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

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.

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".

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"—

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".

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 (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.

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).

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 (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".

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.