Où sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau!
Elles sont plus heureuses
Dans un séjour plus beau.

Perhaps because he is so non-American, so decidedly a citizen of no city, Poe has been more admired on the Continent, and translated into more languages than any poet of America. His works were admirably rendered into French by Charles Baudelaire, himself an adorer of

The love whom I shall never meet,
The land where I shall never be.

Poe died in 1849; legends of his life are many and negligible. He is a poet who has not much honour in his own country, or who, at least, has more honour in countries not his own. To call him a great poet is impossible, but he is a haunting poet. His prose stories were dismissed as "Hawthorne and delirium tremens" by a great English critic, but really his horrors are carefully designed and elaborated works, polished ad unguem; rather cold than frenzied,—witness "The Cask of Amontillado".

Critics, and many readers, have a passion for "classing" poets, as if they were in an examination. We cannot call Poe great, for poetry deals with life, with action, with passion, with duty, and with the whole of the great spectacle of Nature. To the Muse of Poe these things are indifferent; but to the singing of the dreams with which he dwells he brings such originality of tone and touch as is rare indeed in the poetry of any people. As a critic, too, he is a pioneer of the school of l'art pour l'art, of art for art's sake—a school distinctly decadent, and therefore in modern Europe he, rather than Aristotle, is hailed as a prince of critics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803) was born at Boston of what the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table liked to call "the Brahmin caste"; that is the educated clerical class, ministers from father to son. A similar class existed in Scotland after the Reformation.[2] Preaching was in the blood of these gentlemen of Boston. Emerson, after breaking away from Unitarianism in a singular sermon at Boston (1832), continued to preach, when he could find an audience, and then betook himself to lecturing, first on scientific subjects, and next on literature and things in general. In 1837 he delivered to the F B K Society at Harvard a lecture on "The American Scholar". He said: "Mr. President and Gentlemen, This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe". Indeed Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell successively held a Chair founded for the precise purpose of listening to the courtly Muses of mediaeval and modern Europe. But the American scholar, it seems, was to listen neither to them nor to Homer, Virgil, and Horace, nor even to Isaiah, who was much about an Asiatic Court. Walt Whitman must be the typical American scholar, from the point of view of Emerson.

The position of Emerson, as poet and essayist, is matter of controversy among the learned of his own country. In a poem styled "Nature," Emerson writes:—

She is gamesome and good
But of mutable mood,—
No dreary repeater now and again,
She will be all things to all men,
She who is old but nowise feeble
Pours her power into the people.

As to his prose, Prof. Barrett Wendell of Harvard writes: "The Essays are generally composed of materials which he collected for purposes of lecturing.... He would constantly make note of any idea which occurred to him; and when he wished to give a lecture he would huddle together as many of those notes as would fill the assigned time, trusting with all the calm assurance of his unfaltering individualism that the truth inherent in the separate memoranda would give them all together the unity implied in the fact of their common sincerity.... The fact that these essays were so often delivered as lectures should remind us of what they really are.... Emerson's essays, in short, prove to be an obvious development from the endless sermons with which for generations his ancestors had regaled the New England fathers."

Professor Trent of Columbia University asks: "Shall we not follow Emerson's own lead, and call him frankly a great poet, basing the title on these and similar essays" ("Circles" and "The Oversoul") "and on the somewhat scanty but still important mass of his compositions in authentic poetic form"—of which a poor specimen has just been given. Some of Emerson's fellow-citizens, Professor Trent says, answer his question in the affirmative. Emerson, on the strength of his prose and verse, is "a great poet". "Others equally cultivated maintain that many of his poems are only versified versions of his essays, and declare that save in rare passages he is deficient in passion, in sensuousness, in simplicity ..." while Mr. Trent, speaking for himself, says that Emerson "is prone to jargon, to bathos, to lapses of taste". Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Charles Baudelaire, agreed with the second and less favourable party of American critics. Baudelaire's remarks were intemperate in style, but Mr. Trent thinks that, "it seems as if the time had come for Emerson's countrymen frankly to accept the verdict" of Matthew Arnold, that Emerson's prose "was not of sufficient merit to entitle him to be ranked as a great man of letters".

It does not become an alien to interfere in this unsettled controversy. In literary criticism of modern English poetry Emerson said that Pope "wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake". Walter Scott "wrote a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland," Wordsworth had the merit of being "conscientious," Byron was "passional," Tennyson "factitious".

It is, of course, impossible here to discuss Emerson as a philosopher. He is spoken of as an Idealist, but he seems to lean a little to Pragmatism. "The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular theory is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind." To whose mind? Emerson visited England twice; after the second tour he wrote "English Traits". Dickens had done, regrettably, the same sort of work in "American Notes," and "Martin Chuzzlewit". Authors on each side of the Atlantic took the advice of the elder Mr. Weller, and abused the countries and peoples that they visited, Emerson hitting the darker blots in our society. He had an influence, mainly over young men, in both countries, scarcely inferior to that of Carlyle; but left nothing so massive and concrete as Carlyle's "Frederick," "Cromwell," and "The French Revolution". Having quoted from Professor Barrett Wendell passages which leave rather a mournful impression, we must add that, in his opinion, Emerson's work "surely seems alive with such unconditioned freedom of temper as makes great literature so inevitably lasting". Professor Trent, while confessing "that true poetic glow and flow are almost entirely absent from Emerson's verses, and that his ever-recurring and often faulty octosyllabic couplets soon become wearisome," declines to rank him with Tennyson, Shelley, or Longfellow, and ends: "But to Americans, at least, Emerson is an important poet, whose best work seems likely to gain rather than to lose value".

James Russell Lowell.

The poetic qualities of Whittier and of James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) are pleasantly indicated in Mr. Lowell's sonnet to Whittier on his seventy-fifth birthday.[3]

Here is deserved praise of Whittier's studies of Nature, and of his anti-slavery Tyrtæan verse, while the poet betrays his own affection for the sonorous, heroic song of early mediaeval France, "The Song of Roland".

The circumstances of Lowell's birth and career were as different as possible from those of the tuneful farm-boy. Lowell, like Holmes, Emerson, and so many others, was of the hereditarily cultivated class of New England, clergymen from generation to generation. He was born at his father's place, Elmwood, near Cambridge, was educated at Harvard, lived there, as Matthew Arnold said of himself at Balliol, "as if it had been a great country house," was sent down, for some frolic, to Concord, where he met the sage Emerson, "chaffed" that philosopher and Carlyle in rhymes, and displayed, generally, the gaiety of the undergraduate. Mr. Lowell, in fact, in manner and personal appearance, was, though an enthusiastic patriot, like anything but a "foreigner". He was called to the bar, but preferred literature to law, and wrote prose and verse for the magazines. In 1846 he began the first set of "The Biglow Papers," very lively studies in American politics as rurally understood by the Rev. Hosea Wilbur and Bird o' Freedom Sawin. In satiric and humorous poetry, in dialect, he was supreme from the first. In 1848, he produced "A Fable for Critics"; the idea may have been suggested by Suckling's rhymed and bantering criticism of contemporary minstrels, in his "Session of the Poets". The rhymes in "The Festival of the Poets" are more than Hudibrastic; the measure is anapæstic. It is the work of a young man who is amusing himself in a crowd of scribblers, each claiming to be "the American Scott," "the American Dante," and so forth. Hawthorne finds a place and Cooper.

Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show
He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so;
But he need take no pains to convince us he's not
(As his enemies say) the American Scott.

Of Emerson

His prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,
Is some of it pr—; no, it's not even prose.
All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he's got,
To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what.

As for Bryant, somebody

Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth
May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd's worth,

cries this patriot.

Whittier's manliness is applauded,

But his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes,
And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes.

Concerning Poe,

Three-fifths of him's genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,

which is perfectly true, but where, except in Poe and Hawthorne, was the man with even two-fifths of genius? That Theocritus, were he living, "would scarce change a line" in the hexameters of Longfellow's "Evangeline," is a criticism dictated by friendship. The mere name of "The Vision of Sir Launfal" suggests the influence of Tennyson. The verse, however, is not imitative; the moral is excellent, and "American children," we learn, have been set to studying "Sir Launfal" in annotated editions, perhaps a pathetic illustration of what may be called "the patriotic fallacy in matters connected with literature".[4]

In 1862-1863, the Civil War gave a motive for new "Biglow Papers," which were deservedly popular in England as well as in America. "The Commemoration Ode" has the same origin, in patriotism and resentment of the European attitude. This Ode is perhaps the seal of Mr. Lowell's diploma as a poet; the third and fifth sections, on the Harvard men who fell in battle, are swift, sonorous, and inspiring. When the poet exclaims, "Tell us not of Plantagenets," the critic can only murmur that he had no notion of telling of persons like Richard Cœur de Lion, "whose thin blood crawls". "'Tis with Lincoln, not with Richard, that the poem has to do," Bret Harte might have said. Indeed the Ode is too long. The ode "Under the Old Elm," practically an ode to Washington, is dignified, and of historic interest; perhaps no other poet has more worthily celebrated "that unblemished gentleman," the national hero; and the last section, addressed to Virginia, has a noble dying fall, like the close of the "Iliad". But not of popular appeal are such lines as these:—

O for a drop of that Cornelian ink
Which gave Agricola dateless length of days.

Here the Professor (who held Longfellow's chair at Harvard) interrupts the poet. The reference is to the brief biography by Tacitus of his father-in-law.

In 1877 Mr. Lowell went as American Minister to Spain, a country always of high attraction to American men of letters, historians, or poets. From 1880 to 1885 Mr. Lowell represented his country at the Court of St. James, and won the hearts of all who had the honour of his friendship. As a speaker on many occasions where literature and art were concerned he was without a rival; in conversation his humour, wit, vast knowledge of men and of books, and his simple spontaneous kindness, endeared him to all. With Shenstone his friends might say, "Quanto minus est cum reliquis versari, quam tui meminisse,"—"Memory of him is dearer than life with others".

Concerning the mass of Mr. Lowell's shorter poems, many of them occasional, it may, perhaps, be said that few of them stamp themselves on the memory by any strong individuality of thought and cadence, and that he did not take Keats's advice to Shelley, "load every rift with ore". In a favourite passage opening:—

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays.

the last line has a certain dissonance. His critical essays are of many various degrees of value. In his essay on "Swinburne's Tragedies" (1866, "Chastelard" and "Atalanta") he never seems to perceive the extraordinary and unprecedented merit of the lyrical measures, which are something better than "graceful, flowing, and generally simple in sentiment and phrase". In quite a different field the long essay on "Witchcraft" is rather antiquated, because we now know so much more about the psychology of the subject than was known when the essay was written. After philosophizing with Mr. E. B. Tylor on the origin of the belief in spirits, the critic honestly exclaims: "I am puzzled, I confess, to explain the appearance of the first ghost, especially among men who thought death to be the end-all here below". That is the puzzle, and Lucretius, who is quoted, could not solve it, nor had Mr. Lowell heard of "deferred telepathic impressions". This kind of topic allowed the author to bring in countless illustrations from his wide knowledge of all literatures, especially from the early mediaeval French, of which he was a votary before "Aucassin et Nicolete" and the heroic epics and sweet earliest lyrics were appreciated out of France. The essay on Rousseau contains the usual apologies which critics of English blood make for a man of genius whom at heart they do not like, while the criticism of Pope is true and just, but not specially original; and the paper on Milton (a review of a recent biography and edition) would be better if purged of comments on Professor Masson. The comments on Wordsworth are extremely amusing to non-Wordsworthians, for the Wordsworthian draws a decent veil over the poet's incredible treatment of "Helen of Kirkconnel".

And Bruce (as soon as he had slain
The Gordon), sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant,
Against the Moorish crescent,

using, no doubt, the javelin with which he had pinked Lochinvar. "In 'The Excursion' we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of extenuating circumstances." It is not that Mr. Lowell judged Wordsworth by his feet of clay, but having once observed the absurdities of the bard of Rydal he did not know where to stop in treating a theme so diverting. To Dunbar he was absolutely ruthless: "whoso is national enough to like thistles may browse there to his heart's content". "I would rather have written that half stanza of Longfellow's in 'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' of 'the billow that swept her crew like icicles from her deck' than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together." Mr. Lowell was not a Scot, and was an attached friend of Professor Longfellow, whose half stanza is not of ravishing merit. This raid across the Border is made in an essay on Spenser, wherein Nash is said "to have far better claims than Swift to be called the English Rabelais". This is extremely severe on Rabelais! The undying youth of Mr. Lowell as of Matthew Arnold, may bear the blame of such freaks as theirs in criticism. Shelley's letters are not really of more merit than his lyrics, nor, if we are to call any one an English Rabelais, is Nash more worthy of the compliment than the author of "Gulliver"!

Matthew Arnold.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was the son of the Rev. Thomas Arnold, the famous Head Master of Rugby, and author of a History of Rome. At Rugby and Balliol he gained the prize-poems; he was a Fellow of Oriel, where he did not reside long, marrying and becoming an Inspector of Schools in 1851. Melancholy as much of his poetry seems, he was known to his friends as "Glorious Mat," and, in his own words, he and his brother Thomas lived in Balliol as in a large country house. He was a great walker in Wordsworth's country and a keen trout-fisher. His first verses, signed A, "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems," appeared in a slim volume in 1849; they have nothing of the amateur, and possess a note of their own, though the influence of Wordsworth is discernible. "He is the man for me," Arnold might have said, as Boileau did of Molière. Arnold did not think Tennyson un esprit puissant; indeed Wordsworth was the last of our poets whom he greatly admired, though he placed Byron (for other than Wordsworth's qualities) on the same eminence; and preferred Shelley's letters to his lyrics. Such were what most amateurs think the freaks of Arnold as a critic.

Of the play, or masque, or whatever it should be called, "Empedocles on Etna," his taste later rejected all but a few glorious passages; but again he relented, and admitted "Empedocles" within the canon of his works. He put forth a new volume of verse in 1855; "Merope," an imitation of the Greek tragedy, not of much merit, in 1858, and "New Poems" in 1867. The prefaces to "Empedocles" and "Merope" are good examples of his more sober style of criticism. Like his own Apollo he is "young but intolerably severe," and, like Milton, he freely used, as in "The Strayed Reveller," verse in short unrhymed measures. Though these are distasteful to some critics, others, in Arnold's and Milton's employment of them, find grace and harmony so delightful that they do not regret the absence of rhyme. Arnold's rhymed verse is in simple old-fashioned forms, in lyrics and in the beautiful stanzas of two of his most beautiful poems, where majesty and sweetness meet, "The Scholar Gipsy," and "Thyrsis," an elegy on A. H. Clough, the friend of his Oxford days.

Never has the scenery around Oxford been so nobly celebrated; he makes classical "the stripling Thames," "Bablock Hythe," "the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills," "the Fyfield tree," all the landscape through which Shelley wandered and left unsung. Thus Arnold has for Oxford men the same charm as Scott for Borderers; he is their own poet; and the pieces called "Switzerland" seem to recall a long vacation in the Alps. They are full of beauty in the descriptions of Nature and of Marguerite, a daughter of France, who seems to have inherited the charm of Manon Lescaut in the famous novel of the Abbé Prévost. For the rest, Arnold did not pen, or did not publish, sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow, and his lyrics reveal no more of his personality than his love of natural beauty, his delight in Nature, and a melancholy not unconnected with instability of religious belief; as in the flux and reflux of the sonorous lines in "Dover Beach," and "Yes, in the sea of life enisled". There are moments in youth (perhaps confined to Oxonians) when the grave charm of Arnold (as in the verses in the conclusion of "Sohrab and Rustum") seems the pearl highest of price in modern poetry. But in narrative, even in "Sohrab and Rustum" with its Homeric similes, still more in the narrative of "Tristram and Iseult," Arnold does not shine, and in "Merope" he certainly does not overstimulate. His "Forsaken Merman" is perhaps most admired by readers who are least delighted with the mass of his best poems, and least appreciative of "Requiescat," which is a worthy mate of the noblest "swallow flights of song" in the Greek Anthology, as hopeless and as beautiful as they. In his genius there was something Greek; there was nothing of frenzy and false excitement.

Arnold's criticism cannot always be termed "unaffected," and his manner and tone varied with the nature of the subject which he was discussing. It must be admitted that he "was not always wholly serious," and his banter, his "educated insolence" as Aristotle says, was apt rather to provoke than to convert people who differed from him, as to education, politics, social problems, or literature. But he had an unsurpassed skill in provoking discussion, and the public, which for long did not read him, became acquainted with his name, and his views through the newspapers. It is said that a meeting of persons connected with the Income Tax complained to him that his returns of his literary gains did not correspond with his immense literary reputation. He then, with his habitual urbanity, catechized his catechizers. Had any one of them ever bought or read a book of his? Not one could answer in the affirmative; "So there, you see," he remarked.

His "Lectures on Translating Homer," delivered at Oxford when he was Professor of Poetry (1857-1867) are not only admirable expositions of Homeric art, and "the grand style," but rich in his peculiar vein of lofty irony and academic "chaff"—of a translator who did the "Iliad" into the metre of "Yankee Doodle". He advocated the use of English hexameters—which, indeed, would be excellent, if any one could write readable hexameters. His "Essays in Criticism" (1865) pleaded vainly for an Academy on the French model, for "ideas," and for culture, a term caught at and misapplied by feebler folk. His remarks on two unessential French writers illustrated his inability to appreciate the poetry as compared with the prose of France. He conceived, however, "of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual purposes, one great confederation... whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another". He had the knowledge, though appreciation did not always accompany it, while the French, he complained, were almost wholly ignorant of his favourite Wordsworth. Yet, much as he rejoiced in Wordsworth's "criticism of life" (a favourite phrase), he admitted that, save in 1798-1808, the poet was devoid of inspiration, though "a great and powerful body of work remains," when the dross is cleared away. Generally, Arnold had a trick of taking a single line or two, perhaps of the worst, from a poet, using this inferior brick as a sample of the building, and contrasting it with specimens superlatively excellent from poets whom he wanted to extol. Thus he contrasted Théophile Gautier with Wordsworth, taking Théo as an inn on the road, and Wordsworth as a home eternal in the heavens. But surely we may tarry at an inn on our way and enjoy ourselves, though perhaps only one human being has seriously exclaimed: "I place Théophile only after Shakespeare". In this case the trick of setting a verse from Gautier beside a verse from Wordsworth was not played. After the appreciation of Wordsworth it is curious to find Arnold speaking of Molière as "altogether a larger and more splendid luminary in the poetical heaven" than the Bard of Rydal, because the two authors are not in any way comparable with each other. The "high seriousness" in which Wordsworth is pre-eminent was indeed familiar to the comic author called "le Contemplateur," but the nature of his art did not permit him to hint at the existence of this quality, except in irony; while Lucretius, not, as in Wordsworth's case, Plato, was his favourite philosopher.

Arnold's eager curiosity led him into fields of which he had no first-hand knowledge, as in his delightful book on "The Study of Celtic Literature". We cannot assign all "natural magic" in poetry to the Celtic strain of blood in the population, and the peculiar wistfulness of old Gaelic and Welsh poetry may be found in Greek, Finnish, and even savage poetry. Though the book led others into much senseless writing, it is in itself full of revelations of beauty. Arnold was no Orientalist, and had no special knowledge of New Testament Greek, nor of the comparative study of religions. These defects, with surprising errors in taste, prevent his "St. Paul and Protestantism," "God and the Bible," and "Literature and Dogma" from reaching a high level in their way. But Arnold wrote beautiful prose, and wrote with that high sense of critical superiority which was his own, as it had been Dryden's. Both occasionally surprise, or even shock, by their idiosyncrasies, as do Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt; but they all delight and excite and instruct.

GENERAL WRITERS.

To the various and voluminous works of Mr. Ruskin, corresponding to every facet of his singular intellect and character, justice cannot possibly be done within our space. The son of a rich wine-merchant of Scottish extraction, he was born and bred among books and works of art, and, without attending any public school, entered Christ Church as a gentleman commoner. He won the Newdigate prize poem, and in 1843 published the first volume of his "Modern Painters". His primary object was to assert the supremacy of Turner, which involved him in a comparative study of art, modern, mediaeval and classical, and of the intellectual, literary, social, and moral conditions of the societies in which the art, in each case, arose. He had also to observe Nature accurately, from the contour of the Alps to the development of the forms of trees, and, indeed, of "the meanest flower that blows". He drew excellently, and many of the copious and beautiful illustrations are from his own pencil. His own opinions, which, as he confessed, varied greatly at different times, were constantly exhibited, and he wrote in a style as highly pitched and coloured as that of De Quincey. The effect of the whole, at least on young readers, was immensely exciting and inspiriting, whatever the topic might be on which he expressed himself. His was the prose of a man who was almost a poet, but his verses proved to the world, as they must have done to himself, that formal poetry was not his forte. In art his affections were with les primitifs, the artists, holy and humble men of heart, before the Revival of learning, before Raphael; and he was actually fierce over Claude and Salvator Rosa. "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849) and "The Stones of Venice" (1852) continued the teaching of "Modern Painters". In his "Academy Notes" his attitude was thus described by a painter in "Punch".

I sits and paints,
Hears no complaints,
I sells before I'm dry;
Comes savage Ruskin,
Puts his tusk in—
And nobody will buy.

Ruskin was extolling and defending the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Rossetti—whom he knew well, and bought from gladly—Millais, Holman Hunt, and others less celebrated, with whom were joined William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They went back to the art of the Middle Ages, often applying its minute study of detail to incidents in modern life. The value of Ruskin's theories of art is now, and has long been, disputed. Ruskin was not an "impressionist," and the libel action brought against him by Whistler, characteristically appealing to a British jury on a question of art, and receiving one farthing of damages, left the questions open to each impartial mind. Ruskin's socialistic theories, in "Unto This Last" have had infinitely more permanent and wide-reaching results than his æsthetics. But, be these right or wrong, his early works are of the highest and most varied interest, both in matter and expression. There never was a man more rich in pity, and more open-handed, whether it was his pictures and other objects of art, or his money that he lavishly bestowed. In the sixties and later he produced many small books with pretty symbolical titles, dealing with all things from personal confessions to social problems: he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, where his lectures were crowded, and his "Fors Clavigera," an autobiography in numbers, came out in parts. It contains many examples of his style at its best, that is, at its simplest. One glorious passage gives a great Turneresque picture of a scene viewed from a certain bridge over Ettrick, whence, in fact, to mortal eyes no such prospect is visible! In "Fors" Ruskin wrote with great sympathy and affection about Sir Walter Scott.

In his later years and writings, the contradictions of his complicated character, and the effects of over-work, and too keen a vision of "the sad pageant of men's miseries," began to affect his work with eccentricity; and he sought retirement near Coniston Lake with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Severn.

Of joy in widest commonalty spread,

of joy in art and Nature, he had made many thousands of people participators, for while others had written on art, none had done so with so much contagious enthusiasm, varied eloquence, and magnificent imagination. The rhythm of his style is almost as often invaded by blank verse, as in Dickens's case, and, according to R. L. Stevenson, an irruption of blank verse into prose is a symptom of great fatigue. In one short sentence of prose in Swinburne's essay on Lamb and Wither we read:—

Behind him and beneath we see....
The Hazlitts prattling at his heel,
The Dyces labouring in his wake.

Two other Oxford critics, Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) and John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) are so recently silent that they cannot here be critically estimated. Both were devoted to literature and art, classical, modern, and of the Renaissance. Both had their peculiar styles, that of Symonds very animated, but somewhat Corinthian; that of Pater remarkable for a kind of hieratic precision, and sedulous daintiness, and a vocabulary in which certain favourite terms occurred but too frequently. Symonds sufflaminandus erat; in his "History of the Renaissance in Italy" he is certainly unable to keep the stream of his learning and enthusiasm within its banks; while an impatient reader might demand a more rapid and less obviously self-conscious movement in the style of Pater. His first volume, "Studies in the History of the Renaissance" (1873), brought to young readers the same kind of pleasant surprise as "The Defence of Guenevere" or "Atalanta in Calydon". The essay on Coleridge, and the "little poem in prose" on the Monna Lisa of Leonardo, appeared to be new models of excellence. This book remains the most characteristic of the author, though he seems to have thought that his style verged perilously on that of poetry. He avoided this possible danger, without ceasing "still to be neat, still to be dressed," in his reflective novel of Roman life, "Marius the Epicurean" (1885), in which Marius is far from being an Epicurean in the vulgar sense of the word, but is rather the John Inglesant of the period. The book, like "Clarissa Harlowe," is not to be read so much for the story as for the delicate dreamy succession of the moods, and of the inclinations and half-beliefs of the hero, and for the pictures of the manners of the age. "Plato and Platonism" is a valuable study, and "Imaginary Portraits" shows more imagination in the designing of character than Marius. The reef which he and R. L. Stevenson did not always steer clear of was préciosité, over-anxious effort towards novelty and perfection of phrase.

CHAPTER XXXV.

LATE VICTORIAN POETS.

Edward FitzGerald.

Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), a contemporary at Trinity College, Cambridge, of Thackeray and Tennyson, was in later life the friend of both. Though he vehemently admired Tennyson's poems up to 1842, he never was quite contented with them later; yet detested all the work of both of the Brownings, as if jealous of the supremacy of his friend. He was, indeed, a humorous person, and a person "of humours," in Ben Jonson's sense of the word. He was a great reader, a delicate and sound critic, where prejudice did not interfere; a most interesting letter-writer; and, for the rest, passed away his life with his books, his garden, his boat, and his pipe. Nothing of the little that he wrote, for example, translations from Æschylus and Calderon, reached the public, nor for long did his very free version of quatrains in the Persian, attributed to Omar Khayyám, an astronomer. It is impossible here to discuss how many of these quatrains are really, by Omar, how many are masterless verses assigned to him by tradition, and how much of the merit of the "Rubáiyàt" is due to FitzGerald. But it is hardly too bold to say that but for the new music and melancholy of FitzGerald's verse, but for FitzGerald's own contribution of a sad and humorous stoicism under an Epicurean wash of colour, Omar and his company would never have been known to the general English reader. The slim pamphlet of the "Rubáiyàt" (1859) was "a drug in the market" till the set of Rossetti and Swinburne discovered it and talked about it. Then a wider circle of young University men made it an idol; to adore it was a sign of grace; and, in the long run, to admire Omar and the old French tale of "Aucassin et Nicolete" became a substitute for a liberal education. It was no longer necessary to have read anything else. It was not FitzGerald's fault that the saying of the Alexandrian Philistine in Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all," became "Omar is enough for all". But, though idolised by the worst judges, FitzGerald's little masterpiece remains a very original and, in Wordsworth's phrase, "a very pretty piece of paganism". His letters are probably the best and most interesting of any letters much concerned with literature that have been published since those of Byron.

George Meredith.

As a poet, Meredith attained, when he chose (and he often did choose) to a pitch of obscurity no less deserving of admiration, and of interpretative commentaries, than the darkest verses of Browning. He did not begin in this manner; his early verses, such as "Juggling Jerry," "The Old Chartist," "Marian," "Love in the Valley," have the charm of being fresh, natural, and easily readable by him who runs; while, like most of Meredith's verses, they are the poetry of a lover of the Earth, with all that she bears and nourishes. Many poems read like hymns to Earth by an Earth-intoxicated pagan. But "Modern Love"—a long sequence of pieces of sixteen lines, which exceed the sonnet in length without possessing its answering and echoing rhymes—contains a story, and a sad story, of the pangs of two wedded lovers. What that story is, perhaps some commentator has told in prose; if not, the poet needs such a commentary. The preluding sonnet to "Modern Love" may contain the secret, it closes thus:—

But listen in the thought; so may there come
Conception of a newly added chord,
Commanding space beyond where ear has home.
In labour of the trouble at its fount,
Leads Life to an intelligible Lord
The rebel discords up the sacred Mount.

We "listen in the thought," but conception of a newly added chord does not readily arrive, not where ear has home at all events, and nothing leads us to an intelligible Lord, if that means an intelligible poet. Persons cultivated enough to love English poetry more obscure than an "unseen" piece of Pindar, find much matter in verses like these.

The two lovers, married apparently, in "Modern Love," are "condemned to do the flitting of the bat," but, in the dark, we lose sight of them, and can only admire luminous breaks of two or three lines here and there, glow-worms in the darkness of the grass. The mystery of Byron's "Manfred," reckoned fine in its day, the new poet explains as "an after dinner's indigest". Byron, no doubt, could have said something not less witty about "The Nuptials of Attila".

Meredith's manner, in short, "is not of the centre". Great poets rarely conceal their meaning like hidden wealth; he who does so, values too cheaply the leisure of the reader, or values too highly the reader's industry and ingenuity.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Elizabeth Barrett, later the wife of the poet Robert Browning, was born on 6 March, 1806 (died in 1861). Her father was a man of considerable wealth and eccentricity; at least he appears to have resented almost as much as Queen Elizabeth the idea of any one marrying. His daughter had a good education, some knowledge of Greek, and wrote verse early. In several of her most pleasing verses, such as "Little Ellie," and "Hector in the Garden," we hear echoes of the memories of her childhood. She translated from the Greek, and also wrote a kind of romantic ballads (not in the manner of the Border ballads) which had abundant life and movement. She took up the cause of children overworked in factories at an age when they should not have worked at all. Her health became deplorable, her life that of a valetudinarian, till, in 1846, Robert Browning married her and took her out of her father's sphere of influence. Thenceforth her health improved; at this time her fame and popularity as a poet of great variety and passion far exceeded those of the author of "Men and Women". Her sonnets, really original, though published as "From the Portuguese" were not so popular as her lyrics and romances, but her genius, somewhat too eager and careless, especially in her recklessness of correct rhymes, was in need of the formal restraints of the sonnet. Her "Casa Guidi Windows" (1851) and other poems displayed her enthusiasm for a free and united Italy; her "Aurora Leigh," a tendenz novel in verse, attracted much attention, if it does not bear the test of time so well as her briefer poems; her "Poems before Congress" were of somewhat temporary interest. Mrs. Browning, with Miss Rossetti, holds the highest place among the women-poets of England, but her Muse is neither trimly girdled nor neatly shod; and her manner not infrequently does injustice to the pity and passion of her sympathies, conceptions, and emotions.

Christina Rossetti.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) as a poet resembled her brother as much as a woman who lived a somewhat fugitive and cloistered life, practising the rites of her religion and in the exercise of good works, could resemble an artist so unapt for self-control as Dante Rossetti. Both felt the same half-exotic influences of a family half-Italian; both shared the same early enthusiasm for mediaeval art, and there is a certain sameness in the colour and harmonies of their verse and in their use of words. In 1862 Miss Rossetti published, in brief, irregular rhymed lines, "Goblin Market," a tale of the affection of sisters dwelling in a rural England that marches with a country of fantastic malevolent elves, a species of fairy of her own invention. The whole effect is magical yet moral "which is strange," and the moral is not strained or didactic, but natural, and a great part of the charm of this delightful composition. "The Prince's Progress," in the same way, is suggested by the beautiful tale of "The Black Bull of Norroway," but the suggestion is remote and the bewitched Prince comes too late to his bride. The best lyrics of the author are singularly musical with an anticipation of some of Swinburne's effects, as in "Dreamland".

She left the rosy morn,
She left the fields of corn,
For twilight lone and lorn
And water springs.

Through sleep as through a veil,
She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.

"When I am dead, my dearest," is not less musical and melancholy. Many of the sacred poems have great sincerity as well as original beauty of form; and some of these, with some of the sonnets, half reveal the sorrow of a life and its religious consolations,—see the sequence of sonnets styled "Monna Innominata" and "Later Life". She is, indeed, a true poet of the inner life and of nature. To institute comparisons between her and Mrs. Browning is apt to cause injustice to either or to both.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

While Tennyson was in the mid-flush of his fame, there arose a school, in poetry and pictorial art, which, like him, turned to the Middle Ages for subjects and inspiration, but also reverted to the ideals of the great Italian painters who were before Raphael. The leader and the eldest of the little Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of Gabriel Rossetti, a devout interpreter of Dante, and of his wife, a Miss Polidori, a kinswoman of Byron's strange and ill-fated young Italian physician. Dante was born in 1828, from his earliest days wrote verses and drew, and, after passing through King's College School, became a student of art, and a painter whose colour was undoubtedly excellent, while his subjects were chosen from religion and romance; his portraits being in a high degree romantic, and his mannerisms tending towards the monotonous. They were the paintings of a poet; and his poetry is that of a painter. While some of his poetry, like "The Blessed Damozel," his most characteristic piece, appeared early in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856) and "The Germ," he published no book before 1861, when his translations from the early Italian poets gave evidence that, as a translator, he was unique and unapproached. Bizarre circumstances, connected with his grief for the death of his wife, delayed the appearance of his collected sonnets and other verses till 1870, when the work excited enthusiasm among all who desired some new thing in poetry; while certain mannerisms of slight importance spoiled the pleasure of others, and the choice of themes in two or three cases offended the precise. Indeed, the sonnet has no wide popular appeal, and the sequence styled "The House of Life," with its kind of mysticism proved nearly as puzzling, in another way, as the sonnets of Shakespeare. The pictorial and visionary beauty and the novel harmonies of the verse, could not but be admired. The ballads were too artificial for the ballad farm, which is nothing if not simple, though the ballads also have Rossetti's special note and impress, his colour, passion, mystery, and romance. Rossetti, after many years, vexed by insomnia and by sleepy drugs, died in 1882. It is not easy to say whether he was fortunate or unfortunate in that the newness of his manner had been to some extent anticipated, through the delay of his own poems, by the not dissimilar newness of his sister Christina, and of Swinburne. Their works made some aspects of his manner seem not so new, and at the same time not so likely to deter by entire unfamiliarity of tone.

William Morris.

A younger associate of Rossetti was William Morris, educated at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. His Muse was "pre-Raphaelite" and mediaeval in his early prose stories in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856), and his later fictions, in the same archaic and fantastic manner (there were seven of them between 1889 and 1898), never could wholly recapture the magic of "The Hollow Land" of his undergraduate days. It is even the author's opinion that Morris never, in his voluminous later poetry, reached the same level of original effect as in several poems in his "Defence of Guenevere," published when his age was 24, in 1858. This opinion can scarcely be the result of "ossification of the intellect," which seldom sets in when the critic is an undergraduate, and is eagerly expecting a new poem from a favourite author. That poem, "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867), was, to some devotees of "The Defence of Guenevere," a disappointment. The vigour and melancholy of "The Haystack in the Floods," and "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," and "The Sailing of the Sword," and the unanalysable magic of "The Blue Closet" and "The Wind," were not in "Jason," and could not be, and never will be anywhere again. In the earlier book the young poet had caught a rare element in mediaeval romance and song, a vague but poignant sense of colour and yearning and mystery, not to be defined in prose, and scarcely, except perhaps in "Sir Galahad," apprehended by Tennyson. We were carried again into such chambers as that wherein—

Beside the bed there was a stone
Corpus Christi written thereon;

or we were brought face to face with some forgotten tragedy of the Hundred Years' War, and saw the true lovers and the parting that they had beside the haystack in the floods, such dull grey floods in a dull green land as Shelley saw in fact, and recognized with terror that he had seen before—in vision.

The new poem, "Jason," retold, with an approach to Chaucer's manner in versification and in mediaeval tone, the immortal pre-Homeric story of the adventure of the Fleece of Gold. The poem, in rhymed decasyllabic couplets, with songs interspersed, should be compared with the ancient poems on the subject, especially with the "Argonautica" of Apollonius Rhodius. Morris had succeeded in telling of the love of Medea and the adventures of the heroes, in the tone of romance, with "abundant fluency, distinctness, and distinction". He had already in hand many of the tales in "that ocean of the sea of stories," "The Earthly Paradise" in four volumes (1868-1870). Of the twenty-four tales half are from classical, half from romantic sources. To some readers the opening, the adventure of English voyagers of the time of Edward III., who find the Earthly Paradise, is more congenial, the heroes being men of this world, than the languor which seems to hang over the personages in the tales of Lotusland. The tales are more like work in tapestry than in painting; the manner tends to monotony; we need a wind from the wings of the Muse of Homer. Morris called himself "the idle singer of an empty day". No man was more industrious, not only in his great poetic task, but in Icelandic studies,—hence the ringing anapæsts of his "Sigurd the Volsung"—in study of the arts of the Middle Ages; in manufacture and sale of objects of household decoration, and of furniture, in glass for church windows, and in printing. Coming into close touch with artisans and labourers, and being more and more impressed by the hideousness of their modern conditions of life, and by the contrasted mindless luxury of many of the rich, he founded a social democratic league, tersely described as meant "to blow the guts out of everybody". The beauty and happy æsthetic simplicity of the society which is to follow after this initial process he described in "News from Nowhere," and he chanted for the toilers in "Poems by the Way". Not for the people, perhaps, in fact for few, he produced translations of the Volsunga Saga, combining the fragments from Icelandic prose and poetry about that glorious tragic fable; and also rendered the Saga of "Grettir the Strong" and others, into an English of his own, with archaicisms of various ages blended. His verse translation of "Beowulf" is obscure, owing to his effort to find living words in the form of their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. These things, and even the series of his tales, such as "The Story of the Glittering Plain," and "The Roots of the Mountains," are delightful to the few but "caviare to the general". In things æsthetic, literary, and revolutionary, the idle singer of an empty day has been a most active and enduring influence.[1]

It has been said of Morris that he is "the most Homeric" of English poets. Despite the excellence of his fighting scenes, as in "The Story of Sigurd the Volsung," and the interest in the details of the arts and crafts which he shares with Homer, he has neither the strength nor the simplicity nor the speed of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," nor the delicate power in the drawing of character, nor the unconscious magic of the Achæan "Father of the Rest". Indeed no English poetry after "Beowulf" is, or in any way could be, Homeric.

Swinburne.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, of an old Northumbrian family, which, according to the poet's verses, had suffered in the cause of Mary Stuart and of the last Stuarts, was born in 1837, the eldest son of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane Ashburnham. He was educated at Eton, where, as he tells us, Charles Lamb led him to study the early dramatists. When he was aged 12 he composed a tragedy in imitation of Cyril Tourneur's works ("The Atheist's Tragedy," "The Revenger's Tragedy"), but exceeding greatly their average of rapes and murders. The choice of themes, and of the model, argues unsurpassed precocity—among other things. Many of Swinburne's lyrics

Sang themselves to him in class time,
When idle of hand as of tongue.

He went up to Balliol, where he took no part whatever in the sports and amusements of the College, and appears to have lived in the society of Mr. T. H. Green (later the critic of Hume, and exponent of Hegel), and of Mr. John Nichol, later Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow. Swinburne obtained the Taylor Scholarship in Modern Languages, open to the whole University, and like Shelley and Landor, but not for the same sort of reasons, left Oxford without entering the Final Schools. He made the acquaintance at Oxford of Morris' Burne-Jones, and Dante Rossetti, who were painting on the ceiling of the Union the romantic pictures which instantly vanished away owing to some defect in the medium employed. Swinburne must already have had an extensive and peculiar knowledge of literature. In his last year as an undergraduate he began his play of "Chastelard," published in 1865, and he was contributing to "The Spectator" some of his poems including "Faustine". He must already have been the master of his rapid, ringing, and infinitely varied metres; his blank verse, taste, and manner were already themselves in his neglected volume of two plays, "The Queen Mother" (Catherine de Medici) and "Rosamund" (Fair Rosamund) (1860), and he had made an intimate study of the manners and absence of morals at the Court of the Valois. He had the cruelty to poison Chicot, who, in Dumas, survives immortally. In 1865 appeared "Atalanta in Calydon," a small quarto with a decorative white cloth binding. The poem at once swept every young reader off his feet by the wonderfully original and novel metres of the choruses, and by the remarkable beauty of the blank verse, which was entirely independent of the then reigning influence of Tennyson. Swinburne was indeed an "inventor of harmonies," and if his persons were not strictly Greek, the verdict of youth was that they were something much better! The action of the tragedy, the avenging by Althæa of her brothers on their slayer, her son, was more in the Germanic than the Greek taste, so here we had a "Revenger's Tragedy" wholly unlike that of Cyril Tourneur, and dignified by the beautiful figure of the maiden Atalanta.

It is probable that "Atalanta" remains Swinburne's masterpiece in poetry; but, owing to its classical character, it did not achieve the instantaneous popularity of his "Poems and Ballads" of 1866. Here was a nest of singing birds of every note, from the sonorous splendour of "The Triumph of Time," in a new stanza already employed in "Atalanta," to "The Garden of Proserpine" (in the measure, improved, of Keats's "Some drear-nighted December") and "The Hymn to Proserpine" with the surge and reflux of its anapæsts, and "Dolores" in a measure which Mr. Chivers, an American poet, had already used, with a poor ha'porth of sense to a monstrous deal of sound. Some of the subjects ("very curious and disgusting") and some of the sentiments (distinctly anticlerical, to state it mildly) were unfavourably criticized, not unnaturally, and the volume was transferred from Mr. Moxon, long the poets' publisher, to Messrs. Chatto & Windus.[2] But most of Swinburne's readers, at Oxford at least, were quite-indifferent as to the nature of his opinions and sentiments, which were suspected to be, in Lamb's words, "only his fun". He was staunch to them, however, always, both in prose and poetry; indeed, whatever be the subject of his prose, he usually gets in hits at the clergy of all denominations, "The blood on the hands of the King, and the lie on the lips of the priest". He also attacks Carlyle, in and out of season, and is severe on a race of reptiles unnamed who haunt his imagination. Meanwhile his "Chastelard" had not the attraction of his lyrics. "Bothwell," the second in the trilogy of Queen Mary, was of excessive length, though the natural limit of a play is almost as much defined as that of a sonnet; and the last of the trilogy, "Mary Beaton" was rather too daring in contradiction of historic fact. Mistress Beaton was not in love with Chastelard any more than Queen Mary was. She did not vengefully pursue her mistress to Fotheringay, but married Ogilvy of Boyne, when Lady Jane Gordon (in love with Ogilvy) married the Earl of Bothwell, who was in love with her, never with the Queen.

In his poem of farewell to the Queen of Scots, Swinburne sang of her eyes as "blue," a curious error to make after so many years of study. "Songs before Sunrise" were often of great technical—beauty, abounding in the old political enthusiasms and aversions; while lovers of poetry almost wished, with all respect, that the applause of Victor Hugo could be "taken as read," with the panegyrics of babies, and the abuse of "Bonaparte the Bastard". The tragedy "Erechtheus" more closely conformed to the early Greek model than "Atalanta," but the subject was of inferior interest, and what FitzGerald, speaking of Tennyson's later poems, called "the old champagney flavour" was, in the choruses, less exhilarating. Narrative was not the poet's forte, he was too ebullient, and neither "Tristram" (in rhymed heroic couplets) nor "Balin and Balan" (in the stanza of'"The Lady of Shalott") was on a level with the early triumphs. Three or four later volumes of verse were marked by the tour de force of using lines of extraordinary length; the skill never failed the poet, what failed more and more was the interest of his readers. The generation which first welcomed him had grown grey, it may be said, and cold to new poetry, but it did not appear that the new generation was warmer. In his delight in the sea, tempest, frost and fire, and all meteoric forces and elemental things, Swinburne resembled Shelley, but Shelley's music is more spontaneous and of a more natural charm than Swinburne's, who relied so much on "apt alliteration's artful aid," and on double rhymes. His characters, in play and narrative poetry, do not dwell in the memory like the creations of great tragedians and narrators; they are rather sonorous than sympathetic, more "heroic" than human. Queen Mary and her Maries did not speak in Swinburne's tones, but like women of this world. "Before his fortieth year," Mr. Gosse informs us, "there had set in a curious ossification of Swinburne's intellect." But this appears merely to mean that he saw no merit in Ibsen, Stevenson, Dostoieffsky. As to Ibsen, it was not likely that he should see any merit; as to the others, most ageing men rather shun new novelists, there is nothing "curious" in that; while with his "hostility to Zola" it is easy to sympathise. The ossification left him as exuberant as ever in his old tastes, which included all that is best in the literature of the world, and as vehement in the old way on the old themes. But if, by forty, he "had done his do" in Cromwell's phrase, the phenomenon is usual among poets, "the new wine is best," with most of them, and perhaps none, save Scott, has ever been able to turn with success to an entirely fresh field.

As a critic, Swinburne had a transcendent knowledge of literature, and a power of appreciation only rivalled by Charles Lamb; but whether he loved or hated an author, his language was certainly too violent in praise or dispraise. His essay on Wordsworth and Byron, and incidentally on Matthew Arnold, contains many things that are true, and needed to be said, but their truth would not be less apparent if the critic did not speak in the tones of a demoniac, and write sentences longer, and less easily to be construed, than those of Clarendon. Of his prose works the "George Chapman," "Essays and Studies," "Note on Charlotte Brontë," "Study of Shakespeare," and "Miscellanies," may all be read with pleasure, instruction, and gratitude, though here and there with surprise and regret. The vehemence and turbulence appear almost incompatible with the possession of humour, of which, none the less, whether in Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, or the Bab Ballads, Swinburne had a very keen appreciation. Humour was not conspicuous in his book of parodies, "Cap and Bells," and memory recalls no amusing comic relief in his tragedies. But he must have meant to-be amusing when he said that "in all things he desired to preserve the golden mean of scrupulous moderation". There is somewhat lacking to that remarkable genius of almost the last true English poet; we can but say "he was born to be so". As English in heart he was as Shakespeare, but a patriot need not have insulted the enemies of his country, especially, in one instance, when they were Republicans.

One field in which he worked industriously has yet to be mentioned, his punctual and frequent celebration of the recently dead. Of his many elegies that on Charles Baudelaire is perhaps the best, but it attains not unto "Lycidas," "Adonais," and "Thyrsis".

Poetic Underwoods.

There was, in the age of the great poets of the early nineteenth century, a considerable growth of underwood. Among the more conspicuous plants are Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore. Campbell (1777-1844) was born and bred at Glasgow. His first verses, "The Pleasures of Hope," in rhyming heroic couplets, appeared in a poetic dearth (1799) and were fair samples of a kind of poetry which was near its death. His "Gertrude of Wyoming" was pathetic (1809), few have even heard of his "Pilgrimage of Glencoe," and Campbell lives by short spirited things, "Hohenlinden," "Ye Mariners of England," "Of Nelson and the North," "Lochiel, Lochiel, Beware of the Day," and the longer piece which displays the resolution and fortitude of "The Last Man" in a very pleasing light. Campbell lived by ordinary writing, critical and editorial. He was a scrupulous, almost a timid corrector of his own verses. A draft for, one of his great naval songs, in the library at Abbotsford, is much longer and not nearly so good as the published version. Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) was a man of wealth, and the friend of men of letters, especially of Byron, through as many generations as Nestor reigned over. His "Italy" (1822) se sauve sur les planches, on the plates by Turner.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) had greater intelligence, vivacity, agility, an endearing if trivial lyric note of his own, and plenty of witty banter. His songs were meant to be sung, and were sung to the accompaniment of the piano, or the Harp of Erin. He was born in Dublin, was barely 20 when he translated Anacreon, or the poems that were attributed to Anacreon, while his "Poems by Thomas Little" were more than Anacreontic. A duel with the editor of the "Edinburgh Review," Jeffrey, would have advertised him better if Byron had not spoken of the pistols as leadless; Byron and he, thereafter, became bosom friends (see Byron's Correspondence, in which he tells whom he has been kissing). As the biographer of the noble poet, Moore's asterisks are not often successful in wrapping the facts in a mystery. By "Irish Melodies" (1807) Moore chiefly lives; "The Twopenny Postbag," being "topical" and dealing in Whig witticisms, cannot be popular with an age in which few have read "The Rovers," "The Loves of the Triangles," and the other classical drolleries of the "Anti-jacobin" (mainly by Ellis, Frere, and Canning). Not to have read these is to be deficient in liberal education. "Lalla Rookh," Oriental stories in verse, was welcomed almost as eagerly as Byron's "Giaour," "Lara," and similar romances of the land of the cypress and myrtle. The "Life of Byron" (1830) was also, though hampered by disputes and the burning of Byron's Memoirs, a great success, but neither then nor now can a complete view of Byron's life be given. Moore enjoyed his reputation and social opportunities in his own day, but the competition of the great contemporary and of later poets has injured his laurels.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) was at the opposite pole from Moore as a man and a poet. Educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke, Oxford, he made poetry his main object in a lonely and dissatisfied life, always struggling with a chaotic tragedy in the most sombre Elizabethan manner, "Death's Jest Book, or the Fool's Tragedy". He could not satisfy himself with it; chaotic it remains, but it contains beautiful passages, and, among other admirable lyrics, he produced—

If there were Dreams to sell,
What would you buy?

His letters, though frequently morbid, are often interesting. He died abroad, dubiously sane. What is poetic in the mass of Beddoes's writings is true poetry.

It is not possible here to do more than mention Thomas Hood (1799-1845) whose abundant animal spirits and puns were, and if any one cares to look into his facetious works still are, highly entertaining. His "Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" is in a serious vein, and though it has much charm, it never was appreciated. "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs" made for him a name by their pathos, while his character, his fortitude, and irrepressible spirits, not to be subdued by hack-work and misfortune, made him an honour to his profession.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839, Eton and Cambridge) is remembered for his lively and adroit occasional verses, more than for his essay in the grotesque and terrible, "The Red Fisherman". Praed was certainly the foremost writer of vers de société of his day, though he was not a Gay or a Prior.