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.

CHAPTER 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.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

POETS AFTER WORDSWORTH.