The Poets

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, most of the great poets who had been inspired by the French Revolutionary epoch were dead. Keats had died in Rome in 1821, Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia in 1822, Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824, Scott at Abbotsford in 1832, and Coleridge at Highgate in 1834. Southey was Poet Laureate, although Wordsworth held a paramount place, recognised on all hands as the greatest poet of the day.

The gulf which separates the Southey 1774-1843 of the laureateship from the Southey who presents himself to our judgment to-day is almost impossible to bridge over. Southey, as the average bookman thinks of him now, is the author of a "Life of Nelson" and of one or two lyrics and ballads.[1] The "Life of Nelson" is constantly republished for an age keenly bent on Nelson worship, but for the exacting it has been superseded by at least two biographies from living authors.[2] That Southey should live mainly by a book which was merely a publisher's commission, and not by the works which he and his contemporaries deemed immortal, is one of the ironies of literature. Southey's "Cowper" is a much better biography than his "Nelson," but in Cowper the world has almost ceased to be interested. It does not now read "Table Talk" and "The Task" any more than it reads "Thalaba" and "Madoc," although every cultivated household of sixty years ago could talk freely of these poems. There will probably be a revival of interest in Cowper. It is safe to assume that there will never be a revival of interest in Southey, and that his very lengthy poems are doomed to oblivion.

And yet it is interesting to note where Southey's contemporaries placed him. Shelley thought "Thalaba" magnificent, and its influence was marked in "Queen Mab." Coleridge spoke of its "pastoral charm." Landor found "Madoc" superb. Scott said that he had read it three or four times with ever-increasing admiration. It kept Charles James Fox out of bed till the small hours! But inexorable time has declared that these poems have no permanent place in literature. Time, however, has left us a kindly memory of Southey the man. Sara Coleridge's assertion that he was "on the whole the best man she had ever known," tallies with the judgment of many others of his contemporaries—who did not come into collision with his relentless prejudices.

Relentless prejudice was equally a characteristic of Southey's greater successor as Poet Laureate. William Wordsworth 1770-1850 had written all the poems by which he will live when the Queen came to the throne, but further recognition awaited the author of "Lyrical Ballads" and "Laodamia" in the thirteen years of his life that were yet to come. It was in 1839 that Keble, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, welcomed Wordsworth when he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. with the eulogy that he had "shed a celestial light upon the affections, the occupations and the piety of the poor." In 1842 he obtained an annuity from the Civil List, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as laureate. The mere fact, however, that Wordsworth wrote nothing of importance in the present reign does not permit of his dismissal as a pre-Victorian author. His real influence, splendid and serene, was made upon the age which is passing away.

During the period in which Wordsworth's poems were coming from the press he was scoffed at alike by Byron and by the authors of "Rejected Addresses," and they appealed to a sympathetic audience. Coleridge had, indeed, praised him generously enough, but the author of "The Ode to Duty" knew nothing of the enthusiastic partisanship which was to be his lot in the later years of his life, and for more than a quarter of a century after his death. I have before me two books which will serve to indicate the high-water-mark of Wordsworth's popularity. One is a volume of selections from his poems, which was edited by Mr Matthew Arnold,[3] the other, a volume of Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, which was privately issued to the members. In his little volume of "Selections" Mr Arnold, then recognised on all hands as our most important living critic, insisted upon Wordsworth's pre-eminence in poetry, placing him indeed on a level with Shakspere and Milton, and assigning to Byron and Shelley a secondary rank.

Mr Arnold, as events proved, only echoed a pervading sentiment. The Wordsworth Society was founded, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of St Paul's, the Lord Chief Justice of England, the then American Minister—Mr Lowell—and a number of distinguished literary men, among its members. The Transactions of that Society give evidence that among the thoughtful men and women of the last decade Wordsworth was by far the strongest influence, that he was not merely a literary tradition, but that he was a vital force in the minds and hearts of nearly all the most interesting people of the period. Students of to-day, however, will be well content to read Wordsworth only in Matthew Arnold's "Selections." Here they will find him as a sonneteer proclaiming liberty with scarcely less zeal and power than Milton. They will find him as the sympathetic friend of the poor and of the oppressed. To be dead to the charm of Matthew Arnold's "Selections from Wordsworth" is to care nothing for poetry. To appreciate with any measure of enthusiasm the twelve volumes of Wordsworth's collected writings is equally to have one's sense of true poetry deadened and destroyed. We have no time now for "The Excursion" and "The Prelude." We have less for Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" and "The Borderers." For his copious prose moralizings one has no toleration whatever.

It is not easy to judge whether Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892 will ever cease to retain the very wide hold upon the public which was his for at least thirty years prior to his death, and which is his to-day. The poems of Tennyson might be read by succeeding generations of Englishmen if only for their exquisite purity of style. Music he has also in abundance. In "Harold," "Queen Mary," and his other plays there is no great gift of characterisation, and these assuredly will go the way of Southey's more ambitious poems. But in "Maud" Tennyson caught the social aspiration of his time with singular insight. The world, he pleaded—and England in particular—was given over to money-getting. The capitalist was more tyrannical than the old, expiring slave-owner. Even peace was a mere word. There was a worse tyranny than that which left men for dead on the battle-field. There was the tyranny which ground them to dust for a bare pittance in mill and factory. Tennyson never wrote with greater force or with more perfect dramatic and lyric art, and his poem is as striking and effective to-day as at the time of its publication in 1855.

Lord Tennyson—for the Poet Laureate accepted a peerage in 1890—won the hearts of a wider audience by "In Memoriam," and of a still larger one by "The Idylls of the King." "In Memoriam," a lengthy elegy on his college friend, Arthur Hallam, touched the great religious public of England. The poem reflected a certain transcendentalism of view which was fast becoming fashionable.

was, in fact, more and more the prevailing tone among all phases of Protestantism where a few years earlier the exact opposite had been insisted upon.

One of the most agreeable pictures which our literary period affords is offered by the friendship between Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. The two men were not seldom compared; each had his partisans, and each his enthusiastic disciples. Neither from a social nor from a literary point of view would they seem to have had much in common. Browning was a regular diner-out, he appeared systematically at every picture-gallery, and at every public entertainment, and in all these things he was keenly interested: he loved society. Lord Tennyson, on the other hand, lived a retired life in one or other of his country houses. He was morbidly sensitive to the attentions of the crowd, and amusing stories are told of his desire to avoid the "vulgar" gaze. Considered as literary men, the contrast between these poets was greater. Tennyson's language was dainty, simple, full of grace; his characters monotonous, lacking in vigour. Browning wrote with rugged force, and sometimes with an obscurity which left the reader bewildered. But his gift of characterisation was superb, and his men and women for individuality are comparable only to those of Shakspere. The hearts of all of us go out to Tennyson when we think of the music of his verses, of his gifts of natural description, his fine and captivating imagination; but our hearts and our intellects go out to Browning, as to one who has enshrined our best thoughts, who has touched all our deepest emotions. It is true that half of Browning's sixteen volumes are flatly incomprehensible to the majority of us; but the other half are equal in bulk to the whole of Lord Tennyson's writings, and quite free from any suspicion of obscurity. The "Ring and the Book" is not obscure. It is an exciting story, dramatically told. So also are the poems called "Men and Women," and the "Dramatic Idyls." "Luria," "In a Balcony," "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," are as readable as railway novels. And yet Browning had, and has, none of the popularity of Tennyson. The one writer sold by thousands, and his financial reward was probably unprecedented in poetry; the other had but a small audience, an audience which never approached to one-third of his rival's. Notwithstanding all this, it is pleasing to note that the two poets loyally esteemed one another, as the dedication of some of their books conspicuously proves.

To write thus early of Robert Browning 1812-1889 is to anticipate in the literary record. "Pauline," the poet's first poem, was published, it is true, in 1833; and that and successive poems were accepted by good critics as the work of a true poet. Nevertheless, Browning had to fight his way as no poet of equal merit has ever had to do, and it was very late indeed in the Victorian epoch that he became more than the poet of a limited circle. One there was, certainly, who appreciated his work from the first with no common fervour, for the world has long been familiar with the statement that a reference by Elizabeth Barrett in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" first brought the two poets together in 1845—

They were married a year later. As exemplifying the condescension of their earlier contemporaries it is interesting to note Wordsworth's observation on the event—and Wordsworth had no humour—"So, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together! Well, I hope they may understand each other—nobody else could!" Lord Granville, who was staying in Florence when a son was born to the poets there in 1849, was still more amusing although equally uncritical. "Now there are not two incomprehensibles but three incomprehensibles," he said.

It cannot be charged against Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806-1861 that she was in the least incomprehensible. Her "Cry of the Children," "Cowper's Grave," and "Aurora Leigh," have the note of extreme simplicity. Nor is obscurity a characteristic of "Sonnets from the Portuguese," which were not translations, but so named to disguise a wife's devotion to her husband. "Aurora Leigh" she styled a "novel in verse," and it was in fact a very readable romance, marked by that zest for social reform which characterised the period.[4] "The most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered," she wrote of it.

After the marriage the pair lived principally at Florence. In their Florentine home—Casa Guidi—"Aurora Leigh," and "Casa Guidi Windows" were written, and here Mrs Browning died in June 1861. One may still see the house upon which the Florentine municipality has inscribed a tablet in gratitude for the "golden ring" of poetry with which the enthusiastic woman poet had attempted to unite England and Italy.

Another great Florentine by adoption, Walter Savage Landor 1775-1864, came to live near the Brownings. His rugged nature must have been not a little soothed by the gentle little woman with "a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl." Landor was educated at Rugby, at Ashbourne, and at Trinity College, Oxford. From Rugby he was removed to avoid expulsion, and at Oxford he was rusticated. All this was the outcome of an excitable temperament, which led in later life to domestic complications, and to exile from his family in Florence. It found no reflection in his many beautiful works. As a poet, however, Landor holds no considerable rank, although here placed among them. "Gebir" was published in 1798 and "Count Julian" in 1812. Both these lengthy poems have received the rapturous praise of authoritative critics, De Quincey even declaring that Count Julian was a creation worthy to rank beside the Prometheus of Æschylus and Milton's Satan. Southey insisted indeed that Landor had written verses "of which he would rather have been the author than of any produced in our time." But Landor's poems, although obtainable in his collected works, and published in selections, command no audience to-day. With his prose the case is otherwise. There is little in the six volumes of "Imaginary Conversations," or in the two volumes of "Longer Prose Works," that does not merit attention alike for style and matter. "Give me," he says in one of his prefaces, "ten accomplished men for readers and I am content." Landor has all accomplished men for readers now. And all are at one with the critic who said that, "excepting Shakspere, no other writer has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature." Mr Swinburne's expression of veneration is well known.

The connecting link between Landor and his young admirer is sufficiently apparent. In genuine accomplishment, the imaginative literature of our era has produced no one comparable to Landor, save only Algernon Charles Swinburne1837- . Mr Swinburne has written well in several languages other than his own. In his own he has written tragedies of wider purpose than those of Tennyson, of equal insight with those of Browning. He has written noble sonnets, lyrics of exquisite melody, and one poem, "Ave atque Vale," which takes rank among the imperishable elegies of our literature. He has abundant spontaneity and a marvellous gift of rhythm. Added to all this, he is a critic of almost unequalled learning and distinction. He was the first to give adequate recognition to the poetic genius of Matthew Arnold and Emily BrontË. He knows Elizabethan literature with remarkable thoroughness, and he knows the literature of many ages and many lands better than most of the professors. His appreciation of Charles Lamb endears him to English readers, and his eulogies of Victor Hugo command the respect of Frenchmen. A great poet and a great prose writer, Mr Swinburne is perhaps the most distinguished literary figure of our day. Only when in the distant years his country has lost him, will a great folly be generally recognised. Why, it will be asked, did we not spontaneously call for him—arch democrat and arch rebel though he may have been—as the only possible successor to Lord Tennyson as Poet Laureate?

It has been said that Mr Swinburne was the first to recognise the great poetical gifts of Matthew Arnold 1822-1888. Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1867,[5] he remarked that the fame of Mr Matthew Arnold had for some years been almost exclusively the fame of a prose writer. "Those students," he continued, "could hardly find hearing, who with all esteem and enjoyment of his essays ... retained the opinion that, if justly judged, he must be judged by his verse and not by his prose." The view that Arnold excelled as a prose writer continued to hold sway for many years after Mr Swinburne wrote, and it was current up to the date of Arnold's death. "Literature and Dogma" and "God and the Bible," the former of which first appeared in 1873, excited an extraordinary amount of attention, and helped largely to modify the religious beliefs of many men and women now rapidly approaching middle age. The son of a famous clergyman, Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Matthew Arnold was a product of that Broad Church movement which Dr Arnold had helped largely to inspire. A fellow-pupil of Dr Stanley, Dean of Westminster, Arnold went further than the Dean in his opposition to supernaturalism in religion, though he stopped short of the fiery antagonism which another eminent Anglican churchman, Bishop Colenso, displayed towards the miraculous stories of the Old Testament. But far more than Stanley or Colenso did he influence the Protestant Christianity of his day. This, however, scarcely enters into the discussion of Matthew Arnold the poet. More akin to that side of Arnold's life is his literary criticism. For many years he held in this field a well nigh undisputed throne. For a time he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. But his influence came mainly through a volume called "Essays in Criticism" (1865), of which it is not too much to say that the paper entitled "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," gave a new impulse to all students of books. Here and elsewhere Arnold emphasised the opinion that not only a fine artistic instinct but a vast amount of knowledge, admitting of comparisons, is necessary as the equipment of a critic. Criticism he defined as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." Matthew Arnold had other claims as a prose writer. His appeal for the study of Celtic literature initiated and encouraged a revival of learning in Wales and in Ireland; and his books and essays on Education—for his main income for many years was derived from his salary as an Inspector of Schools—did much to further the cause which his brother-in-law, Mr W. E. Forster, began with the great Education Act of 1870.

But it is as a poet, as Mr Swinburne foretold, that Matthew Arnold lives in literature. It is strange to some of us to note how largely the bulk of his prose work has dropped out of the memory of the younger generation. The diligent collector possesses some forty-five volumes of Mr Arnold's writings; but although there has been a cheap reprint of many of these, it is only by his collected poems that he is widely known to-day. Mr Swinburne, in the essay to which I have referred, tells of the joy with which, as a schoolboy, he came upon a copy of "Empedocles on Etna." He must then have been about fifteen years of age, as "Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems by A" was published in 1852. It contained "Tristram and Iseult," "Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Obermann,'" and many now accepted favourites. "The Strayed Reveller" by "A" was a still earlier volume of anonymous verse (1849); and, in 1853, "Poems" by Matthew Arnold made the poet known by name to a small circle. A substantial recognition as a poet did not however fall to Matthew Arnold while he lived. His career is, indeed, a striking example of the fact that our views of contemporary literature require to be revised every decade. Ten years ago everyone was discussing Matthew Arnold's views concerning Isaiah and St Paul, and the Nonconformists, whom he chaffed good-humouredly, have reconstructed many of their beliefs through a study of his works. People were excited by his views on education and by his views on literature, but not by his poetry. To-day his poetry is all of him that remains, and its charm is likely to soothe the more strenuous minds among us for at least another generation, and perhaps for all time.

In "Thyrsis," a striking elegy on Arthur Hugh Clough1819-1861, Arnold struck a note which has only Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais" to call forth comparisons. Clough was not a Keats, but he was a more considerable personage than Milton's friend, and indeed he has been persistently underrated by many men of letters. Not indeed by all. "We have a foreboding," said Mr Lowell, "that Clough will be thought a hundred years hence, to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies of the period in which he lived." Clough was the son of a cotton merchant of Liverpool, and he was a pupil of Dr Arnold at Rugby. He gained a Balliol scholarship, and went into residence in 1837. The coming years brought doubts and distractions, religious and political, and Clough parted from Oxford. His most famous poem, "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," was published in 1848. In 1852 he sailed to Boston in the same ship that carried Thackeray and Lowell. Emerson, who had met him in England, welcomed him there. Travelling through Europe for his health, he died of paralysis in Florence in 1861.[6]

The catalogue of great English poets of the period is completed with the names of Rossetti and Morris. Perhaps there is no more romantic figure in modern literature than Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882, although he has suffered cruelly from the biographer. His father, Gabriele, was an Italian exile, a critic of Dante, a teacher of Italian in London. His mother was a sister of the notorious Polidori, whose charlatanry is remembered wherever an interest in Lord Byron prevails.

The younger Rossetti had relatives—a brother, William Michael, who has written verses, criticisms, and a ponderous biography of Gabriel; and a sister, Maria Francesca Rossetti 1827-1876, whose "Shadow of Dante" makes good reading for admirers of the great Florentine, and, indeed, may be recommended to every English student of Dante. Another sister, Christina Georgina Rossetti 1830-1894, wrote many books. She will live by her "Goblin Market" (1862), and by numerous short poems. Books of the type of "Called to be Saints" and "The Face of the Deep: A Commentary on the Revelation," have also won her much affection and admiration from religious sympathisers. She was not responsible for "Maude" and "New Poems," inadequate works which her brother thought fit to publish after her death. They are practically worthless.

Dante Rossetti was a considerable painter as well as a poet. His name is written large in that pre-Raphaelite movement which gave him for associates Mr Holman Hunt and Sir John Millais. The movement, which had Mr John Ruskin for its literary champion, when reduced to simple statement, meant a harking back to early mediÆval art. Sir John Millais and Mr Holman Hunt speedily abandoned this position, and Rossetti himself was never a pre-Raphaelite in any real sense. The pre-Raphaelites issued in 1850 a journal under the editorship of Rossetti's brother, and to the Germ, as it was called, Rossetti contributed his poem, "The Blessed Damozel," and a story, "Hand and Soul." To the Germ also, Thomas Woolner (1825-1892), the sculptor, contributed the poems of "My Beautiful Lady."

One epoch in the life of Rossetti was his introduction to Mr Ruskin, and another was his first acquaintance with William Morris. Ruskin bought his pictures with characteristic generosity, and further assisted Rossetti to publish "The Early Italian Poets" (1861), afterwards reprinted as "Dante and his Circle" (1874). William Morris introduced Rossetti to his Oxford friends, including Mr Swinburne, and to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, in which many of his finest poems were published. After his wife's death, from an overdose of laudanum in 1862, Rossetti moved to Queen's House, Cheyne Walk, where for a time he had for associates in payment of rent Mr Swinburne and Mr George Meredith, though the latter never actually lived in the house. From that time to his death he published many important poems—ballads of singular power like "The White Ship," "The King's Tragedy," and "Sister Helen," and the many splendid sonnets of "The House of Life." The two volumes of Rossetti's collected works must always command readers. Rossetti died at Birchington-on-Sea, and a simple tomb in the churchyard marks his grave.

The name of William Morris1834-1896 closes the list of Victorian poets of the first rank. Morris was as versatile as Rossetti. He touched many branches of Art with remarkable success. Now he was designing wall-papers, and became a successful manufacturer in this branch of commerce: now he was indefatigable in printing notable books in English literature from a type which he had himself selected. The wall-paper has given a new direction to the decoration of English houses, and the Kelmscott Press has added many beautiful books to our libraries, and given an impetus to a revival of taste in printing. This was but a part of Morris's life. Although a rich man, he was a vigorous lecturer on behalf of Socialism, and wrote many books, such as, for example: "The Dream of John Ball" (1888), and "News from Nowhere" (1891), in support of his ideals. From the appearance of his "Defence of Guenevere" (1858), and "Life and Death of Jason" (1867), he was always publishing, and his translations from Homer, Virgil, and Scandinavian literature make a small library by themselves. But a practical handbook to Victorian literature needs but to mention one of his books. "The Earthly Paradise" (1868-70), will live as long as a love of good story-telling remains to us. The tales are told by twenty-four travellers who desire to find the earthly paradise, and the book opens as do the Canterbury Tales with a Prologue. The lyrical introduction is one of the most quotable things in our later literature:—

William Morris has not seldom been confused with a writer with whom he had nothing in common but the name. Sir Lewis Morris1833-, a Welsh squire, and candidate for Parliament, has stood for convention as decisively as William Morris has stood against it. His "Songs of Two Worlds" (1871-5), and "Epic of Hades" (1876), brought him a considerable popularity, which "A Vision of Saints," and later books have not been able to maintain. Another literary knight of our time who has secured a large share of public attention through his verse is Sir Edwin Arnold1832-, whose "Light of Asia" interpreted to many the story of Buddha's career. A poem upon Christ and Christianity "The Light of the World," owed the fact of its smaller success to the greater familiarity of the public with its main incidents. Sir Edwin Arnold has won other laurels as a traveller and as a journalist.

Some of the best poetry of the era has been produced by writers whose principal achievements are in the realm of prose. The BrontËs, Charles Kingsley, George Meredith, and George Eliot—to name but a few—all wrote verse which must ultimately have secured attention had they not made great reputations as novelists.

Assuredly, the three most successful poems in Victorian literature, of that portion of it which is already passing into oblivion, are "Proverbial Philosophy," "Festus," and "Philip Van Artevelde." The "Proverbial Philosophy" of Martin Farquhar Tupper1810-1889 created an excitement in literary and non-literary circles, which it is difficult for the present generation to comprehend. It is true that when it was first published, in 1838, it was greeted by the Athenaeum as "a book not likely to please beyond the circle of a few minds as eccentric as the author's." In spite of this, it sold in thousands and hundreds of thousands; it went through over nine hundred editions in England, and five hundred thousand copies at least were sold in America. It was translated into French, German, and many other tongues; its author was a popular hero, although of his later books, including "Ballads for the Times," "Raleigh, his Life and Death," and "Cithara," the very names are by this time forgotten. Of "Proverbial Philosophy" itself there are few enough copies in demand to-day, and it is difficult for us to place ourselves in the position of those who felt its charm. What to the early Victorian Era was counted for wisdom, and piety, and even for beauty, counts to the present age for mere commonplace verbiage. Tupper's name has taken a place in our language as the contemptuous synonym for a poetaster. "Festus," on the other hand, although not read to-day, has always commanded respectful attention. Its author, Philip James Bailey1816-, wrote "Festus" in its first form, at the age of twenty, and it was published in 1839. The book was enlarged again and again, till it reached to three times its original length. It may be that this enlargement has had something to do with its fate. "Festus" was frequently compared to the best work of Goethe and of Mr Browning. Even a more pronounced recognition accrued to the dramatic poems of Sir Henry Taylor1800-1886, and more particularly to "Philip Van Artevelde" (1834), which was described by the Quarterly Review as "the noblest effort in the true old taste of our English historical drama, that has been made for more than a century," and which attracted the keenest attention of all Sir Henry Taylor's contemporaries. His entertaining "Autobiography" has told us that Taylor, who was an important official at the Colonial Office, knew all the famous men of his time.

Women have occupied no small share in the literary history of the past sixty years, although it is in fiction that their most enduring triumphs have been secured. The most popular women poets, next in order to Mrs Browning, have been Eliza Cook and Jean Ingelow. Eliza Cook1818-1889 wrote for the most part the kind of verses which would now be rejected by the editor of the Poet's Corner of a provincial newspaper. She would be little more than a vague memory, were it not for "The Old Arm-Chair"; but she has other claims to consideration. In the forties and the fifties Eliza Cook's Journal was one of the most prominent publications of the day, and it did much for the cause of literature and philanthropy. Jean Ingelow1820-1897 survived, as did Eliza Cook, to see her verse well-nigh forgotten, and yet it is stated that two hundred thousand copies of her poems have been sold in America alone. Miss Ingelow, who was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, and died in London, will live in anthologies by her ballad, "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire," by a song in "Supper at the Mill," and by sundry short poems.

A certain brighter and more humorous kind of verse had its beginnings with Thomas Hood and the author of "The Ingoldsby Legends." Thomas Hood1798-1845 has endeared himself to the whole reading world by his "Song of the Shirt" (1844); and his "Dream of Eugene Aram" (1829) is not less familiar. But in addition to this he had an abundance of wit and drollery side by side with pathos and tenderness, which will always make a splendid tradition and a great inspiration. Hood was a journalist. His prototype, Richard Harris Barham1788-1845, was an Anglican clergyman. His pseudonym of Thomas Ingoldsby calls up memories of some of the quaintest and drollest verse ever written. "The Ingoldsby Legends" were first contributed to Bentley's Miscellany, and afterwards collected in volumes. "The Jackdaw of Rheims" is the most popular. Barham's once successful novel, "My Cousin Nicholas," is now all but forgotten.

The most famous successors of Hood and Barham have been Calverley and Mr Austin Dobson. Charles Stuart Calverley1831-1884 wrote "Fly Leaves" and "Verses and Translations." Mr Dobson has published, in addition to many valuable prose works, the exquisite "Vignettes in Rhyme" and "Proverbs in Porcelain," which, with Mr Andrew Lang's "Ballades in Blue China," form a dainty contribution to the lighter literature of the epoch.

A determination to say as little as possible concerning writers still young in years, though already famous, will make, it may be, my summary of Victorian poetry seem inadequate to many. Mr Traill, a discerning critic, has specified some hundred or more "minor poets" who flourish to-day! But it cannot be doubted that the minor poet of our era, with his excellent technique, his deep feeling, and his high-minded impulsiveness, is separated by an immense gulf from the minor poet of an earlier period. The Pyes and the Hayleys, who were famous in an age when criticism was less of an art, had little enough of the real poetical faculty. That faculty can scarcely be denied to the hundred or more of living bards who now claim the suffrages of the poetry-loving reader. It cannot be denied also to many men who have passed away during the present era—to Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell in one period, and to Coventry Patmore and James Thomson in another. Alexander Smith1830-1867 was an industrious essayist as well as a poet. Tennyson and Mrs Browning concurred in their esteem of Smith as a poet "whose works show fancy, and not imagination"; and this might with truth be said of too many of the minor bards, and, indeed, constitutes the dividing line. Sydney Yendys, under which pseudonym Sydney Dobell1824-1874 co-operated with Smith in "Sonnets on the War" (1855), was a poet of similar temperament.

Coventry Patmore1823-1896 is known to the many through his "Angel in the House," a poem upon domestic bliss which breathed a note not always sincere, but to which Mr Ruskin assured a certain popularity through effective quotation in his "Sesame and Lilies." A certain ecstatic band of admirers attached more importance to Patmore's "Unknown Eros." These admirers spoilt him by adulation. He probably looked forward with the same keen assurance to the verdict of posterity as did Southey; and posterity it is all but certain will be as ruthless in the one case as in the other.

Patmore's life was one of luxury and independence. Quite the reverse was the fate of James Thomson1834-1882, whose great poem, "The City of Dreadful Night," was published in Mr Charles Bradlaugh's National Reformer in 1874, and not republished as a book until 1880. Thomson had a melancholy career which ended in drink and disaster. He died in University Hospital, London. His "City of Dreadful Night" is peculiarly a reflection of the age that is passing. It secured even during the poet's life the commendation of George Eliot, of George Meredith, and of other critics; and it may yet command a large audience, who breathe the note of pessimism which was always characteristic of the writer:—

A poet whom one names with peculiar reverence is Thomas Aubrey de Vere1814-, the son of Sir Aubrey de Vere, who was also a poet. Aubrey de Vere, the younger, knew and loved Wordsworth, to whom in 1842 he dedicated "The Waldenses: A Lyrical Tale," and yet retains, sixty years later, the most sympathetic interest in modern literary effort. Mr de Vere is an Irishman, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He has written many volumes of poetry and prose, his dramatic poems "Alexander the Great" and "St Thomas of Canterbury" having, no doubt, been largely inspired by the successes of his friend and relative, Sir Henry Taylor, and by his father's brilliant drama, "Mary Tudor." One of his most recent books was a volume of critical essays containing a notable study of Wordsworth.

Irishmen have been fairly conspicuous in the poetry of the epoch, and the term "Celtic Renaissance" has begun to be used hopefully by lovers of Ireland who desire that country to have a literature as distinctly Irish as Scotland has a literature definitely Scottish. Thomas Moore1779-1852 was the pioneer of this movement. He had, it is true, done all his work before the Queen came to the throne, although he lived yet another fifteen years. His "Irish Melodies" began to appear in 1807, "Lalla Rookh" was published in 1817, and the "Life of Byron" in 1830. Moore was as much an inspiration to modern Ireland as Burns to modern Scotland, and the one country holds the name of its poet as reverentially in memory as does the other. Moore, however, lacked the note of passionate sincerity which pertained to Burns; although we may fairly ask what would have been the career of Burns had he been thrown early into the literary and social life of London—the London of Byron's time.

The influence of Moore was strong in Thomas Davis1814-1845 whose "National and Historical Ballads, Songs and Poems" caused so great a ferment in the heart of Young Ireland. Many other Irish writers deserve to be named, such as James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886), Lady Dufferin (1807-1867) and John Banim (1798-1842), who wrote, in conjunction with his brother Michael, some twenty-four volumes of Irish stories and verses. Samuel Lover1797-1868 is best known in England by his romance "Rory O'More" and his ever popular "Handy Andy," but in Ireland he is remembered as a writer of lyrics and ballads of heart-stirring character.

An Irishman by descent, although not by birth, was Edward FitzGerald1809-1883, who was born in Suffolk and lived all his life in the neighbourhood of Woodbridge in that county. FitzGerald's "Letters and Literary Remains" fill three substantial volumes, but he lives for us by his translation or rather paraphrase of the "RubÁyÁt of Omar KhayyÁm of NaishÁpur," which first appeared in 1859. It is generally agreed that FitzGerald, a nineteenth century pagan, always reverently questioning the mystery of existence, superadded his own personal thoughts and feelings to the verses of the old Persian singer. In doing this he touched deeply a certain aspect of the second half of the nineteenth century and founded a cult. FitzGerald's verses, however, have been ardently admired by many who are far from accepting their pessimist view of life.

Hartley Coleridge1796-1849 wrote and published his admirable sonnets before 1837. He was a son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), whose literary remains were edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, a nephew and son-in-law. H. N. Coleridge married the great poet's only daughter, Sara Coleridge1803-1852, who wrote one poem, "Phantasmion," and whose letters throw much light on an important chapter of literary history.

Bryan Waller Procter1787-1874, better known as "Barry Cornwall," was at school with Lord Byron at Harrow. His "Dramatic Scenes," "Marcian Colonna," and "Mirandola" were much talked of in their day. Procter was admired as a poet by Byron, Moore, and other famous contemporaries, but no one reads him now. A happier fate has befallen his daughter, Adelaide Anne Procter1825-1864, whose "Legends and Lyrics" are still widely popular.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed, who wrote much admirable humorous and satirical verse, is not a Victorian author, although his present popularity makes that rather hard to realise. He died in 1839. Richard Hengist Horne1803-1884, on the other hand, although he lived into our time, is now remembered only by his friendship with Mrs Browning and by the humorous freak of publishing his epic "Orion" at a farthing. He was the author of a miracle play entitled "Judas Iscariot," a tragedy entitled "The Death of Marlowe," and many other works.

Another writer of well-nigh forgotten tragedies was Thomas Lovell Beddoes1803-1849, who wrote "The Bride's Tragedy" and "Death's Jest Book." A like extinction, it is to be feared, has befallen Ebenezer Jones and Ebenezer Elliott—the former of whom belonged to that spasmodic school of poets of which Alexander Smith and Philip James Bailey were supposed to be the leaders. Ebenezer Jones 1820-1860 wrote "Studies in Sensation and Event," to which in 1879 his brother, Sumner Jones, attached an interesting biography. There is very genuine poetry in the volume, but it is not likely to be republished. Ebenezer Elliott 1781-1849 had a very different fate. He enjoyed for many years the suffrages of the multitude. His "Corn Law Rhymes" played a considerable part in the political agitation of the period. James Montgomery called him "the poet of the poor." Another writer with a fine democratic impulse was Gerald Massey1828- , who was associated with the Chartist movement, and wrote "Poems and Charms" and "Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love." Another Chartist was Thomas Cooper 1805-1892, who wrote "The Purgatory of Suicides" and many other poems and an entertaining autobiography. Cooper was an active political agitator, and was imprisoned for two years in Stafford gaol for sedition.

A poet who holds a great place in the minds of many is William Barnes 1820-1886, who kept a school for a time in Mr Thomas Hardy's town of Dorchester. He afterwards became a clergyman and rector of Winterbourne-Came. He was a philologist as well as a poet, and published many works on language. His interest for us here is in his "Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect" (1844). Another poet-clergyman of great learning was Robert Stephen Hawker1803-1875 whose work reflects Devonshire and Cornwall as Barnes' reflects Dorsetshire. He wrote the "Song of the Western Men" which he deceived Macaulay into believing to be an old Cornish ballad, and the great historian introduced it into his "History of England" as an example of the excitement caused by the arrest of the seven bishops.[7] Its stirring refrain:—

"And shall Trelawney die, and shall Trelawney die?

Then thirty thousand Cornish boys will know the reason why"