The Project Gutenberg eBook of History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne, by Andrew Lang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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),

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"—

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

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.

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.

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.

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.