squires who much resembled the Osbaldistone family as described by Diana Vernon. All were greedy and reckless oppressors of their devoted tenantry, but one was more of a drunkard, another more of a litigant, another more of a cruel debauchee, and the last more of a good-natured fool, as innocent of worldly matters as Leigh Hunt (but not so much to his own advantage), than the rest. Their wives are worthy of them. Poor Thady maintains his "great respect for the family" throughout, and there is a humorous pathos in his topsy-turvy code of ethics, constructed out of insanely depraved Irish moral conventions of the period. The fairy belief, and the Banshee, peep out in the notes: Miss Edgeworth was the precise reverse of Mrs. Radcliffe in the matter of romance. The book at once became popular, with "Belinda," a very readable story of London society, and "The Absentee," in which the Irish characters are much better when in their own green isle than when abroad. The horrors of an estate ruled by a corrupt and cruel agent are barely credible, and the hero is a wooden if generous puppet, while Lady Colbrony, trying to be more English than the English, in London, is not really so amusing as similar characters in Thackeray. Scott, with his usual generosity, publicly asserted more than once that Miss Edgeworth's example led him to attempt the delineation of his own country-folks; and perhaps the happiest of weeks at Abbotsford was spent during Miss Edgeworth's visit. In Paris, Edinburgh, and London she was a lioness, and enjoyed all the pleasant rewards of friendship and fame which fortune denied to Miss Austen. Her later novels, "Ormonde," "Harrington," and "Helen," were duly appreciated; in May, 1849, she ended a long, happy, and beneficent life.

Charles Brockden Brown.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is commonly regarded as the first American novelist. He came at an unfortunate moment, for in the years of his activity as a romancer (1797-1801) English fiction was at a low ebb, and, uninfluenced by Fielding and Sterne, and neglectful of Fanny Burney, he followed Godwin (in "Caleb Williams"), and adopted the mysterious effects of Mrs. Radcliffe. In his "Wieland," the terrific and fatal agency which brings down fate, is akin to that which Monsieur de Saint Luc used to frighten Henri III., and which Chicot exposed, in Dumas's novel. In "Arthur Mervyn," Brown wrote with much vigour a realistic description of a yellow fever hospital. His friendly critics place him above Mrs. Radcliffe in his mastery of the truly horrid; but though his books were republished in England, they do not appear in the list of Miss Catherine Morland in "Northanger Abbey". If Brown were superior to the great enchantress, at least he followed the model which she had created, without the humour which affords relief in "The Italian". He did not deal in Italian castles and abbeys of the Valois period, but cast his romances in his native Philadelphia.

Jane Austen.

Scott's first novel was finished and published in 1814. His friend, Morritt of Rokeby, said that before "Waverley" appeared, novels were read only by ladies' maids and seamstresses. Yet, eighteen or nineteen years before the birth of "Waverley," novels as great in their own style as Scott's, and as imperishable, had been written by a girl of 21, whose first published works of fiction came earlier than "Waverley" into the world. Before 1803, Jane Austen (born 1775) had written "Northanger Abbey"; before the beginning of the nineteenth century "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility," were completed by her. But though a speculative publisher bought "Northanger Abbey" in 1803, he never published it, and "Sense and Sensibility" (1811) with "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), lay long neglected, like the poems of Theocritus in their dark chest, before they were given to the world. They were not received, like Miss Burney's "Evelina," with triumphant acclaims; the author was not surrounded and flattered by the wits, as was Miss Burney. Indeed Jane Austen, in her lifetime, was never made a lioness. Slow and all but silent approval of her genius advanced by degrees and deepened into the diapason of her ever-widening renown.

She was the daughter of a country clergyman, the Rector of Steventon in Hampshire, much of her later life (she died at 42, in 1817) was passed at the hamlet of Chawton near Winchester. Bath was her metropolis; she describes its pleasure and society with inimitable charm and humour in "Northanger Abbey," and "Persuasion," published after her death, in 1818. She lived in the heart of a kind and happy family, among her nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters, with such squires, clerics, doctors, solicitors, sportsmen, naval officers, and old maids as clustered round or visited Steventon and Chawton. She watched them with a smiling intense observation; she winced from their mindless gregariousness; they are never out of their neighbours' houses. But she was only a very little cruel, even to the most brainless of baronets, or the stupidest of mothers, or the least well-bred of jolly good-humoured matrons, or the noisiest of children. She does show the trifling defects of spoiled children, but she was the kindest and best-beloved of aunts. Meanness she does brand in the really awful characters of John Dash wood and his wife; stupid pride in Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (who receives her deserts from Miss Elizabeth Bennet), and clerical sycophancy in the immortal Mr. Collins. But Mr. Collins is so amusing that we can no more be angry with him than with Mr. Pecksniff. Mr. Woodhouse, in "Emma," is next door to an idiot, and in actual life he would have been insufferable, except to the good and gentle. But the excellence of his heart, and the sweetness of his manners, cause him to be surrounded by patient and silent affection from all who know him; and not less good and fortunate is the most voluble of chatter-boxes, Miss Bates. Only for a single moment is Emma, the heroine, unable to hold her peace when Miss Bates is too intolerable; and this youthful excess is bitterly repented by the beautiful sinner. Emma was extremely young when she was a snob, Miss Austen did not draw an angel in Emma, but a good, human girl. We cannot really call Miss Austen severe, though we cannot but see how much she must have suffered among people so dull that a lady's recollection of the name of her dead son's naval Captain is described as "one of those extraordinary bursts of mind that sometimes do happen".

Less than twenty years divided Miss Burney's "Evelina" (1778) from the composition of "Northanger Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice". These years had brought an astonishing change. The Smollettian element in Miss Burney's books and the horse-play have vanished; vanished has that amazing style which the fair Fanny evolved. The manners of naval officers have passed from the brutal to the courtly. Miss Burney is antiquated, she is archaic, she belongs to another world than ours, while Miss Austen is perennially fresh, and sparkling with wit; she recaptures, without imitation, the humour and the ease of Addison. Unlike Scott, she is almost never stilted: her people, as a rule, talk like men and women of this world, not like Helen Macgregor. "Northanger Abbey," which is in part meant as a quiet but delightful mockery of Mrs. Radcliffe's haunted abbeys, secret panels, and mysterious sounds, was written but six years after "The Sicilian Romance" sent a shudder through its myriad readers; and is almost of the year of "The Mysteries of Udolpho". The girl of the Steventon rectory was already mocking "The Great Enchantress," and the smile outlives the shriek.

Miss Austen shunned the romantic--like Wordsworth she might have said "the moving accident is not my trade," but her incidents move us (for example, Louisa Musgrove's fall off the Cobb at Lyme Regis); and the mystery of Jane Fairfax's piano in "Emma," is as exciting as the black curtain behind which Catherine Morland expected to discover the skeleton of Laurentina. John Thorpe said of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels (which he had not read), "there is some fun and nature in them" (and there is plenty of fun), Miss Austen found in them much more of fun than of nature.

It is said that she is afraid of the passions, but what can be more passionate than the constancy of Anne Elliot, or more ardent than the first love of Marianne Dashwood? All the family of the Bennets are charming or diverting in their various ways; the humorous father, the foolish mother, the witty and spirited Elizabeth, the gentle, beautiful Jane, the pedantic Mary, the colourless Kitty, and Lydia who might have shone in a comedy by Vanbrugh. It is rather hard to believe that Elizabeth could accept Darcy after he, like the Master of Ravenswood, had told his lady that her father was not a gentleman. But then Elizabeth came to see Darcy's house and place in Derbyshire!

If one novel is not quite so good as the rest, it is "Mansfield Park"; but to name it recalls Mrs. Norris, and the return of the heavy father as his progeny are rehearsing a dubious play from the German; and one has a tenderness for the good little heroine, and for her rather squalid kinsfolk, and for both of the naughty Crawfords. "Mansfield Park" is a masterpiece like the rest. Perhaps Miss Austen's heroes are not so good as her heroines; but Henry Crawford and Frank Churchill, in "Emma" prove that her young men are not mere lay figures.

She never went outside of the life she knew to draw wicked dukes and the virtuous poor; she had no villains, no rebels; if she read Crabbe's lurid and realistic studies of poverty and crime, she did not imitate them in prose. Her characters are perfectly indifferent to public affairs, throughout the struggle with Napoleon; except when the authoress cannot conceal her passionate enthusiasm for the men who fought under Nelson and Collingwood. But the expression is not enthusiastic in terms.

Miss Austen's art has the exquisite balance and limit of Greek art in the best period. She knew what she could do, she did it to perfection; and, naturally, the humourless Charlotte Brontë thought her tame and dull. But from Scott himself to Macaulay and Archbishop Whately, nay, from the Prince Regent (George IV., who had a set of her novels in each of his houses), the best judges recognized the greatness of one of the six greatest English writers of fiction, and, a century after the publication of "Pride and Prejudice," she is a more popular favourite by far than in her own brief day. To judge by a miniature of Miss Austen, done when she was of the age when Catherine Morland began to give up playing cricket and baseball, her face and figure were as bright and charming as her genius. Like Milton's Eve, Miss Austen is "fairest of her daughters" in art, though among them are Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Thackeray (Lady Ritchie).

Walter Scott.

The Novelist.

When Scott, in 1814, sought for some fly-hooks in a bureau, and found the lost first chapter of "Waverley," a novel begun in 1805, prose fiction seemed to be under general contempt, was only fit for milliners, said his friend Morritt of "Rokeby". Yet, in fact, the good novel was not left without a witness. Miss Edgeworth's tales of Irish life and manners excited, said Scott, his own wish to write of his own people, and Miss Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" is of 1800. Jane Austen had written "Northanger Abbey" in 1797; it remained unpublished, but "Sense and Sensibility" is of 1811, "Pride and Prejudice" of 1813; thus both were prior to "Waverley". But neither, great as are their merits, attracted attention then, as Miss Burney's novels had done from the first; and probably the contempt of novels was one of the various causes, the chief being that "it was his humour," which made Scott conceal his authorship of his prose romances.

"Waverley"--in the first and long-lost chapters--is reckoned tame; but the hero's youth in peaceful rural England was deliberately designed as a quiet approach to his richly varied adventures under the White Cockade. From the moment when Waverley enters the village, so strange to English eyes, and the still stranger castle, of Tullyveolan, he passes into the land of romance; all was, to English readers, as novel and unexpected as if Edward had joined a tribe of Central Africa. The ancient feudal manners, Lowland or Highland; the learned, eccentric, brave old baron; the half idiot jester, Davy Gellatley; the Bailie, Balmawhapple; the clansmen, the Celtic chief, Fergus MacIvor; the survivor of the Remnant, gifted Gilfillan, were humorous and masterly creations, while the gallant figure of the doomed Prince and his wonderful adventure, narrated with sympathy, completed the charm. The world was taken by storm, believed in Flora MacIvor, and wept afresh over the shambles of Carlisle.

Written in six weeks, the romance of "Guy Mannering" (1815), with its pell-mell of characters from the Colonel (who was thought like Scott), and his lively dark-eyed daughter Julia, (certainly like Mrs. Scott), to Pleydel, Meg Merrilies, Glossin, the bankrupt Bertram laird, to Dominie Sampson, and Dandie Dinmont with his dogs, was only less popular from the first. "The Antiquary" (1816) added a romance of dark complexion to a study of modern manners of the preceding decade; while "Old Mortality," at the end of the year, did for 1679 and the Covenanters, with even greater skill, what "Waverley" had done for the clans and the Forty-five. "Old Mortality" is probably the greatest of Scott's historical novels. The friends of the persecuted Remnant exclaimed against historical unfairness, but the friends of the "Indulged" of 1679, and of Claverhouse, had as good a right to pick a quarrel.

"The Black Dwarf" was condemned by Blackwood the publisher, and posterity has not differed from his verdict. The story had been written on a larger scale, but was truncated, said Scott, to the proportions of the dwarf. In 1817 "Rob Roy" gave us the best of all Scott's heroines, Diana Vernon, and the deathless Andrew Fairservice, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and the Dougal creature, with Rob himself, a tower of strength; but Helen, his wife, is somewhat melodramatic (as probably she actually was) and the plot, with its financial embroilment, is "only good for bringing in fine things".

It is difficult to decide between the rival excellences of "The Heart of Midlothian" (1818) (with another heroine, Jeanie Deans, as good and original in her way as Diana Vernon) and of "Old Mortality". We are apt to prefer the novel which we read last. Written "in torments," and totally forgotten by Scott after he had composed it, "The Bride of Lammermoor" has won tears for generations, though the doomed Master is something of a lay figure, and the pathos of the old Steward is better than his humour, which grows mechanical. The darkening of the omens towards the close is matched only in the "Odyssey" and "Njal's Saga"; for, though the novel is not in the first rank, it contains much of the author's best, and could have been written by no other mortal. With "The Bride" came the brief "Legend of Montrose," in which the great Marquess is half-forgotten, for Dugald Dalgetty, that matchless creation, runs away with Scott's fancy, happily carrying him to meet the rival Marquess of Argyll. Confessedly Scott could adhere to no predetermined plan (he tried to do so, again and again, but was conscious of failure); his characters were alive and masterful, and led him where they would, but he had never contemplated a romance in a theme above romance, the Action and Passion of Montrose.

Leaving Scotland--lest the field should be overworked--for England and the Middle Ages, Scott, in 1819, won the hearts of most boys and many men, by "Ivanhoe," the crusader who returns disguised, like de Wilton in "Marmion". It is to be believed that Scott disliked Rowena at least as much as Thackeray did, and was no less in love than he with Rebecca. Merely to think of the characters is a pleasure--Gurth, Wamba, Locksley, de Bracy, Friar Tuck, Isaac, the Abbot, while, if Urfried is extremely incoherent in her pagan creed, the Templar is Byronic enough for the taste of that day; Scott, in fact, could draw a dark Byronic dare-devil before Byron came into the field. "The Monastery" (1820) with the White Lady of Avenel, and the Euphuist Knight, was not well received, but Sir Walter boldly carried on the tale in an infinitely better sequel, "The Abbot," with all the charm and horror of Mary Stuart at Loch Leven, with a hero full of spirit, and a heroine worthy of him in Catherine Seyton.

In "Kenilworth" (1821), a most audaciously anachronistic tale, Scott treated Queen Elizabeth with a chivalry amazing in a Scot; his fated heroine, Amy Robsart, has unusual spirit and womanliness, and his villain, Varney, is his Iago, while Michael Lambourne is a perfect sketch of the Elizabethan adventurer of the baser sort.

In "The Pirate" (1821) Scott chose the scene of his tour in the Orkney Islands (1814), and his hero is, like George Staunton in "The Heart of Midlothian," rather a Byronic being. Minna and Brenda, the two fair sisters, were immensely admired, but Norna of the Fitful Head is much inferior to Madge Wildfire and Meg Merrilies as a seeress and a romantically eccentric being; while Claude Halcro and Triptolemus Yellowley are the least entertaining of "Scott's bores".

"The Fortunes of Nigel" (1822) is enriched with all the wealth of Scott's knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and pamphlets, and the unsatisfactory hero, much the least sympathetic of Scott's jeunes premiers, is redeemed by the delightful humours of gentle King Jamie, by the two grim Trapbois, father and daughter, by the flower of Scottish serving-men, Richie Moniplies, and by all the life of the Court, of the Ordinary, and of Alsatia.

In "Peveril of the Peak" (1823) Scott is less fortunate in his treatment of English society during the Popish Plot, a theme which seemed "made to his hand". His Charles II. is the least excellent of his kings, and the plot is more than commonly rambling, while Fenella is the feeblest of his romantic and eccentric puppets. "Quentin Durward," on the other hand, with the adventures of a gallant but canny Scot at the perilous Court of Louis XI., is perhaps the best constructed of all his novels. In drawing Louis XI. the author excels himself; we have not too much of Leslie le Balafré, the Dugald Dalgetty of the age; the adventures are many and exciting, and the book was welcomed eagerly in France, though at first it was scarcely appreciated at home.

"St. Ronan's Well" was a tale of contemporary manners, but Scott was not skilled in describing the humours of a Tweedside watering-place, interwoven as they are with a dark domestic tragedy, spoiled by an incongruous conclusion which was forced on the author by the prudery of James Ballantyne. In "Redgauntlet," Scott recovered himself: the manners and characters are a little earlier than those of his own boyhood, and mingled with the adventures of the hero on the Border is the last tragic appearance of that Prince who, twenty years earlier, had shaken the three kingdoms with the claymores of the clans.

The brief "Wandering Willie's Tale," in "Redgauntlet," is Sir Walter's masterpiece of humour and terror: this story he worked on very carefully, and his care was rewarded. The Edinburgh lawyers, the eccentrics, Nanty Ewart, and the heroine of the Green Mantle, are worthy of their places in this great romance, made the more moving by many touches of autobiography.

"The Talisman" (1825) is a brilliant tale of Cœur de Lion and Saladin; "The Betrothed" is less appreciated than it ought to be. In 1825-1826 came the ruin of Scott, entailed by that of his publisher, Constable. How he bore it, how he laboured and died to redeem it, by long heavy task work at "The Life of Napoleon,"--by "Woodstock," in which the characters of Cromwell and of Charles II. in youth, are among his best creations; by "The Fair Maid of Perth," with the great character of the timid chief, and the finale of the Clan Battle of Perth; by "The Chronicles of the Canongate," and by his latest works, written with a half-palsied hand, composed by a brain in ruin, yet again and again inspired,--is a familiar story. The eyes are dimmed as these words are penned; so potent is the spell of that rich, kind genius, of that noble character, over the hearts of those who love and honour the great and good Sir Walter.

He created the historical novel; he opened the way in which no man or woman has followed him with such genius as his: we may say this even while we remember "Esmond" and "The Virginians"; "Kidnapped," "Catriona" and "The Master of Ballantrae"; "Les Trois Mousquetaires" and "La Dame de Monsoreau".

After a voyage to Italy, Sir Walter returned to Abbotsford, where he died in his own house with the murmur of Tweed in his ears as he passed away (September, 1832). "I say," wrote Byron emphatically, "that Walter Scott is as nearly a thoroughly good man as a man can be, because I know it by experience to be the case."

James Fenimore Cooper.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), bearing a name dear to grateful boyhood, is even now, with Hawthorne--an infinitely greater man--the American novelist best known on the Continent of Europe. In France as in England, he was the delight of the youth of men of letters; among the characters of fiction concerning whom Thackeray says Amo he places Leather Stocking with Dugald Dalgetty. Many of us, no doubt, at about the age of 10, have made stone heads for our arrows, like the noble neolithic Indian braves of Cooper, and have found (like Scottish savages, when flint was scarce) that slate served our purpose.

Cooper was born in New Jersey, and passed his childhood on his father's new settlement at Otsego Lake. Here were real deer and real Red Indians, and here Cooper's ply was taken. He was sent down from Yale, as inappreciative of the studious habits of the Pale Faces. He went to sea, thus obtaining another string to his bow as a novelist; next saw service in the Navy, by lake and sea; and, after a subsequent life of leisure, was stimulated by a bad English novel to vow that he could write a better,--his tale of English life, "Precaution," has not had the vogue of "Persuasion". Cooper turned to American topics in "The Spy," a story of the War of Independence; Scott's example may have led him to choose a recent historical topic; his knowledge of the forests and his remarkable hero, Harvey Birch, did the rest, and his success was assured; his work was welcomed both in France and England. Then came "The Pioneers," the first in composition of the five tales where Leather-Stocking, with his peculiar and silent laugh, leads us through forests, haunted by the Mingo and other fearful wild fowl. Then he turned to the sea, to Paul Jones, that renegade of Galloway, and Long Tom Coffin; this was the first of various novels of the Navy which are to American boys what Marryat's were and ought to be to our own. "The Last of the Mohicans," of 1826, marks the culmination of Cooper's talent, and Chingachgook, the Great Serpent, and Uncas, if not the paleface heroine, are imperishable in the memory. Cooper's visit to Europe led him into writings which rather exacerbated the American Eagle and the British Lion. Most of his very numerous later works are more or less polemical. He was no psychologue, his heroines are forlorn of admirers; in style he had nothing to touch R. L. Stevenson; he is "Cooper of the wood and wave".

Washington Irving.

The true beginner of accomplished literature in America was Washington Irving, born in New York, 3 April, 1783; his father was of the old Border family of the name, his mother, the daughter of an English clergyman. In his twenty-first year he visited Europe; on his return, with friends named Paulding, wrote light essays in a serial named "Salmagundi," and, later, a burlesque "History of New York," with the humours of "Diedrich Knickerbocker," a book in which Scott recognized gleams of Sterne and Swift. After the war ending in 1815, when he was under canvas, if not under fire much, he revisited England, and stayed with Scott at Abbotsford, of which he has left a pleasant record. In 1819 appeared his "Sketch Book" with the immortal story of Rip Van Winkle, and the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow". He had not quite shared Scott's enthusiasm for the scenery about Abbotsford, mainly resting for its charm on historical and legendary associations unfamiliar to him, but he gave legends to his native Catskill Hills, and the Hudson River. His style has an Addisonian felicity and kind humour; and in his "Bracebridge Hall" he handled old-fashioned England as if he loved it. His "Tales of a Traveller" (he now visited Italy, France, and Spain) are not, throughout, of his best work. Spain and the Spanish inspired his "Life of Columbus," which in England was deservedly popular, and the picturesque "Conquest of Granada," and "The Alhambra." In 1829, Irving became secretary of the American Legation in London, and, returning, produced "Astoria," to boys, at least, a delightful account of the wilds. In 1842 he went as American Minister to Spain, and, at home, wrote an attractive "Life of Mahomet". He carried into historical work the grace of his essays, and the power of visualizing characters and events. He did not write of Europe as an American, with his eyes very open to the comparative merits of his own country; and he did not write of America as a European. He was at home in the past as in the present, and though in his country's literature he was a pioneer, his performance has none of the roughness of pioneering work. He had the amiability of his favourite Goldsmith, whose biography he wrote. He died in November, 1859. If he were not a great writer, he is a delightful writer; we think of him with Addison and Goldsmith, without the occasional little petulancies of the author of "The Vicar of Wakefield". When he began his work America had no literature, when he died her chief poets and historians had given full assurance of their powers.

Magazines and Essayists.

Magazines, critical, literary, social, and antiquarian magazines, had flourished in the later years of the eighteenth century. With the nineteenth, in 1802, appeared "The Edinburgh Review," critical and political, edited by Francis Jeffrey (born at Edinburgh, 1773, died 1850). Though a man of ability and of a crackling kind of cleverness, Jeffrey was wholly incompetent to criticize the works of the great romantic poets, the chief glories in literature of an age so rich in the renowns of war. Scott aided Jeffrey at first, but partly vexed by the coxcombry of his review of "Marmion," more by the pro-French tone of his Whig review, the Sheriff deserted the "Blue and Buff," and helped to found the Tory "Quarterly Review," published by Murray, and edited by the learned but crabbed and dilatory Gifford. Both magazines had esteemed contributors: the "Edinburgh" was enlivened by the high spirits and wit of Sydney Smith (1771-1845), qualities not always controlled by good taste when he made merry with Nonconformists--Bishops, of course, were reckoned fair game--and with squires, old familiar butts of every wit. Henry Brougham, later Lord Brougham (1778-1868), was always ready to write the whole magazine, if needful; what Macaulay thought of him, much later, may be read in the letters of the historian. Edinburgh professors and Francis Horner helped. Horner died young; much had been expected of him. The modern reader of the old "Edinburghs" will not find in them much entertainment, except from Sydney Smith's gaiety and Jeffrey's exhibitions of conceited incompetence as a judge of poetry. Both the "Edinburgh" and the "Quarterly," carried political rancour into literary criticism; both dealt in insolent personal bludgeon-work. From such matter the contributions in the "Quarterly" of Southey and Scott were free, and as Scott dealt with topics of permanent literary and historical interest, his essays retain their value: though Canning and other contributors to the "Anti-Jacobin" wrote for the "Quarterly," their buoyant humour of parody and their high spirits did not lighten up its august pages. As the younger poets, Shelley, Byron, and Keats, were either revolutionary or, in Keats's case, supposed to be, at least, Whigs and associates of Whigs, the "Quarterly" was more frequently disgraced by political abuse of poetical works than the "Edinburgh".

"Blackwood's Magazine," after a few months of stagnation, came into the hands of Mr. Blackwood, a bookseller of sound sense and masterful character, who was practically his own editor, though he allowed John Wilson (1785-1854) and John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) to play their pranks. Wilson, of Magdalen College, Oxford, was a splendid athlete, and excelled in country sports; Lockhart, of Balliol, very young in 1817, was of remarkable beauty, with a strongly sarcastic pen ("The Scorpion"), and as sardonic as his far-away cousin in the past, Lockhart of Carnwath, the manager of Jacobite affairs under James VIII. and III., and the author of valuable Memoirs. These two, on a night of claret and mirth, composed "The Chaldee Manuscript," a jape written in Scriptural style on all the notables of Scottish literary society. To persons who understand the allusions, it is still full of very mirthful matter, but many grave sufferers were as little amused as John Knox was by a delightful parody of himself and his associates by young Thomas Maitland, brother of Maitland of Lethington, Secretary of State to Queen Mary. Thenceforth, "Blackwood's," was for several years engaged in broils, which culminated in the death of John Scott, then Editor of "The London Magazine" in which Lamb often wrote. In this serial Scott attacked Lockhart, who went to London to fight him. Scott kept advancing reasons for not meeting Lockhart, who "posted" him and went home. Scott then entangling himself in a dispute with Lockhart's college friend, Christie, put himself in the hands of Horace Smith of "The Rejected Addresses," and of Mr. Patmore. Mr. Patmore's ignorance of the laws of the duello made it necessary for Christie (who had fired once in the air, and thereby legally ended the duel) to shoot in the direction of Scott, who fell mortally wounded. The brawls of "Blackwood's" were detested by Sir Walter Scott, whose daughter Lockhart had married. Wilson, who had no connexion with this tragedy, was an early devotee of Wordsworth's poetry, and himself wrote "The Isle of Palms," "The City of the Plague," and two or three "Kailyard" novels. His memory is best preserved by the high spirits and occasional sentiment and humour of his "Noctes Ambrosianæ," dialogues in which the Ettrick Shepherd is the most conspicuous hero; not always with his own good will or to his own advantage. Wilson was of a most mercurial temperament; his fiery style was apt to be too florid; his caprices of temper were unaccountable; and probably his most permanent work is found in his descriptions of nature and of sport. He was for long Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. Lockhart is seen to most advantage in his immortal "Life of Sir Walter Scott," a noble union of perfect candour with passionate affection for the great man of whom he wrote. His social fastidiousness must always have been vexed by Scott's intimacy with the Ballantyne brothers, who, again, had been incapable of controlling Scott's tendency to large expenditure; indeed, the books of the firm were in a state of chaos. The strictures on these Ballantynes were a blemish in a book which, with Boswell's "Johnson," holds the highest place in English literary biography. It is even more in a few pieces of original verse (such as Carlyle's favourite, "It is an Old Belief") than in the best of his "Spanish Ballads" that Lockhart reveals the poetry within him, and the tenderness of a heart on which he laid the fetter lock of his ancient scutcheon. Of his novels, as we have said, "Adam Blair" is by far the best. He became Editor of the "Quarterly Review" in 1825; his death (1854) took him from a world darkened for him by many bereavements and other sorrows. His body sleeps in Dryburgh Abbey, "at the feet of Sir Walter Scott".

We now turn to the great essayists of the early nineteenth century.

Charles Lamb.

He who would write briefly of Charles Lamb is under this disadvantage: to open a volume of Lamb's essays or letters is to remain absorbed in them, and in wondering affectionate admiration. A man is fascinated by the book, however often read before, and cannot take up the pen.

Born in Crown Office Row, in the Temple (10 February, 1775), Lamb was the son of the clerk of a barrister, Samuel Salt, a Lincolnshire man; his maternal grandmother was housekeeper at the ancient house of Blakesware, in Herts. Lamb has described these people and that place in his essays, "Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," "Blakesmoor in H----shire," and his own infantile mental state (much like that of R. L. Stevenson in some ways), in "Witches and Other Night Fears," while his own and Coleridge's school days are commemorated in "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," and (here he assumes the part of Coleridge), in "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago". To begin the study of Lamb with these essays is in part to understand him, and is wholly to fall in love with him. We see his father, with his honesty, courtesy, and courage; with his "merriest quips and conceits" and many little artistic accomplishments, "a brother of the angle, moreover," devoted to the theatre, an enthusiast for Garrick, and, too early, "in the last sad state of human weakness," babbling of his boyhood. Lamb inherited the "merry quips," and was an inveterate punster. The "conceits" derived from constant reading of Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, and the then neglected early dramatists, abound in his style. The love of the stage he also inherited, and constantly expresses; and, he says, "from my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch stories," and fond of a picture in a great book on the Bible "of the Witch Raising of Samuel, which I wish I had never seen". (The present writer's childhood was dominated by the same picture.) He never laid his head on the pillow, from his fourth to his eighth year, "without an assurance which realized its own prophecy" of seeing some frightful spectres. He supposed that these imaginations might date from "our ante-mundane condition". They were, in fact, proofs of his imaginative genius in infancy, for any child may have the fears, yet never fancy that it sees the phantasms. Conceivably the strain of madness in Lamb's blood, the madness which made his sister Mary slay her own mother, and affected her at frequent intervals, was also for something in his childish terrors. In later life his dreams wandered in great cities never visited by him, which he saw "with a map-like distinctness of trace, a daylight vividness of vision". He thought that "the degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking". His verses, like "When maidens such as Hester die," though exquisite, give less proof of his poetical faculty than his essay on "Dream Children," and on his lost love, which is perhaps the most beautiful example of his peculiar pathos.

Thus, throughout his essays, Lamb is constantly studying and revealing himself, his sister, his friends, with varying disguises and alterations of circumstance. In his "Character of the Late Elia," (his pseudonym) he is his own critic. "Better it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him." Unnatural it would have been to him, even in the briefest note to a friend, to write in a plain forthright style, but his quaintnesses and his conceits are never obscure. Elia "gave himself too little concern about what he uttered and in whose presence". That this is too true appears in the famous scene where he desired "to feel the bumps" of a very stupid comptroller of stamps, and was not to be restrained by Wordsworth's mild "My dear Charles!" What pranks, with his confessed "imperfect sympathy" with Scots, he may have played before the avenging Carlyle, no man knows. His friends "were, for the most part, persons of uncertain fortune ... a ragged regiment". "He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people." "The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood." Passing all his best hours at a desk in the India Office, he returned to his gambols when free. His essays were part of his playtime; in them he was his real self.

From 1782 to 1789 he was at Christ's Hospital, but did not attain to the high rank of Grecian, nor enter either of the Universities which he loved. He continued to meet Coleridge during vacations at "The Salutation and Cat," and contributed verses to Coleridge's volume of 1796 (Cottle, Bristol). In 1796 befell the tragedy in his family, and henceforth the care of his sister Mary (the Bridget of Elia) dominated his existence of unrepining self-sacrifice. In literature (in addition to the old writers), he admired Burns, and Wordsworth, from the first. It is more curious that Burger's ballad of Lenore (the Death-ride) struck Lamb as potently as it inspired Scott, who appreciated Lamb much more than he was by Lamb appreciated, and in vain invited this resolute Cockney to visit Abbotsford. In 1797 he contributed more sonnets to a volume by Coleridge and Lloyd, and in 1798 published his tale "Rosamund Gray",

Friends going up to examine it Observe a good deal of Charles Lamb in it

(to parody Browning), it has passages of his style, quotations from his favourite old authors; one chapter is an essay in his own manner, and there is even an anticipation of "Dream Children". Shelley praised the story highly, but Lamb was not enthusiastic about Shelley's poems or Byron's. His "John Woodvil" was intended for the stage, and the tragedy was published in 1802. It contains fine passages of verse, and a great deal of the "local colour" of the Restoration; perhaps the chief merit lies in the restoration of the accents of old poetry. The farce of "Mr. H." was a foredoomed failure. There is room for variety of opinion as to the suitability of the "Tales from Shakespeare" (much of which was executed by Mary Lamb), for children; but the peculiar merits of the style are beyond dispute. The same remark may be made on "The Adventures of Ulysses". On the other hand the notes to the "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets" (1808) reveal Lamb at his best as a critic and a master of language, while the selections are invaluable to readers who have not the time nor the taste for the perusal of the entire works of many most unequal dramatists. The book was a revelation to all but a few readers who, like Scott, had dwelt much with Marlowe, Chapman, Ford, Webster, and the rest.

Lamb "found himself" and found a public, at first small but ever increasing, when he wrote his first essays for "The London Magazine" in 1820, under the name of Elia. (Republished as "Essays of Elia" in 1823.) The very names of the essays are fragrant in the memory, and the characters drawn have become household words, while the personal touches are, with Lamb's delightful and fantastic letters, his best biography. In 1825, Lamb retired, with a liberal pension, from the India Office, and was "a freed man after thirty-three years' slavery" (see his essay "The Superannuated Man"). Lamb's "Last Essays" were published in 1833, and the author did not long survive the death of his life-long friend, Coleridge, in July, 1834; he passed away on 27 December, 1834. His name stands with those of Addison and Steele among English essayists: indeed he is much more read than they, as he was nearer to our own time, while more closely connected than they with the best literature of the great centuries which preceded the eighteenth. His self-revelations too are more serious than those of his famous predecessors, and the character revealed is more potently attractive.

Leigh Hunt.

Born nine years after Lamb (in 1784) and, like Lamb and Coleridge, educated at Christ's Hospital, Leigh Hunt perhaps holds, after Lamb and Hazlitt, the third place among the English essayists of his age. While love of literature, of wide and very miscellaneous reading in old English and Italian poetry was the chief pleasure of Hunt, he also took, with great vigour, a side in the politics of his age. A "Friend of the People," a contemner of kings, and no sympathizer with his country in the Napoleonic wars, Hunt, with his brother John, started, in 1808, "The Examiner," a Radical weekly journal of politics and literature. In 1812 he published what the law called a libel on the Prince Regent, and for two years occupied prison rooms which he decorated in his own taste (leaning to roses on the wall-paper, and plaster casts), among these he received his friends. Though he had a rapid perception of new poetic excellence, though he was the first to perceive and welcome the star of Keats, and, almost alone, encouraged and applauded Shelley, Hunt was blind to the merits of poets who were not of his own political party. In the text and notes of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814), first published in "The Reflector," he insulted Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth,--and made "for" rhyme to "straw". When his "Story of Rimini" appeared (1816), it told Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca with a Cockney jauntiness, and abounded in such epithets as "perky," "bosomy," "farmy," "winy Hunt's theory was that "the harmonious freedom of our old poets"--"their freedom in continuing the sense of the heroic rhyming couplets," should be "united with the vigour of Dryden". His verse was based on Chaucer's, and on some examples of the seventeenth century, and his metrical example influenced Shelley, while Keats followed him in re-telling Italian stories, and, at first, even in his affectations.

"Rimini" and its author were furiously attacked, for reasons of politics, by the young Tory writers in "Blackwood's Magazine," to whom Hunt's ineradicable vanity and lack of taste lent handles. He was dubbed "King of the Cockneys," and Keats himself shrank from his ways and manners. He joined Byron and Shelley in Italy in 1822; they were to work together on a journal, "The Liberal," but, from the first, and especially after the death of Shelley, the relations of Byron with the needy and familiar Hunt were intolerably unpleasant. In 1828, after Byron's death, Hunt avenged himself in his "Lord Byron and His Contemporaries," a book which, as he came to see, should never have been written.

The rest of Hunt's life was spent in journalism, mainly literary; his essays, often delightful reading, were republished in "Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla," while in his last work, "Autobiography," he forgives all his enemies, among whom he had actually reckoned Sir Walter Scott. He was the friend of Dickens and Carlyle. He wrote concerning Carlyle's style: "How could he exculpate this style, in which he denounces so many 'shams,' of being itself a sham? of being affected, unnecessary, and ostentatious? a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance, and reproduce endless German talk under the guise of novelty?" Here was candour: Leigh Hunt cultivated the virtue described as "the independence of the heart".

William Hazlitt.

Lamb as a man was universally beloved, except by Carlyle, and as a writer he is the friend of the human race. On the other side, Lamb's friend and fellow-essayist, William Hazlitt, in a letter to Leigh Hunt, says, "I want to know why everybody has such a dislike to me". There is much pathos and a plentiful lack of humour in the question. The brief answer is that Hazlitt acted as if he were trying to make himself disliked. In this he was pretty successful; he quarrelled even with Lamb, but never shook Lamb's constant affection. There is so much of Hazlitt's self in his works that, greatly as his good qualities delight us, there are times when we can scarcely forgive his defects, and are apt to conceive a personal grudge against him.

Born at Maidstone on 10 April, 1778, Hazlitt was the son of a distinguished Nonconformist minister. After visiting America, which was not tolerant of his doctrines, the elder Hazlitt returned, to England, where the son resided from 1788 to 1802. In 1798 he met Coleridge preaching in a blue coat and white waistcoat. The great and peculiar merit of Hazlitt's essays is his power of expressing and communicating the zest of his enjoyment of nature, human nature, preaching, juggling performances, prize-fighting, painting, fiction, sculpture, and the game of fives. In his description of the voice, the manner, the personal magic of Coleridge, then in his glorious youth, Hazlitt outshines himself, as he does in his criticism of Cavanagh's style in the fives-court. Hazlitt visited Coleridge at Stowey, and heard Wordsworth read his "Peter Bell"; heard Coleridge speak with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope, and express a dislike of Dr. Johnson!

These were divine days; but politics crossed the friendships of Hazlitt. The others had been enthusiasts, like himself, for the French Revolution, but not for Napoleon, as objecting to be emancipated by a hero who subdued hereditary kings, and supplied to conquered nations his own brothers and captains to be their princes. Hazlitt, on the other hand, rejoiced in the superb genius of Napoleon as he did in that of Shakespeare and in the sunlight. Bonaparte he could no more keep out of his essays on Poetry than Mr. Dick could banish "that comely head" of Charles I. from his memorial. To Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other friends became anathema, as renegades; and it is when we read his odious attack on Coleridge's poetry, in "The Edinburgh Review," that we understand "why everybody has such a dislike of me".

People who have read his "Liber Amoris," still more they who have studied the original letters partly published in that book, perceive other ways in which Hazlitt became antipathetic to human nature. He was, in the Scots phrase, "thrawn," and as he could seldom avoid exhibiting his temper in his writings, he may be and is admired for his generous qualities, and power of interpreting poetry and art, of elevating and enlivening the appreciative powers of his readers; but he can never be liked without reserve. His course of life, after he abandoned the study of metaphysics and the art of painting for the lecture-room and the pen of the ready essayist, put him too much in the way of temptation. He was too free to bring his personal and political animosities into his work, "it is such easy writing". He was also unskilled in the management of his life, and both his marriages (not to mention the unsuccessful passion of his "Liber Amoris") were fountains of bitterness. Living in London (1812-1820), Hazlitt gave his lectures on "English Poetry," and "Comic Writers" (1818-1819). Of 1817 are his "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays," and his "Round Table," essays on all sorts of subjects reprinted from Leigh Hunt's paper "The Examiner". In the work on poetry it is surprising to find him ranking Ossian with Homer, the Bible, and Dante, but when he gives his reasons it is natural to envy his powers of appreciation and enjoyment. To read him on Chaucer and Spenser is to desire to read Spenser and Chaucer themselves, so nobly does he recommend them, and Shakespeare, and so on, till, over Burns, he falls into a quarrel with Wordsworth, and then lashes "The Lake School," sniffs at Scott, and discovers but "one fine passage" in "Christabel". His politics prevent him from appreciating what is excellent in the Cavalier poets, and even when writing of Milton, Satan suggests to him Bonaparte, and he goes off full-mouthed on that trail. Among the novelists he is as much at home, and as convincingly right in his criticisms, especially of Richardson, as he is lost in a mist when he touches on Racine and Molière. Over Scott's novels he first breaks into a passion of admiration, and then, remembering politics, pelts the author (who never gave a thought to him) in the manner of Gulliver's Yahoos.

Hazlitt, unhappily, lived at a time when both parties in the State carried, with inconceivable rancour and stupidity, their politics into the field of literary criticism. His "Characters of Shakespeare" was slandered by Gifford in "The Quarterly Review," and he keeps telling us the sale of the book was stopped. Why members of his own party did not continue to buy it, he does not ask. In "Blackwood's Magazine" (1817-1818) he was styled "pimply-faced Hazlitt," a leader of "the Cockney School," and he says that Keats died of being called a Cockney. In fact, these stupidities did not affect Keats more than any other man of sense, while Hazlitt never ceased to avenge on people perfectly innocent, and on the guilty Gifford, the insults which he ought to have disregarded. For these reasons, and because he wrote so much, his essays are unequal, though when he is at his best, and he is often at his best, he is in the foremost rank of critics. He died in 1830. "Well, I have had a happy life," was among his latest words, and his finest works are reflections of his happiest hours.

Thomas de Quincey.

An essayist whose works are probably more read than those of Leigh Hunt is Thomas de Quincey, one of the extraordinary men whose boyhood was in the eighteenth, and whose works were produced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in Manchester in 1785, and dying in Edinburgh in 1859, De Quincey was precisely the contemporary of Hunt. His father, dying young, left his children adequately provided for, and, to judge by De Quincey's Autobiography, they were extraordinary children. William, the invincibly amusing, died young, and De Quincey's first great sorrow was the death of Elizabeth, when he himself was 6 and she was not 10 years of age. His description of the vision and the mysterious music which attended his visit to her as she lay dead, is one of the most remarkable and characteristic passages in his writings. Sixty-nine years later, "his very last act was to throw up his arms and utter, as if with a cry of surprised recognition, 'Sister! Sister! Sister!'" He was, indeed, a born seer; and probably other persons, if so ill-advised as to follow his example in taking quantities of laudanum, would not behold the visions which first charmed and then tormented "The English Opium Eater".

De Quincey was a wanderer and a fugitive from his school days, at least such he became after receiving an accidental stroke on the head from a cane, which prostrated him for weeks, and quite conceivably was one cause of his eccentricities. As he has told us he ran away, quite needlessly, from school at 16 or 17, tramped, a sentimental traveller, in North Wales, starved, lurked, and walked the midnight streets of London with Ann, ran away from Oxford (Worcester College) when his papers had astonished and delighted the examiners, and, generally, flew in the face of common sense. He came into his little fortune, behaved to Coleridge with the generosity of Shelley, settled long near Wordsworth at Grasmere, made the acquaintance of John Wilson (Christopher North), married a country girl, and fell into the miseries of the opium eater. Poverty ensued, De Quincey returned to his fugitive life of lurking in London, and, in 1821, astonished the world of readers by "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater," published in "The London Magazine," for which Lamb and Hazlitt used to write. De Quincey was acquainted with Lamb, and Wordsworth and Coleridge he knew well. But he belonged to none of the rival sets of writers, "Cockneys" or Edinburgh wits; and, in his freakish moods of schoolboy-like high spirits, he wrote personal banter of his best friends, deriding Coleridge's corpulence and "large expanse of cheek"; the retort, as to cheek, was obvious. In 1830 De Quincey moved to Edinburgh; and in lodgings there, and at a cottage near Lasswade on the Esk, he mainly passed the rest of his strange, industrious, eccentric life. He wrote alternately for Blackwood's and Tait's magazines: almost the whole matter of his sixteen volumes appeared originally in magazines, and was written with the wolf and the printer's boy at the door. His vast store of reading, accumulated before 1821, embraced the old English writers and the new German philosophers, magic, political economy, and the records of police trials.

That sketch for a murder with a pair of dumb-bells, by the murderer Thurtell, "the same who was generally censured for murdering the late Mr. Weare," occurs, not only in the essay on "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," but in the long essay on "Style". The story of the very mysterious murder, at noon-day, of Mrs. Ruscombe in Bristol, is very well told in "Autobiographic Sketches" ("The Priory"). Confessedly some essays, such as "Dream-fugue" in "The English Mail Coach," are records of visions inspired by opium: "the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the responsible party". These essays on the Mail Coach, then the marvel of rapidity of travel, offer, in miniature, the type of De Quincey's style, with its sonorous poetic cadences, its quaint colloquial familiarities,--with his insatiable intellectual curiosity, and his digressiveness--he discusses the origin of the word "snob". Finally the Dream has its way, after the wonderful description of the laurelled coach bearing news of Wellington's and Blücher's victory to England, and to two lovers the sudden face of death.

De Quincey, with his wide reading, with the songless poet in his nature, and with his strange freakish habits, his following a chance association of ideas far beyond the field of his essay, is, naturally, one of the most unequal of writers. His prose is, on occasion, "aureate" or ornate, in a manner which has, perhaps, had its day; and again he deals in schoolboy slang. Only parts of his famous essay on Jeanne d'Arc are excellent: taste has moved away from, and may return to, the mystic eloquence of "The Three Ladies of Sorrow". But in De Quincey there is variety enough for all tastes, and he is perhaps especially inspiring and delightful to young readers. He died at Edinburgh on 8 December, 1859.

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