sympathy which led to actual perversion of the truth. On the other hand, Mr. Dowden's critics complained that he glossed over the really difficult points in Shelley's strange history, and was misled by his sympathy into an equal perversion of the truth. Then, besides these two great representatives of the two essentially divergent views of Shelley, there is a host of writers, essayists, poets, and critics of the first water, who have written with more or less acuteness, and more or less diffuseness, on the same subject. Shelley has been pronounced viler and more dangerous than Byron, and has been pictured as a pure and holy being, whose boots Byron was not worthy to black. Every shade of vituperation and praise lies between these extremes. Nor is the battle of the books over. It is very well for Mr. Dowden to write "Last Words" on Shelley, but the last word is not said yet. At this very moment probably there are half-a-dozen writers who believe that they have a fresh view of Shelley to present, and are determined to produce presently an epoch-making book thereon.

Now, what is the plain practical man, the intelligent but unleisured reader, to do amid this babble of tongues? Obviously he cannot for himself sort all the evidence, and study all the books on Shelley, and yet, perhaps, he feels a deep curiosity to know more of that strange and visionary spirit whose winged words have fascinated him. He wants to know what relation his poetry has to the other poetry of his time, and what is the true secret of his wayward life. To such a reader the literary middleman is an ambassador of peace. may not know everything, for we are none of us infallible, not even the youngest of us; but he knows more than the reader who can only take his literary

He

diet by snatches. It is for him to give as fairly as he can the result of his own reading, the impression which a given poet's poetry has had upon him, the general estimate which he has been led to form both of the man and his works. Of course, it may be objected that all the busy man gets from the critic, then, is after all the critic's mere personal view of the matter. But after all that is what the most accomplished critic gives us, and he gives us no more. The worth of his verdict, and the laws by which it is attained, depend on the qualities of his own mind. According to his discernment will be the worth of his judgment; but his own personal judgment is, when all is done, the one gift the critic has to give.

This then is in brief the object of this book. It is to put before the reader in a compact form what can be said of the character and worth of writers who have made English literature glorious. The estimate may be imperfect, the verdict may be wrong: but it will be honestly given, as far as the knowledge and conviction of the writer are concerned; to which it is only necessary to add, that every wise reader will reconsider the verdict for himself, and will, as far as his opportunities allow, avail himself of those legitimate sources of information on which any estimate of any writer must be based. The astonishing cheapness of books puts such sources of information within the reach of almost all to-day, and the process of education will in another generation leave no excuse for those who have not read the great masterpieces of that long line of English writers who have made the nineteenth century famous.

WE

CHAPTER II.

THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE DAWN.

E have seen that in Alexander Pope one great period of English literature found its consumImation and its close. He was the last master of a style of poetry distinguished by a species of hard and artificial brilliance, intellectual rather than emotional, dealing with philosophic niceties rather than the great passions and common thoughts of men, excelling in epigrammatic force and satirical incisiveness, but destitute, or nearly destitute, of tenderness and pathos, and, above all, marked by a total indifference to nature. It is a clipped and gravelled garden in which the poets of Pope's school walk, never in the fresh fields and true presence of nature. Their treatment of love is as artificial as their treatment of nature: it is mere conventional rhodomontade of "Dying swains to sighing Delias." They hear no lark singing at heaven's gate as did Shakespeare, and travel through no morning meadows fresh with dew as did Chaucer.

The childlike simplicity of Chaucer, garrulous, unaffected, bewitching by the magic of an art that scarcely seems to be art at all, was entirely forgotten by the men of the earlier decades of the eighteenth century. The magnificent force of the Elizabethan poets was even abhorrent to them. In Marlowe they

saw nothing but the violent and untrained imagination of a barbarian, and Shakespeare himself was disallowed the full diploma of their approval. Spenser was left in complete obscurity, and the passionate and fanciful lyrics of Elizabethan literature, excelling as they do in the most delicate and tender workmanship of which poetry is capable, were wholly forgotten. Then came the faint signs of a new era, but they were slow and intermittent. There was an interval before the dawn, an interval between the dying of the old and the birth of the new. The voices that heralded the return to nature were solitary voices, like the unaccompanied song of the lark in the gray morning skies, when the light is thickening and before the day has broken. It will be well before passing to the world of modern English to enumerate those who stood upon its threshold, and were its heralds and its architects.

There is, first of all, a group of writers, in which the spirit of Pope's poetry survived, and in whose work the ideals of the didactic school made their last stand Dr. Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes" is a sample of this school. It is a stately and pompous poem, full of careful phrases, polished into epigrammatic force, and not without a certain pathos in its descriptions, which, however, springs largely from what we know of the early struggles of Johnson himself. Young's "Night Thoughts" and Churchill's "Satires" belong to the same school, but still further mark the process of disintegration. The poems of Gray and Collins contain a different element, and in one sense may be said to stand unclassed and isolated. They are among the finest examples we possess of studious, scholarly, exquisite workmanship in poetry. Every word is weighed in

They breathe
They are not

age, but their

the finest balances of judicious criticism, and every phrase is turned with the utmost nicety. the spirit of classic and artistic culture. wholly free from the affectation of their work is so excellent that we are rarely conscious of this defect. Goldsmith reckoned that ten lines of poetry was a good day's work, but Gray calculated that years were well filled in the perfecting of so short a poem as the "Elegy."

Gray is also remarkable for another element which was to be a very striking feature of the new school of poets, viz., a sense of the romantic past. The old wild stories of chivalry and daring fascinated him, as they fatally fascinated Chatterton a little later. In Chatterton indeed we have the first and fullest expression of the romantic element of modern poetry. The old grandeur of phrase which distinguished the Elizabethan writers leaps up again in him, and the stern simplicity and tragic force of the older ballad-writers is again exemplified. And yet another writer who in no small degree helped on the change was James Macpherson, who published his "Ossian" in 1762. To many modern readers "Ossian" seems a wild farrago of formless bombast; but to the men of the latter part of the eighteenth century it meant much. It is known that it powerfully affected Scott, and was to him a valuable stimulus to poetic creation. Wild and chaotic as it was in form, it occasionally reached a grandeur of imagination and largeness of phrase wholly astonishing and new to those who looked upon didactic poetry as the final consummation of all poetic form and utterance. It was steeped in nature, it painted the impressiveness of savage scenery, the lonely vastness of moor and ocean, the broken magnificence of wild sea-coasts, as