part ii

., with Nahum Tate, 1682), as well as _The Medal_ and _Mac

Flecknoe_, marked a new birth of English satire, placing it at once on a level with that of any ancient or modern country. The mixture of deadly good temper, Olympian unfairness, and rhetorical and metrical skill in each of these poems has never been repeated. The presentment of Achitophel, earl of Shaftesbury, in his relations with Absalom Walters and Charles the minstrel-king of Judah, as well as the portraits of Shimei and Barzillai and Jotham, the eminent Whigs and Tories, and of the poets Og and Doeg, are things whose vividness age has never discoloured. Dryden's Protestant arguings in _Religio Laici_ (1682) and his equally sincere Papistical arguings in _The Hind and the Panther_ (1687) are just as skilful. His translations of Virgil and parts of Lucretius, of Chaucer and Boccaccio (_Fables_, 1700), set the seal on his command of his favourite couplet for the higher kinds of appeal and oratory. His _Ode_ on Anne Killigrew, and his popular but coarser _Alexander's Feast_, have a more lyric harmony; and his songs, inserted in his plays, reflect the change of fashion by their metrical adeptness and often thorough-going wantonness. The epithet of "glorious," in its older sense of a certain conscious and warranted pride of place, not in that of boastful or pretentious, suits Dryden well. Not only did he leave a model and a point of departure for Pope, but his influence recurs in Churchill, in Gray, in Johnson and in Crabbe, where he is seen counteracting, with his large, wholesome and sincere bluntness, the acidity of Pope. Dryden was counted near Shakespeare and Milton until the romantic revival renewed the sense of proportion; but the same sense now demands his acknowledgment as the English poet who is nearest to their frontiers of all those who are exiled from their kingdom.

Tragedy.

Otway.

Restoration and Revolution tragedy is nearly all abortive; it is now hard to read it for pleasure. But it has noble flights, and its historic interest is high. Two of its species, the rhymed heroic play and the rehandling of Shakespeare in blank verse, were also brought to their utmost by Dryden, though in both he had many companions. The heroic tragedies were a hybrid offspring of the heroic romance and French tragedy; and though _The Conquest of Granada_ (1669-1670) and _Tyrannic Love_ would be very open to satire in Dryden's own vein, they are at least generously absurd. Their intention is never ignoble, if often impossible. After a time Dryden went back to Shakespeare, after a fashion already set by Sir William Davenant, the connecting link with the older tragedy and the inaugurator of the new. They "revived" Shakespeare; they vamped him in a style that did not wholly perish till after the time of Garrick. _The Tempest_, _Troilus and Cressida_, and _Antony and Cleopatra_ were thus handled by Dryden; and the last of these, as converted by him into _All for Love_ (1678), is loftier and stronger than any of his original plays, its blank verse renewing the ties of Restoration poetry with the great age. The heroic plays, written in one or other metre, lived long, and expired in the burlesques of Fielding and Sheridan. _The Rehearsal_ (1671), a gracious piece of fooling partially aimed at Dryden by Buckingham and his friends, did not suffice to kill its victims. Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, both of whom generally used blank verse, are the other tragic writers of note, children indeed of the extreme old age of the drama. Otway's long-acted _Venice Preserved_ (1682) has an almost Shakespearian skill in melodrama, a wonderful tide of passionate language, and a blunt and bold delineation of character; but Otway's inferior style and verse could only be admired in an age like his own. Lee is far more of a poet, though less of a dramatist, and he wasted a certain talent in noise and fury.

Comedy.

Wycherley.

Restoration comedy at first followed Jonson, whom it was easy to try and imitate; Shadwell and Wilson, whose works are a museum for the social antiquary, photographed the humours of the town. Dryden's many comedies often show his more boisterous and blatant, rarely his finer qualities. Like all playwrights of the time he pillages from the French, and vulgarizes Moliere without stint or shame. A truer light comedy began with Sir George Etherege, who mirrored in his fops the gaiety and insolence of the world he knew. The society depicted by William Wycherley, the one comic dramatist of power between Massinger and Congreve, at first seems hardly human; but his energy is skilful and faithful as well as brutal; he excels in the graphic reckless exhibition of outward humours and bustle; he scavenges in the most callous good spirits and with careful cynicism. _The Plain Dealer_ (1677), a skilful transplantation, as well as a depravation of Moliere's _Le Misanthrope_, is his best piece: he writes in prose, and his prose is excellent, modern and lifelike.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--General Histories: Hallam, _Introduction to the Lit. of Europe_ (1838-1839); G. Saintsbury, _Elizabethan Literature_ (1890), and _History of Literary Criticism_, vol. ii. (1902); W.J. Courthorpe, _History of English Poetry_, vols. i.-v. (1895-1905); J.J. Jusserand, _Histoire litteraire du peuple anglais_, vol. ii. (1904); T. Seccombe and J.W. Allen, _The Age of Shakespeare_ (2 vols., 1903); D. Hannay, _The Later Renaissance_ (1898); H.J.C. Grierson, _First Half of 17th Century_; O. Elton, _The Augustan Ages_ (1899); Masson, _Life of Milton_ (6 vols., London, 1881-1894); R. Garnett, _The Age of Dryden_ (1901); W. Raleigh, _The English Novel_ (1894); J.J. Jusserand, _Le Roman anglais au temps de Shakespeare_ (1887, Eng. tr., 1901); G. Gregory Smith, _Elizabethan Critical Essays_ (2 vols., 1904, reprints and introd.). Classical and Foreign Influences.--Mary A. Scott, _Elizabethan Translations from the Italian_ (bibliography), (Baltimore, 1895); E. Koeppel, _Studien zur Gesch. der ital. Novelle i. d. eng. Litteratur des 16ten Jahrh._ (Strasb., 1892); L. Einstein _The Italian Renaissance in England_ (New York, 1902); J. Erskine, _The Elizabethan Lyric_ (New York, 1903); J.S. Harrison, _Platonism in Eliz. Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries_ (New York, 1903); S. Lee, _Elizabethan Sonnets_ (2 vols., 1904); C.H. Herford, _Literary Relations of England and Germany in 16th Century_; J.G. Underhill, _Spanish Lit. in the England of the Tudors_ (New York, 1899); J.E. Spingarn, _Hist. of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_ (New York, 1899). Many articles in _Englische Studien_, _Anglia_, &c., on influences, texts and sources. See too arts. DRAMA; SONNET; RENAISSANCE. (O. E.*)

V. THE 18TH CENTURY

Social changes.

In the reign of Anne (1702-1714) the social changes which had commenced with the Restoration of 1660 began to make themselves definitely felt. Books began to penetrate among all classes of society. The period is consequently one of differentiation and expansion. As the practice of reading becomes more and more universal, English writers lose much of their old idiosyncrasy, intensity and obscurity. As in politics and religion, so in letters, there is a great development of nationality. Commercial considerations too for the first time become important. We hear relatively far less of religious controversy, of the bickering between episcopalians and nonconformists and of university squabbles. Specialization and cumbrous pedantry fall into profound disfavour. Provincial feeling exercises a diminishing sway, and literature becomes increasingly metropolitan or suburban. With the multiplication of moulds, the refinement of prose polish, and the development of breadth, variety and ease, it was natural enough, having regard to the place that the country played in the world's affairs, that English literature should make its debut in western Europe. The strong national savour seemed to stimulate the foreign appetite, and as represented by Swift, Pope, Defoe, Young, Goldsmith, Richardson, Sterne and Ossian, if we exclude Byron and Scott, the 18th century may be deemed the cosmopolitan age, _par excellence_, of English Letters. The charms of 18th-century English literature, as it happens, are essentially of the rational, social and translatable kind: in intensity, exquisiteness and eccentricity of the choicer kinds it is proportionately deficient. It is pre-eminently an age of prose, and although verbal expression is seldom represented at its highest power, we shall find nearly every variety of English prose brilliantly illustrated during this period: the aristocratic style of Bolingbroke, Addison and Berkeley; the gentlemanly style of Fielding; the keen and logical controversy of Butler, Middleton, Smith and Bentham; the rhythmic and balanced if occasionally involved style of Johnson and his admirers; the limpid and flowing manner of Hume and Mackintosh; the light, easy and witty flow of Walpole; the divine chit-chat of Cowper; the colour of Gray and Berkeley; the organ roll of Burke; the detective journalism of Swift and Defoe; the sly familiarity of Sterne; the dance music and wax candles of Sheridan; the pomposity of Gibbon; the air and ripple of Goldsmith; the peeping preciosity of Boswell,--these and other characteristics can be illustrated in 18th-century prose as probably nowhere else.

But more important to the historian of literature even than the development of qualities is the evolution of types. And in this respect the 18th century is a veritable index-museum of English prose. Essentially, no doubt, it is true that in form the prose and verse of the 18th century is mainly an extension of Dryden, just as in content it is a reflection of the increased variety of the city life which came into existence as English trade rapidly increased in all directions. But the taste of the day was rapidly changing. People began to read in vastly increasing numbers. The folio was making place on the shelves for the octavo. The bookseller began to transcend the mere tradesman. Along with newspapers the advertizing of books came into fashion, and the market was regulated no longer by what learned men wanted to write, but what an increasing multitude wanted to read. The arrival of the octavo is said to have marked the enrolment of man as a reader, that of the novel the attachment of woman. Hence, among other causes, the rapid decay of lyrical verse and printed drama, of theology and epic, in ponderous tomes. The fashionable types of which the new century was to witness the fixation are accordingly the essay and the satire as represented respectively by Addison and Steele, Swift and Goldsmith, and by Pope and Churchill. Pope, soon to be followed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was the first Englishman who treated letter-writing as an art upon a considerable scale. Personalities and memoirs prepare the way for history, in which as a department of literature English letters hitherto had been almost scandalously deficient. Similarly the new growth of fancy essay (Addison) and plain biography (Defoe) prepared the way for the English novel, the most important by far of all new literary combinations. Finally, without going into unnecessary detail, we have a significant development of topography, journalism and criticism. In the course of time, too, we shall perceive how the pressure of town life and the logic of a capital city engender, first a fondness for landscape gardening and a somewhat artificial Arcadianism, and then, by degrees, an intensifying love of the country, of the open air, and of the rare, exotic and remote in literature.

Locke: Addison.

At the outset of the new century the two chief architects of public opinion were undoubtedly John Locke and Joseph Addison. When he died at High Laver in October 1704 at the mature age of seventy-two, Locke had, perhaps, done more than any man of the previous century to prepare the way for the new era. Social duty and social responsibility were his two watchwords. The key to both he discerned in the _Human Understanding_--"no province of knowledge can be regarded as independent of reason." But the great modernist of the time was undoubtedly Joseph Addison (1672-1719). He first left the 17th century, with its stiff euphuisms, its formal obsequiousness, its ponderous scholasticism and its metaphorical antitheses, definitely behind. He did for English culture what Rambouillet did for that of France, and it is hardly an exaggeration to call the half-century before the great fame of the English novel, the half century of the _Spectator_.

Steele.

Addison's mind was fertilized by intercourse with the greater and more original genius of Swift and with the more inventive and more genial mind of Steele. It was Richard Steele (1672-1729) in the _Tatler_ of 1709-1710 who first realized that the specific which that urbane age both needed and desired was no longer copious preaching and rigorous declamation, but homoeopathic doses of good sense, good taste and good-humoured morality, disguised beneath an easy and fashionable style. Nothing could have suited Addison better than the opportunity afforded him of contributing an occasional essay or roundabout paper in praise of virtue or dispraise of stupidity and bad form to his friend's periodical. When the _Spectator_ succeeded the _Tatler_ in March 1711, Addison took a more active share in shaping the chief characters (with the immortal baronet, Sir Roger, at their head) who were to make up the "Spectator Club"; and, better even than before, he saw his way, perhaps, to reinforcing his copious friend with his own more frugal but more refined endowment. Such a privileged talent came into play at precisely the right moment to circulate through the coffee houses and to convey a large measure of French courtly ease and elegance into the more humdrum texture of English prose. Steele became rather disreputable in his later years, Swift was banished and went mad, but Addison became a personage of the utmost consideration, and the essay as he left it became an almost indispensable accomplishment to the complete gentlemen of that age. As an architect of opinion from 1717 to 1775 Addison may well rank with Locke.

Swift.

Arbuthnot.

Bolingbroke.

The other side, both in life and politics, was taken by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), who preferred to represent man on his unsocial side. He sneered at most things, but not at his own order, and he came to defend the church and the country squirearchy against the conventicle and Capel court. To undermine the complacent entrenchments of the Whig capitalists at war with France no sap proved so effectual as his pen. Literary influence was then exercised in politics mainly by pamphlets, and Swift was the greatest of pamphleteers. In the _Journal to Stella_ he has left us a most wonderful portrait of himself in turn currying favour, spoiled, petted and humiliated by the party leaders of the Tories from 1710-1713. He had always been savage, and when the Hanoverians came in and he was treated as a suspect, his hate widened to embrace all mankind (_Gulliver's Travels_, 1726) and he bit like a mad dog. Would that he could have bitten more, for the infection of English stylists! In wit, logic, energy, pith, resourcefulness and Saxon simplicity, his prose has never been equalled. The choicest English then, it is the choicest English still. Dr John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) may be described as an understudy of Swift on the whimsical side only, whose malignity, in a nature otherwise most kindly, was circumscribed strictly by the limits of political persiflage. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), unorthodox as he was in every respect, discovered a little of Swift's choice pessimism in his assault (in _The Fable of the Bees_ of 1723) against the genteel optimism of the _Characteristics_ of Lord Shaftesbury. Neither the matter nor the manner of the brilliant Tory chieftain Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), appears to us now as being of the highest significance; but, although Bolingbroke's ideas were second-hand, his work has an historical importance; his dignified, balanced and decorated style was the cynosure of 18th-century statesmen. His essays on "History" and on "a Patriot King" both disturb a soil well prepared, and set up a reaction against such evil tendencies as a narrowing conception of history and a primarily factious and partisan conception of politics. It may be noted here how the fall of Bolingbroke and the Tories in 1714 precipitated the decay of the Renaissance ideal of literary patronage. The dependence of the press upon the House of Lords was already an anomaly, and the practical toleration achieved in 1695 removed another obstacle from the path of liberation. The government no longer sought to strangle the press. It could generally be tuned satisfactorily and at the worst could always be temporarily muzzled. The pensions hitherto devoted to men of genius were diverted under Walpole to spies and journalists. Yet one of the most unscrupulous of all the fabricators of intelligence, looked down upon as a huckster of the meanest and most inconsiderable literary wares, established his fame by a masterpiece of which literary genius had scarcely even cognizance.

Defoe.

The new trade of writing was represented most perfectly by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), who represents, too, what few writers possess, a competent knowledge of work and wages, buying and selling, the squalor and roguery of the very hungry and the very mean. From reporting sensations and chronicling _faits divers_, Defoe worked his way almost insensibly to the Spanish tale of the old Mendoza or picaresque pattern. _Robinson Crusoe_ was a true story expanded on these lines, and written down under stress of circumstance when its author was just upon sixty. Resembling that of Bunyan and, later, Smollett in the skilful use made of places, facts and figures, Defoe's style is the mirror of man in his shirt sleeves. What he excelled in was plain, straightforward story-telling, in understanding and appraising the curiosity of the man in the street, and in possessing just the knowledge and just the patience, and just the literary stroke that would enable him most effectually to satisfy it. He was the first and cleverest of all descriptive reporters, for he knew better than any successor how and where to throw in those irrelevant details, tricks of speech and circumlocution, which tend to give an air of verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative--the funny little splutterings and naivetes as of a plain man who is not telling a tale for effect, but striving after his own manner to give the plain unvarnished truth. Defoe contributes story, Addison character, Fielding the life-atmosphere, Richardson and Sterne the sentiment, and we have the 18th-century novel complete--the greatest literary birth of modern time. Addison, Steele, Swift and Defoe, as master-builders of prose fiction, are consequently of more importance than the "Augustan poets," as Pope and his school are sometimes called, for the most that they can be said to have done is to have perfected a more or less transient mode of poetry.

Pope.

Thomson.

Collins. Gray.

To the passion, imagination or musical quality essential to the most inspired kinds of poetry Alexander Pope (1688-1744) can lay small claim. His best work is contained in the _Satires_ and _Epistles_, which are largely of the proverb-in-rhyme order. Yet in lucid, terse and pungent phrases he has rarely if ever been surpassed. His classical fancy, his elegant turn for periphrasis and his venomous sting alike made him the idol of that urbane age. Voltaire in 1726 had called him the best poet living, and at his death his style was paramount throughout the civilized world. It was the apotheosis of wit, point, lucidity and technical correctness. Pope was the first Englishman to make poetry pay (apart from patronage). He was flattered by imitation to an extent which threatened to throw the school of poetry which he represented into permanent discredit. Prior, Gay, Parnell, Akenside, Pomfret, Garth, Young, Johnson, Goldsmith, Falconer, Glover, Grainger, Darwin, Rogers, Hayley and indeed a host of others--the once famous mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease--worshipped Pope as their poetic founder. The second-rate wore his badge. But although the cult of Pope was the established religion of poetic taste from 1714 to 1798, there were always nonconformists. The poetic revolt, indeed, was far more versatile than the religious revival of the century. The _Winter_ (1726) of James Thomson may be regarded as inaugurating a new era in English poetry. Lady Winchilsea, John Philips, author of _Cyder_, and John Dyer, whose _Grongar Hill_ was published a few months before _Winter_, had pleaded by their work for a truthful and unaffected, and at the same time a romantic treatment of nature in poetry; but the ideal of artificiality and of a frigid poetic diction by which English poetry was dominated since the days of Waller and Cowley was first effectively challenged by Thomson. At the time when the Popean couplet was at the height of its vogue he deliberately put it aside in favour of the higher poetic power of blank verse. And he it was who transmitted the sentiment of natural beauty not merely to imitators such as Savage, Armstrong, Somerville, Langhorne, Mickle and Shenstone, but also to his elegist, William Collins, to Gray and to Cowper, and so indirectly to the lyrical bards of 1798. By the same hands and those of Shenstone experiments were being made in the stanza of _The Faerie Queene_; a little later, owing to the virtuosity of Bishop Percy, the cultivation of the old English and Scottish ballad literature was beginning to take a serious turn. Dissatisfaction with the limitations of "Augustan" poetry was similarly responsible for the revived interest in Shakespeare and Chaucer. Gray stood not only for a far more intimate worship of wild external nature, but also for an awakened curiosity in Scandinavian, Celtic and Icelandic poetry.

To pretend then that the poetic heart of the 18th century was Popean to the core is nothing short of extravagance. There were a number of true poets in the second and third quarters of the century to whom all credit is due as pioneers and precentors of the romantic movement under the depressing conditions to which innovators in poetry are commonly subject. They may strike us as rather an anaemic band after the great Elizabethan poets. Four of them were mentally deranged (Collins, Smart, Cowper, Blake), while Gray was a hermit, and Shenstone and Thomson the most indolent of recluses. The most adventurous, one might say the most virile of the group, was a boy who died at the age of seventeen. Single men all (save for Blake), a more despondent group of artists as a whole it would not perhaps be easy to discover. Catacombs and cypresses were the forms of imagery that came to them most naturally. Elegies and funeral odes were the types of expression in which they were happiest. Yet they strove in the main to follow the gleam in poetry, to reinstate imagination upon its throne, and to substitute the singing voice for the rhetorical recitative of the heroic couplet. Within two years of the death of Pope, in 1746, William Collins was content to _sing_ (not say) what he had in him without a glimpse of wit or a flash of eloquence--and in him many have discerned the germ of that romantic _eclosion_ which blossomed in _Christabel_. A more important if less original factor in that movement was Collins's severe critic Thomas Gray, a man of the widest curiosities of his time, in whom every attribute of the poet to which scholarship, taste and refinement are contributory may be found to the full, but in whom the strong creative energy is fatally lacking--despite the fact that he wrote a string of "divine truisms" in his _Elegy_, which has given to multitudes more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in the English language. Shenstone and Percy, Capell, the Wartons and eventually Chatterton, continued to mine in the shafts which Gray had been the first to sink. Their laborious work of discovery resembled that which was commencing in regard to the Gothic architecture which the age of Pope had come to regard as rude and barbaric. The Augustans had come seriously to regard all pre-Drydenic poetry as grossly barbarian. One of the greatest achievements of the mid-eighteenth century was concerned with the disintegration of this obstinate delusion. The process was manifold; and it led, among other things, to a realization of the importance of the study of comparative literature.

The novel.

Richardson.

The literary grouping of the 18th century is, perhaps, the biggest thing on the whole that English art has to show; but among all its groups the most famous, and probably the most original, is that of its proto-novelists Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. All nations have had their novels, which are as old at least as Greek vases. The various types have generally had collective appellations such as Milesian Tales, Alexandrian Romances, Romances of Chivalry, Acta Sanctorum, Gesta Romanorum, Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Romances of Roguery, Arabian Nights; but owing to the rivalry of other more popular or more respectable or at least more eclectic literary forms, they seldom managed to attain a permanent lodgment in the library. The taste in prose fiction changes, perhaps, more rapidly than that in any other kind of literature. In Britain alone several forms had passed their prime since the days of Caxton and his Arthurian prose romance of _Morte d'Arthur_. Such were the wearisome Arcadian romance or pastoral heroic; the new centos of tales of chivalry like the _Seven Champions of Christendom_; the utopian, political and philosophical romances (_Oceana_, _The Man in the Moone_); the grotesque and facetious stories of rogues retailed from the Spanish or French in dwarf volumes; the prolix romance of modernized classic heroism (_The Grand Cyrus_); the religious allegory (Bunyan's _Life and Death of Mr Badman_); the novels of outspoken French or Italian gallantry, represented by Aphra Behn; the imaginary voyages so notably adapted to satire by Dr Swift; and last, but not least, the minutely prosaic chronicle-novels of Daniel Defoe. The prospect of the novel was changing rapidly. The development of the individual and of a large well-to-do urban middle class, which was rapidly multiplying its area of leisure, involved a curious and self-conscious society, hungry for pleasure and new sensations, anxious to be told about themselves, willing in some cases even to learn civilization from their betters. The disrepute into which the drama had fallen since Jeremy Collier's attack on it directed this society by an almost inevitable course into the flowery paths of fiction. The novel, it is true, had a reputation which was for the time being almost as unsavoury as that of the drama, but the novel was not a confirmed ill-doer, and it only needed a touch of genius to create for it a vast congregation of enthusiastic votaries. In the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ were already found the methods and subjects of the modern novel. The De Coverley papers in the _Spectator_, in fact, want nothing but a love-thread to convert them into a serial novel of a high order. The supreme importance of the sentimental interest had already been discovered and exemplified to good purpose in France by Madame de la Fayette, the Marquise de Tencin, Marivaux and the Abbe Prevost. Samuel Richardson (1689-1762), therefore, when he produced the first two modern novels of European fame in _Pamela_ (1740) and _Clarissa_ (1748), inherited far more than he invented. There had been Richardsonians before Richardson. _Clarissa_ is nevertheless a pioneer work, and we have it on the high authority of M. Jusserand that the English have contributed more than any other people to the formation of the contemporary novel. Of the long-winded, typical and rather chaotic English novel of love analysis and moral sentiment (as opposed to the romance of adventure) Richardson is the first successful charioteer.

Fielding.

Smollett.

The novel in England gained prodigiously by the shock of opposition between the ideals of Richardson and Henry Fielding (1707-1754), his rival and parodist. Fielding's brutal toleration is a fine corrective to the slightly rancid morality of Richardson, with its frank insistence upon the cash-value of chastity and virtue. Fielding is, to be brief, the succinct antithesis of Richardson, and represents the opposite pole of English character. He is the Cavalier, Richardson the Roundhead; he is the gentleman, Richardson the tradesman; he represents church and county, Richardson chapel and borough. Richardson had much of the patient insight and intensity of genius, but he lacked the humour and literary accomplishment which Fielding had in rich abundance. Fielding combined breadth and keenness, classical culture and a delicate Gallic irony to an extent rare among English writers. He lacked the delicate intuition of Richardson in the analysis of women, nor could he compass the broad farcical humour of Smollett or the sombre colouring by which Smollett produces at times such poignant effects of contrast. There was no poetry in Fielding; but there was practically every other ingredient of a great prose writer--taste, culture, order, vivacity, humour, penetrating irony and vivid, pervading common sense, and it is Fielding's chef-d'oeuvre _Tom Jones_ (1749) that we must regard if not as the fundament at least as the head of the corner in English prose fiction. Before _Tom Jones_ appeared, the success of the novel had drawn a new competitor into the field in Tobias Smollett, the descendant of a good western lowland family who had knocked about the world and seen more of its hurlyburly than Fielding himself. In _Roderick Random_ (1748) Smollett represents a rougher and more uncivilized world even than that depicted in _Joseph Andrews_. The savagery and horse-play peculiar to these two novelists derives in part from the rogue romance of Spain (as then recently revived by Lesage), and has a counterpart to some extent in the graphic art of Hogarth and Rowlandson; yet one cannot altogether ignore an element of exaggeration which has greatly injured both these writers in the estimation (and still more in the affection) of posterity. The genius which struggles through novels such as _Roderick Random_ and _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ was nearly submerged under the hard conditions of a general writer during the third quarter of the 18th century, and it speaks volumes for Smollett's powers of recuperation that he survived to write two such masterpieces of sardonic and humorous observation as his _Travels_ and _Humphry Clinker_.

Sterne.

The fourth proto-master of the English novel was the antiquarian humorist Lawrence Sterne. Though they owed a good deal to _Don Quixote_ and the French novelists, Fielding and Smollett were essentially observers of life in the quick. Sterne brought a far-fetched style, a

## bookish apparatus and a deliberate eccentricity into fiction. _Tristram

Shandy_, produced successively in nine small volumes between 1760 and 1764, is the pretended history of a personage who is not born (before the fourth volume) and hardly ever appears, carried on in an eccentric rigmarole of old and new, original and borrowed humour, arranged in a style well known to students of the later Valois humorists as _fatrasie_. Far more than Moliere, Sterne took his literary _bien_ wherever he found it. But he invented a kind of tremolo style of his own, with the aid of which, in conjunction with the most unblushingly indecent innuendoes, and with a conspicuous genius for humorous portraiture, trembling upon the verge of the pathetic, he succeeded in winning a new domain for the art of fiction.

These four great writers then, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne--all of them great pessimists in comparison with the benignant philosophers of a later fiction--first thoroughly fertilized this important field. Richardson obtained a European fame during his lifetime. Sterne, as a pioneer impressionist, gave all subsequent stylists a new handle. Fielding and Smollett grasped the new instrument more vigorously, and fashioned with it models which, after serving as patterns to Scott, Marryat, Cooper, Ainsworth, Dickens, Lever, Stevenson, Merriman, Weyman and other romancists of the 19th century, have still retained a fair measure of their original popularity unimpaired.

Johnson.

Apart from the novelists, the middle period of the 18th century is strong in prose writers: these include Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole. The last three were all influenced by the sovereign lucidity of the best French style of the day. Chesterfield and Walpole were both writers of aristocratic experience and of European knowledge and sentiment. Johnson alone was a distinctively English thinker and stylist. His knowledge of the world, outside England, was derived from books, he was a good deal of a scholar, an earnest moralist, and something of a divine; his style, at any rate, reaches back to Taylor, Barrow and South, and has a good deal of the complex structure, the cadence, and the balance of English and Latinistic words proper to the 17th century, though the later influence of Addison and Bolingbroke is also apparent; Johnson himself was fond of the essay, the satire in verse, and the moral tale (_Rasselas_); but he lacked the creative imagination indispensable for such work and excelled chiefly as biographer and critic. For a critic even, it must be admitted that he was singly deficient in original ideas. He upholds authority. He judges by what he regards as the accepted rules, derived by Dryden, Rapin, Boileau, Le Bossu, Rymer, Dennis, Pope and such "estimable critics" from the ancients, whose decisions on such matters he regards as paramount. He tries to carry out a systematic, motived criticism; but he asserts rather than persuades or convinces. We go to his critical works (_Lives of the Poets_ and _Essay on Shakespeare_) not for their conclusions, but for their shrewd comments on life, and for an application to literary problems of a caustic common sense. Johnson's character and conversation, his knowledge and memory were far more remarkable than his ideas or his writings, admirable though the best of these were; the exceptional traits which met in his person and made that age regard him as a nonpareil have found in James Boswell a delineator unrivalled in patience, dexterity and dramatic insight. The result has been a portrait of a man of letters more alive at the present time than that which any other age or nation has bequeathed to us. In most of his ideas Johnson was a generation behind the typical academic critics of his date, Joseph and Thomas Warton, who championed against his authority what the doctor regarded as the finicking notions of Gray. Both of the Wartons were enthusiastic for Spenser and the older poetry; they were saturated with Milton whom they placed far above the correct Mr Pope, they wrote sonnets (thereby provoking Johnson's ire) and attempted to revive medieval and Celtic lore in every direction. Johnson's one attempt at a novel or tale was _Rasselas_, a long "Rambler" essay upon the vanity of human hope and ambition, something after the manner of the Oriental tales of which Voltaire had caught the idea from Swift and Montesquieu; but _Rasselas_ is quite unenlivened by humour, personality or any other charm.

Goldsmith.

This one quality that Johnson so completely lacked was possessed in its fullest perfection by Oliver Goldsmith, whose style is the supreme expression of 18th-century clearness, simplicity and easy graceful fluency. Much of Goldsmith's material, whether as playwright, story writer or essayist, is trite and commonplace--his material worked up by any other hand would be worthless. But, whenever Goldsmith writes about human life, he seems to pay it a compliment, a relief of fun and good fellowship accompanies his slightest description, his playful and delicate touch could transform every thought that he handled into something radiant with sunlight and fragrant with the perfume of youth. Goldsmith's plots are Irish, his critical theories are French with a light top dressing of Johnson and Reynolds or Burke, while his prose style is an idealization of Addison. His versatility was great, and, in this and in other respects, he and Johnson are constantly reminding us that they were hardened professionals, writing against time for money.

Chesterfield and Walpole.

Much of the best prose work of this period, from 1740 to 1780, was done under very different conditions. The increase of travel, of intercourse between the nobility of Europe, and of a sense of solidarity, self-consciousness, leisure and connoisseurship among that section of English society known as the governing class, or, since Disraeli, as "the Venetian oligarchy," could hardly fail to produce an increasing crop of those elaborate collections of letters and memoirs which had already attained their apogee in France with Mme de Sevigne and the duc de Saint-Simon. England was not to remain far behind, for in 1718 commence the _Letters_ of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; ten years more saw the commencement of Lord Hervey's _Memoirs of the Reign of George II._; and Lord Chesterfield and Lord Orford (better known as Horace Walpole) both began their inimitable series of _Letters_ about 1740. These writings, none of them written ostensibly for the press, serve to show the enormous strides that English prose was making as a medium of vivacious description. The letters are all the recreation of extensive knowledge and cosmopolitan acquirements; they are not strong on the poetic or imaginative side of things, but they have an intense appreciation of the actual and mundane side of fallible humanity. Lord Chesterfield's _Letters_ to his son and to his godson are far more, for they introduce a Ciceronian polish and a Gallic irony and wit into the hitherto uncultivated garden of the literary graces in English prose. Chesterfield, whose theme is manners and social amenity, deliberately seeks a form of expression appropriate to his text--the perfection of tact, neatness, good order and _savoir faire_. After his grandfather, the marquess of Halifax, Lord Chesterfield, the synonym in the vulgar world for a heartless exquisite, is in reality the first fine gentleman and epicurean in the best sense in English polite literature. Both Chesterfield and Walpole were conspicuous as raconteurs in an age of witty talkers, of whose talk R.B. Sheridan, in _The School for Scandal_ (1777), served up a _supreme_. Some of it may be tinsel, but it looks wonderfully well under the lights. The star comedy of the century represents the sparkle of this brilliant crowd: it reveals no hearts, but it shows us every trick of phrase, every eccentricity of manner and every foible of thought. But the most mundane of the letter writers, the most frivolous, and also the most pungent, is Horace Walpole, whose writings are an epitome of the history and biography of the Georgian era. "Fiddles sing all through them, wax lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages glitter and sparkle; never was such a brilliant, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us." Yet, in some ways, he was a corrective to the self-complacency of his generation, a vast dilettante, lover of "Gothic," of curios and antiques, of costly printing, of old illuminations and stained glass. In his short miracle-novel, called _The Castle of Otranto_, he set a fashion for mystery and terror in fiction, for medieval legend, diablerie, mystery, horror, antique furniture and Gothic jargon, which led directly by the route of Anne Radcliffe, Maturin, _Vathek_, _St Leon_ and _Frankenstein_, to _Queenhoo Hall_, to _Waverley_ and even to Hugo and Poe.

Fanny Burney. Boswell.

Meanwhile the area of the Memoir was widening rapidly in the hands of Fanny, the sly daughter of the wordly-wise and fashionable musician, Dr Burney, author of a novel (_Evelina_) most satirical and facete, written ere she was well out of her teens; not too kind a satirist of her former patroness, Mrs Thrale (afterwards Piozzi), the least tiresome of the new group of scribbling sibyls, blue stockings, lady dilettanti and Della Cruscans. Both, as portraitists and purveyors of _Johnsoniana_, were surpassed by the inimitable James Boswell, first and most fatuous of all interviewers, in brief a biographical genius, with a new recipe, distinct from Sterne's, for disclosing personality, and a deliberate, artificial method of revealing himself to us, as it were, unawares.

From all these and many other experiments, a far more flexible prose was developing in England, adapted for those critical reviews, magazines and journals which were multiplying rapidly to exploit the new masculine interest, apart from the schools, in history, topography, natural philosophy and the picturesque, just as circulating libraries were springing up to exploit the new feminine passion for fiction, which together with memoirs and fashionable poetry contributed to give the booksellers bigger and bigger ideas.

The progress of authorship.

It is surprising how many types of literary productions with which we are now familiar were first moulded into definite and classical form during the Johnsonian period. In addition to the novel one need only mention the economic treatise, as exemplified for the first time in the admirable symmetry of _The Wealth of Nations_, the diary of a faithful observer of nature such as Gilbert White, the _Fifteen Discourses_ (1769-1791) in which Sir Joshua Reynolds endeavours for the first time to expound for England a philosophy of Art, the historico-philosophical tableau as exemplified by Robertson and Gibbon, the light political parody of which the poetry of _The Rolliad_ and _Anti-Jacobin_ afford so many excellent models; and, going to the other extreme, the ponderous archaeological or topographical monograph, as exemplified in Stuart and Revett's _Antiquities of Athens_, in Robert Wood's colossal _Ruins of Palmyra_ (1753), or the monumental _History of Leicestershire_ by John Nichols. Such works as this last might well seem the outcome of Horace Walpole's maxim: In this scribbling age "let those who can't write, glean." In short, the literary landscape in Johnson's day was slowly but surely assuming the general outlines to which we are all accustomed. The literary conditions of the period dated from the time of Pope in their main features, and it is quite possible that they were more considerably modified in Johnson's own lifetime than they have been since. The booksellers, or, as they would now be called, publishers, were steadily superseding the old ties of patronage, and basing their relations with authors upon a commercial footing. A stage in their progress is marked by the success of Johnson's friend and Hume's correspondent, William Strahan, who kept a coach, "a credit to literature." The evolution of a normal status for the author was aided by the definition of copyright and gradual extinction of piracy.

Historians.

Histories of their own time by Clarendon and Burnet have been in much request from their own day to this, and the first, at least, is a fine monument of English prose; Bolingbroke again, in 1735, dwelt memorably upon the ethical, political and philosophical value of history. But it was not until the third quarter of the 18th century that English literature freed itself from the imputation of lagging hopelessly behind France, Italy and Germany in the serious work of historical reconstruction. Hume published the first volume of his _History of England_ in 1754. Robertson's _History of Scotland_ saw the light in 1759 and his _Charles V._ in 1769; Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ came in 1776. Hume was, perhaps, the first modernist in history; he attempted to give his work a modern interest and, Scot though he was, a modern style--it could not fail, as he knew, to derive piquancy from its derision of the Whiggish assumption which regarded 1688 as a political millennium. Wm. Robertson was, perhaps, the first man to adapt the polished periphrases of the pulpit to historical generalization. The gifts of compromise which he had learned as Moderator of the General Assembly he brought to bear upon his historical studies, and a language so unfamiliar to his lips as academic English he wrote with so much the more care that the greatest connoisseurs of the day were enthusiastic about "Robertson's wonderful style." Even more portentous in its superhuman dignity was the style of Edward Gibbon, who combined with the unspiritual optimism of Hume and Robertson a far more concentrated devotion to his subject, an industry more monumental, a greater co-ordinative vigour, and a malice which, even in the 18th century, rendered him the least credulous man of his age. Of all histories, therefore, based upon the transmitted evidence of other ages rather than on the personal observation of the writer's own, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ has hitherto maintained its reputation best. Hume, even before he was superseded, fell a prey to continuations and abridgements, while Robertson was supplanted systematically by the ornate pages of W.H. Prescott.

The increasing transparency of texture in the working English prose during this period is shown in the writings of theologians such as Butler and Paley, and of thinkers such as Berkeley and Hume, who, by prolonging and extending Berkeley's contention that matter was an abstraction, had shown that mind would have to be considered an abstraction too, thereby signalling a school of reaction to common sense or "external reality" represented by Thomas Reid, and with modifications by David Hartley, Abraham Tucker and others. Butler and Paley are merely two of the biggest and most characteristic apologists of that day, both great stylists, though it must be allowed that their very lucidity and good sense excites almost more doubt than it stills, and both very successful in repelling the enemy in controversy, though their very success accentuates the faults of that unspiritual age in which churchmen were so far more concerned about the title deeds than about the living portion of the church's estate. Free thought was already beginning to sap their defences in various directions, and in Tom Paine, Priestley, Price, Godwin and Mackintosh they found more formidable adversaries than in the earlier deists. The greatest champion, however, of continuity and conservation both in church and state, against the new schools of latitudinarians and radicals, the great eulogist of the unwritten constitution, and the most perfect master of emotional prose in this period, prose in which the harmony of sense and sound is attained to an extent hardly ever seen outside supreme poetry, was Edmund Burke, one of the most commanding intellects in the whole range of political letters--a striking contrast in this respect to Junius, whose mechanical and journalistic talent for invective has a quite ephemeral value.

Return to nature.

Change in poetic spirit.

Cowper. Blake. Burns.

From 1660 to 1760 the English mind was still much occupied in shaking off the last traces of feudality. The crown, the parliament, the manor and the old penal code were left, it is true: but the old tenures and gild-brotherhoods, the old social habits, miracles, arts, faith, religion and letters were irrevocably gone. The attempt of the young Chevalier in 1745 was a complete anachronism, and no sooner was this generally felt to be so than men began to regret that it should so be. Men began to describe as "grand" and "picturesque" scenery hitherto summarized as "barren mountains covered in mist"; while Voltaire and Pope were at their height, the world began to realize that the Augustan age, in its zeal for rationality, civism and trim parterres, had neglected the wild freshness of an age when literature was a wild flower that grew on the common. Rousseau laid the axe to the root of this over-sophistication of life; Goldsmith, half understanding, echoed some of his ideas in "The Deserted Village." Back from books to men was now the prescription--from the crowded town to the spacious country. From plains and valleys to peaks and pinewoods. From cities, where men were rich and corrupt, to the earlier and more primitive moods of earth. The breath had scarcely left the body of the Grand Monarque before an intrigue was set on foot to dispute the provisions of his will. So with the critical testament of Pope. Within a few years of his death we find Gray, Warton, Hurd and other disciples of the new age denying to Pope the highest kind of poetic excellence, and exalting imagination and fancy into a sphere far above the Augustan qualities of correct taste and good judgment. Decentralization and revolt were the new watchwords in literature. We must eschew France and Italy and go rather to Iceland or the Hebrides for fresh poetic emotions: we must shun academies and classic coffee-houses and go into the street-corners or the hedge-lanes in search of Volkspoesie. An old muniment chest and a roll of yellow parchment were the finest incentives to the new spirit of the picturesque. How else are we to explain the enthusiasm that welcomed the sham Ossianic poems of James Macpherson in 1760; Percy's patched-up ballads of 1765 (_Reliques of Ancient Poetry_); the new enthusiasm for Chaucer; the "black letter" school of Ritson, Tyrrwhitt, George Ellis, Steevens, Ireland and Malone; above all, the spurious 15th-century poems poured forth in 1768-1769 with such a wild gusto of archaic imagination by a prodigy not quite seventeen years of age? Chatterton's precocious fantasy cast a wonderful spell upon the romantic imagination of other times. It does not prepare us for the change that was coming over the poetic spirit of the last two decades of the century, but it does at least help us to explain it. The great masters of verse in Britain during this period were the three very disparate figures of William Cowper, William Blake and Robert Burns. Cowper was not a poet of vivid and rapturous visions. There is always something of the rusticating city-scholar about his humour. The ungovernable impulse and imaginative passion of the great masters of poesy were not his to claim. His motives to express himself in verse came very largely from the outside. The greater part, nearly all his best poetry is of the occasional order. To touch and retouch, he says, in one of his letters--among the most delightful in English--is the secret of almost all good writing, especially verse. Whatever is short should be nervous, masculine and compact. In all the arts that raise the best occasional poetry to the level of greatness Cowper is supreme. In phrase-moulding, verbal gymnastic and prosodical marquetry he has scarcely a rival, and the fruits of his poetic industry are enshrined in the filigree of a most delicate fancy and a highly cultivated intelligence, purified and thrice refined in the fire of mental affliction. His work expresses the rapid civilization of his time, its humanitarian feeling and growing sensitiveness to natural beauty, home comfort, the claims of animals and the charms of light literature. In many of his short poems, such as "The Royal George," artistic simplicity is indistinguishable from the stern reticence of genius. William Blake had no immediate literary descendants, for he worked alone, and Lamb was practically alone in recognizing what he wrote as poetry. But he was by far the most original of the reactionaries who preceded the Romantic Revival, and he caught far more of the Elizabethan air in his lyric verse than any one else before Coleridge. The _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of Experience_, in 1789 and 1794, sing themselves, and have a bird-like spontaneity that has been the despair of all song-writers from that day to this. After 1800 he winged his flight farther and farther into strange and unknown regions. In the finest of these earlier lyrics, which owe so little to his contemporaries, the ripple of the stream of romance that began to gush forth in 1798 is distinctly heard. But the first poetic genius of the century was unmistakably Robert Burns. In song and satire alike Burns is racy, in the highest degree, of the poets of North Britain, who since Robert Sempill, Willy Hamilton of Gilbertfield, douce Allan Ramsay, the Edinburgh periwig-maker and miscellanist, and Robert Fergusson, "the writer-chiel, a deathless name," had kept alive the old native poetic tradition, had provided the strolling fiddlers with merry and wanton staves, and had perpetuated the daintiest shreds of national music, the broadest colloquialisms, and the warmest hues of patriotic or local sentiment. Burns immortalizes these old staves by means of his keener vision, his more fiery spirit, his stronger passion and his richer volume of sound. Burns's fate was a pathetic one. Brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete, his poems wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, sustained effort, length of life. Yet occasional, fragmentary, extemporary as most of them are, they bear the guinea stamp of true genius. His eye is unerring, his humour of the ripest, his wit both fine and abundant. His ear is less subtle, except when dialect is concerned. There he is infallible. Landscape he understands in subordination to life. For abstract ideas about Liberty and 1789 he cares little. But he is a patriot and an insurgent, a hater of social distinction and of the rich. Of the divine right or eternal merit of the system under which the poor man sweats to put money into the rich man's pocket and fights to keep it there, and is despised in proportion to the amount of his perspiration, he had a low opinion. His work has inspired the meek, has made the poor feel themselves less of ciphers in the world and given courage to the down-trodden. His love of women has inspired some of the most ardently beautiful lyrics in the world. Among modern folk-poets such as Jokai and Mistral, the position of Burns in the hearts of his own people is the best assured.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--The dearth of literary history in England makes it rather difficult to obtain a good general view of letters in Britain during the 18th century. Much may be gleaned, however, from chapters of Lecky's _History of England during the 18th Century_, from Stephen's _Lectures on English Literature and Society in the 18th Century_ (1904), from Taine's _History of English Literature_ (van Laun's translation), from vols. v. and vi. of Prof. Courthope's _History of English Poetry_, and from the second volume of Chambers's _Cyclopaedia of English Literature_ (1902). The two vols. dealing respectively with the _Age of Pope_ and the _Age of Johnson_ in Bell's Handbooks of English Literature will be found useful, and suggestive chapters will be found in Saintsbury's _Short History_ and in A.H. Thompson's _Student's History of English Literature_ (1901). The same may, perhaps, be said of books v. and vi. in the _Bookman Illustrated History of English Literature_ (1906), by the present writer. Sidelights of value are to be found in Walter Raleigh's little book on the _English Novel_, in Beljame's _Le Publique et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au XVIII^e siecle_, in H.A. Beers' _History of English Romanticism in the 18th Century_ (1899), and above all in Sir Leslie Stephen's _History of English Thought during the 18th Century_; Stephen's _Hours in a Library_, the monographs dealing with the period in the English Men of Letters series, the Vignettes and Portraits of Austin Dobson and George Paston, Elwin's _Eighteenth Century Men of Letters_, and Thomas Wright's _Caricature History of the Georges_, must also be kept in mind. (T. Se.)

VI. THE 19TH CENTURY

We have seen how great was the reverence which the 18th century paid to poetry, and how many different kinds of poetic experiment were going on, mostly by the imitative efforts of revivalists (Spenserians, Miltonians, Shakespeareans, Ballad-mongers, Scandinavian, Celtic, Gothic scholars and the like), but also in the direction of nature study and landscape description, while the more formal type of Augustan poetry, satire and description, in the direct succession of Pope, was by no means neglected.

Wordsworth.

The most original vein in the 19th century was supplied by the Wordsworth group, the first manifesto of which appeared in the _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798. William Wordsworth himself represents, in the first place, a revolutionary movement against the poetic diction of study-poets since the first acceptance of the Miltonic model by Addison. His ideal, imperfectly carried out, was a reversion to popular language of the utmost simplicity and directness. He added to this the idea of the enlargement of man by Nature, after Rousseau, and went further than this in the utterance of an essentially pantheistic desire to become part of its loveliness, to partake in a mystical sense of the loneliness of the mountain, the sound of falling water, the upper horizon of the clouds and the wind. To the growing multitude of educated people who were being pent in huge cities these ideas were far sweeter than the formalities of the old pastoral. Wordsworth's great discovery, perhaps, was that popular poetry need not be imitative, artificial or condescending, but that a simple story truthfully told of the passion, affliction or devotion of simple folk, and appealing to the primal emotion, is worthy of the highest effort of the poetic artist, and may achieve a poetic value far in advance of conventional descriptions of strikingly grouped incidents picturesquely magnified or rhetorically exaggerated. But Wordsworth's theories might have ended very much where they began, had it not been for their impregnation by the complementary genius of Coleridge.

Coleridge.

Coleridge at his best was inspired by the supreme poetic gifts of passion, imagination, simplicity and mystery, combining form and colour, sound and sense, novelty and antiquity, realism and romanticism, scholarly ode and popular ballad. His three fragmentary poems _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_ are the three spells and touchstones, constituting what is often regarded by the best judges as the high-standard of modern English poetry. Their subtleties and beauties irradiated the homelier artistic conceptions of Wordsworth, and the effect on him was permanent. Coleridge's inspiration, on the other hand, was irrecoverable; a physical element was due, no doubt, to the first exaltation indirectly due to the opium habit, but the moral influence was contributed by the Wordsworths. The steady will of the Dalesman seems to have constrained Coleridge's imagination from aimless wandering; his lofty and unwavering self-confidence inspired his friend with a similar energy. Away from Wordsworth after 1798, Coleridge lost himself in visions of work that always remained to be "transcribed," by one who had every poetic gift--save the rudimentary will for sustained and concentrated effort.

Lamb.

Hazlitt.

Leigh Hunt. De Quincey.

Coleridge's more delicate sensibility to the older notes of that more musical era in English poetry which preceded the age of Dryden and Pope was due in no small measure to the luminous yet subtle intuitions of his friend Charles Lamb. Lamb's appreciation of the imaginative beauty inhumed in old English literature amounted to positive genius, and the persistence with which he brought his perception of the supreme importance of imagination and music in poetry to bear upon some of the finest creative minds of 1800, in talk, letters, selections and essays, brought about a gradual revolution in the aesthetic morality of the day. He paid little heed to the old rhetoric and the _ars poetica_ of classical comparison. His aim was rather to discover the mystery, the folk-seed and the old-world element, latent in so much of the finer ancient poetry and implicit in so much of the new. The _Essays of Elia_ (1820-1825) are the binnacle of Lamb's vessel of exploration. Lamb and his great rival, William Hazlitt, both maintained that criticism was not so much an affair of learning, or an exercise of comparative and expository judgment, as an act of imagination in itself. Hazlitt became one of the master essayists, a fine critical analyst and declaimer, denouncing all insipidity and affectation, stirring the soul with metaphor, soaring easily and acquiring a momentum in his prose which often approximates to the impassioned utterance of Burke. Like Lamb, he wanted to measure his contemporaries by the Elizabethans, or still older masters, and he was deeply impressed by _Lyrical Ballads_. The new critics gradually found responsible auxiliaries, notably Leigh Hunt, De Quincey and Wilson of _Blackwood's_. Leigh Hunt, not very important in himself, was a cause of great authorship in others. He increased both the depth and area of modern literary sensibility. The world of books was to him an enchanted forest, in which every leaf had its own secret. He was the most catholic of critics, but he knew what was poor--at least in other people. As an essayist he is a feminine diminutive of Lamb, excellent in fancy and literary illustration, but far inferior in decisive insight or penetrative masculine wit. The Miltonic quality of impassioned pyramidal prose is best seen in Thomas De Quincey, of all the essayists of this age, or any age, the most diffuse, unequal and irreducible to rule, and which yet at times trembles upon the brink of a rhythmical sonority which seems almost to rival that of the greatest poetry. Leigh Hunt supplies a valuable link between Lamb, the sole external moderator of the Lake school, Byron, Shelley, and the junior branch of imaginative Aesthetic, represented by Keats.

Keats.

John Keats (1795-1821), three years younger than Shelley, was the greatest poetic artist of his time, and would probably have surpassed all, but for his collapse of health at twenty-five. His vocation was as unmistakable as that of Chatterton, with whose youthful ardour his own had points of likeness. The two contemporary conceptions of him as a fatuous Cockney Bunthorne or as "a tadpole of the lakes" were equally erroneous. But Keats was in a sense the first of the virtuoso or aesthetic school (caricatured later by the formula of "Art for Art's sake"); artistic beauty was to him a kind of religion, his expression was more technical, less personal than that of his contemporaries, he was a conscious "romantic," and he travelled in the realms of gold with less impedimenta than any of his fellows. Byron had always himself to talk about, Wordsworth saw the universe too much through the medium of his own self-importance, Coleridge was a metaphysician, Shelley hymned Intellectual Beauty; Keats treats of his subject, "A Greek Urn," "A Nightingale," the season of "Autumn," in such a way that our thought centres not upon the poet but upon the enchantment of that which he sings. In his three great medievalising poems, "The Pot of Basil," "The Eve of St Agnes" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," even more than in his Odes, Keats is the forerunner of Tennyson, the greatest of the word-painters. But apart from his perfection of loveliness, he has a natural magic and a glow of humanity surpassing that of any other known poet. His poetry, immature as it was, gave a new beauty to the language. His loss was the greatest English Literature has sustained.

Landor.

Before Tennyson, Rossetti and Morris, Keats's best disciples in the aesthetic school were Thomas Lovell Beddoes, George Dailey and Thomas Hood, the failure of whose "Midsummer Fairies" and "Fair Inez" drove him into that almost mortific vein of verbal humour which threw up here and there a masterpiece such as "The Song of a Shirt." The master virtuoso of English poetry in another department (the classical) during this and the following age was Walter Savage Landor, who threw off a few fragments of verse worthy of the Greek Anthology, but in his Dialogues or "Imaginary Conversations" evolved a kind of violent monologizing upon the commonplace which descends into the most dismal caverns of egotism. Carlyle furiously questioned his competence. Mr Shaw allows his classical amateurship and respectable strenuosity of character, but denounces his work, with a substratum of truth, as that of a "blathering, unreadable pedant."

Shelley.

Among those, however, who found early nutriment in Landor's Miltonic _Gebir_ (1798) must be reckoned the most poetical of our poets. P.B. Shelley was a spirit apart, who fits into no group, the associate of Byron, but spiritually as remote from him as possible, hated by the rationalists of his age, and regarded by the poets with more pity than jealousy. He wrote only for poets, and had no public during his lifetime among general readers, by whom, however, he is now regarded as _the poet_ par excellence. In his conduct it must be admitted that he was in a sense, like Coleridge, irresponsible, but on the other hand his poetic energy was irresistible and all his work is technically of the highest order of excellence. In ideal beauties it is supreme; its great lack is its want of humanity; in this he is the opposite of Wordsworth who reads human nature into everything. Shelley, on the other hand, dehumanises things and makes them unearthly. He hangs a poem, like a cobweb or a silver cloud, on a horn of the crescent moon, and leaves it to dangle there in a current of ether. His quest was continuous for figures of beauty, figures, however, more ethereal and less sensuous than those in Keats; having obtained such an idea he passed it again and again through the prism of his mind, in talk, letters, prefaces, poems. The deep sense of the mystery of words and their lightest variations in the skein of poetry, half forgotten since Milton's time, had been recovered in a great measure by Coleridge and Wordsworth since 1798; Lamb, too, and Hazlitt, and, perhaps, Hogg were in the secret, while Keats had its open sesame on his lips ere he died. The union of poetic emotion with verbal music of the greatest perfection was the aim of all, but none of these masters made words breathe and sing with quite the same spontaneous ease and fervour that Shelley attained in some of the lyrics written between twenty-four and thirty, such as "The Cloud," "The Skylark," the "Ode of the West Wind," "The Sensitive Plant," the "Indian Serenade."

The path of the new romantic school had been thoroughly prepared during the age of Gray, Cowper and Burns, and it won its triumphs with little resistance and no serious convulsions. The opposition was noisy, but its representative character has been exaggerated. In the meantime, however, the old-fashioned school and the Popean couplet, the Johnsonian dignity of reflection and the Goldsmithian ideal of generalized description, were well maintained by George Crabbe (1754-1832), "though Nature's sternest painter yet the best," a worsted-stockinged Pope and austere delineator of village misdoing and penurious age, and Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), the banker poet, liberal in sentiment, extreme Tory in form, and dilettante delineator of Italy to the music of the heroic couplet. Robert Southey, Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore were a dozen years younger and divided their allegiance between two schools. In the main, however, they were still poeticisers of the orthodox old pattern, though all wrote a few songs of exceptional merit, and Campbell especially by defying the old anathemas.

Byron.

The great champion of the Augustan masters was himself the architect of revolution. First the idol and then the outcast of respectable society, Lord Byron sought relief in new cadences and new themes for his poetic talent. He was, however, essentially a history painter or a satirist in verse. He had none of the sensitive aesthetic taste of a Keats, none of the spiritual ardour of a Shelley, or of the elemental beauty or artistry of Wordsworth or Coleridge. He manages the pen (said Scott) with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality. The "Lake Poets" sought to create an impression deep, calm and profound, Byron to start a theme which should enable him to pose, travel, astonish, bewilder and confound as lover of daring, freedom, passion and revolt. For the subtler symphonic music--that music of the spheres to which the ears of poets alone are attuned--Byron had an imperfect sympathy. The delicate ear is often revolted in his poetry by the vices of impromptu work. He steadily refused to polish, to file or to furbish--the damning, inevitable sign of a man born to wear a golden tassel. "I am like the tiger. If I miss the first spring I go growling back to the jungle." Subtlety is sacrificed to freshness and vigour. The exultation, the breadth, the sweeping magnificence of his effects are consequently most appreciated abroad, where the ineradicable flaws of his style have no power to annoy.

The European fame of Byron was from the first something quite unique. At Missolonghi people ran through the streets crying "The great man is dead--he is gone." His corpse was refused entrance at Westminster; but the poet was taken to the inmost heart of Russia, Poland, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and among the Slavonic nations generally. In Italy his influence is plainly seen in Berchet, Leopardi, Giusti, and even Carducci. In Spain the Myrtle Society was founded in Byron's honour. Hugo in his _Orientales_ traversed Greece. Chateaubriand joined the Greek Committee. Delavigne dedicated his verse to Byron; Lamartine wrote another canto to _Childe Harold_; Merimee is interpenetrated by Byronesque feeling which also animates the best work of Heine, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Mickievicz, and even De Musset.

Criticism.

Like Scott, Byron was a man of two eras, and not too much ahead of his time to hold the Press-Dragon in fee. His supremacy and that of his satellites Moore and Campbell were championed by the old papers and by the two new blatant Quarterlies, whose sails were filled not with the light airs of the future but by the Augustan "gales" of the classical past. The distinction of this new phalanx of old-fashioned critics who wanted to confer literature by university degree was that they wrote as gentlemen for gentlemen: they first gave criticism in England a respectable shakedown. Francis Jeffrey, a man of extraordinary ability and editor of _The Edinburgh Review_ from 1803 to 1829 (with the mercurial Sydney Smith, the first of English conversationists, as his aide-de-camp), exercised a powerful influence as a standardizer of the second rate. He was one of the first of the critics to grasp firmly the main idea of literary evolution--the importance of time, environment, race and historical development upon the literary landscape; but he was vigorously aristocratic in his preferences, a hater of mystery, symbolism or allegory, an instinctive individualist of intolerant pattern. His chief weapons against the new ideas were social superiority and omniscience, and he used both unsparingly. The strident political

## partisanship of the _Edinburgh_ raised up within six years a serious

rival in the _Quarterly_, which was edited in turn by the good-natured pedagogue William Gifford and by Scott's extremely able son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart, the "scorpion" of the infant _Blackwood_. With the aid of the remnant of the old anti-Jacobins, Canning, Ellis, Barrow, Southey, Croker, Hayward, Apperley and others, the theory of _Quarterly_ infallibility was carried to its highest point of development about 1845.

The historical and critical work of the _Quarterly_ era, as might be expected, was appropriate to this gentlemanly censorship. The thinkers of the day were economic or juristic--Bentham, the great codifier; Malthus, whose theory of population gave Darwin his main impulse to theorise; and Mackintosh, whose liberal opposition to Burke deserved a better fate than it has ever perhaps received. The historians were mainly of the second class--the judicial Hallam, the ornate Roscoe, the plodding Lingard, the accomplished Milman, the curious Isaac D'Israeli, the academic Bishop Thirlwall. Mitford and Grote may be considered in the light of Tory and Radical historical pamphleteers, but Grote's work has the much larger measure of permanent value. As the historian of British India, James Mill's industry led him beyond his thesis of Benthamism in practice. Sir William Napier's heroic picture of the Peninsular War is strongly tinged by bias against the Tory administration of 1808-1813; but it conserves some imperishable scenes of war. Some of the most magnetic prose of the Regency Period was contained in the copious and insincere but profoundly emotionalising pamphlets of the self-taught Surrey labourer William Cobbett, in whom Diderot's paradox of a comedian is astonishingly illustrated. Lockhart's Lives of Burns and of Sir Walter Scott--the last perhaps the most memorable prose monument of its epoch--appeared in 1828 and 1838, and both formed the subjects of Thomas Carlyle in the _Edinburgh Review_, where, under the unwelcome discipline of Jeffrey, the new prophet worked nobly though in harness.

Scott.

Great as the triumph of the Romantic masters and the new ideas was, it is in the ranks of the Old School after all that we have to look for the greatest single figure in the literature of this age. Except in the imitative vein of ballad or folk-song, the poetry of Sir Walter Scott is never quite first-rate. It is poetry for repetition rather than for close meditation or contemplation, and resembles a military band more than a full orchestra. Nor will his prose bear careful analysis. It is a good servant, no more. When we consider, however, not the intensity but the vast extent, range and versatility of Scott's powers, we are constrained to assign him the first place in his own age, if not that in the next seat to Shakespeare in the whole of the English literary Pantheon. Like Shakespeare, he made humour and a knowledge of human nature his first instruments in depicting the past. Unlike Shakespeare, he was a born antiquary, and he had a great (perhaps excessive) belief in _mise en scene_, costume, patois and scenic properties generally. His portraiture, however, is Shakespearean in its wisdom and maturity, and, although he wrote very rapidly, it must be remembered that his mind had been prepared by strenuous work for twenty years as a storehouse of material in which nothing was handled until it had been carefully mounted by the imagination, classified in the memory, and tested by experimental use. Once he has got the imagination of the reader well grounded to earth, there is nothing he loves better than telling a good story. Of detail he is often careless. But he trusted to a full wallet, and rightly, for mainly by his abundance he raised the literature of the novel to its highest point of influence, breathing into it a new spirit, giving it a fulness and universality of life, a romantic charm, a dignity and elevation, and thereby a coherence, a power and predominance which it never had before.

In Scott the various lines of 18th-century conservatism and 19th-century romantic revival most wonderfully converge. His intense feeling for Long Ago made him a romantic almost from his cradle. The master faculties of history and humour made a strong conservative of him; but his Toryism was of a very different spring from that of Coleridge or Wordsworth. It was not a reaction from disappointment in the sequel of 1789, nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was indwelling, rooted deeply in the fibres of the soil, to which Scott's attachment was passionate, and nourished as from a source by ancestral sentiment and "heather" tradition. This sentiment made Scott a victorious pioneer of the Romantic movement all over Europe. At the same time we must remember that, with all his fondness for medievalism, he was fundamentally a thorough 18th-century Scotsman and successor of Bailie Nicol Jarvie: a worshipper of good sense, toleration, modern and expert governmental ideas, who valued the past chiefly by way of picturesque relief, and was thoroughly alive to the benefit of peaceful and orderly rule, and deeply convinced that we are much better off as we are than we could have been in the days of King Richard or good Queen Bess. Scott had the mind of an enlightened 18th-century administrator and statesmen who had made a fierce hobby of armour and old ballads. To expect him to treat of intense passion or romantic medievalism as Charlotte Bronte or Dante Gabriel Rossetti would have treated them is as absurd as to expect to find the sentiments of a Mrs Browning blossoming amidst the horse-play of _Tom Jones_ or _Harry Lorrequer_. Scott has few niceties or secrets: he was never subtle, morbid or fantastic. His handling is ever broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy and free. Yet nobly simple and straightforward as man and writer were, there is something very complex about his literary legacy, which has gone into all lands and created bigoted enemies (Carlyle, Borrow) as well as unexpected friends (Hazlitt, Newman, Jowett); and we can seldom be sure whether his influence is reactionary or the reverse. There has always been something semi-feudal about it. The "shirra" has a demesne in letters as broad as a countryside, a band of mesne vassals and a host of Eildon hillsmen, Tweedside cottiers, minor feudatories and forest retainers attached to the "Abbotsford Hunt." Scott's humour, humanity and insistence upon the continuity of history transformed English literature profoundly.

Transition fiction.

Scott set himself to coin a quarter of a million sterling out of the new continent of which he felt himself the Columbus. He failed (quite narrowly), but he made the Novel the paymaster of literature for at least a hundred years. His immediate contemporaries and successors were not particularly great. John Galt (1779-1839), Susan Ferrier (1782-1854) and D.M. Moir (1798-1851) all attempted the delineation of Scottish scenes with a good deal of shrewdness of insight and humour. The main bridge from Scott to the great novelists of the 'forties and 'fifties was supplied by sporting, military, naval and political novels, represented in turn by Surtees, Smith, Hook, Maxwell, Lever, Marryat, Cooper, Morier, Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli. Surtees gave all-important hints to _Pickwick_, Marryat developed grotesque character-drawing, Ainsworth and Bulwer attempted new effects in criminology and contemporary glitter. Disraeli in the 'thirties was one of the foremost romantic wits who had yet attempted the novel. Early in the 'forties he received the laying-on of hands from the Young England party, and attempted to propagandize the good tidings of his mission in _Coningsby_ and _Sybil_, novels full of _entrainement_ and promise, if not of actual genius. Unhappily the author was enmeshed in the fatal drolleries of the English party system, and _Lothair_ is virtually a confession of abandoned ideals. He completes the forward party in fiction; Jane Austen (1775-1815) stands to this as Crabbe and Rogers to Coleridge and Shelley. She represents the fine flower of the expiring 18th century. Scott could do the trumpet notes on the organ. She fingers the fine ivory flutes. She combines self-knowledge and artistic reticence with a complete tact and an absolute lucidity of vision within the area prescribed. Within the limits of a park wall in a country parish, absolutely oblivious of Europe and the universe, her art is among the finest and most finished that our literature has to offer. In irony she had no rival at that period. But the trimness of her plots and the delicacy of her miniature work have affinities in Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau and Mary Russell Mitford, three excellent writers of pure English prose. There is a finer aroma of style in the contemporary "novels" of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866). These, however, are rather tournaments of talk than novels proper, releasing a flood of satiric portraiture upon the idealism of the day--difficult to be apprehended in perfection save by professed students. Peacock's style had an appreciable influence upon his son-in-law George Meredith (1828-1909). His philosophy is for the most part Tory irritability exploding in ridicule; but Peacock was one of the most lettered men of his age, and his flouts and jeers smack of good reading, old wine and respectable prejudices. In these his greatest successor was George Borrow (1803-1881), who used three volumes of half-imaginary autobiography and road-faring in strange lands as a sounding-board for a kind of romantic revolt against the century of comfort, toleration, manufactures, mechanical inventions, cheap travel and commercial expansion, unaccompanied (as he maintains) by any commensurate growth of human wisdom, happiness, security or dignity.

The Victorian era.

In the year of Queen Victoria's accession most of the great writers of the early part of the century, whom we may denominate as "late Georgian," were silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe and Cobbett were gone. Wordsworth, Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers were still living, but the vital portion of their work was already done. The principal authors who belong equally to the Georgian and Victorian eras are Landor, Bulwer, Marryat, Hallam, Milman and Disraeli; none of whom, with the exception of the last, approaches the first rank in either. The significant work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Trollope, the Kingsleys, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky, Buckle, Green, Maine, Borrow, FitzGerald, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, Morris, Newman, Pater, Jefferies--the work of these writers may be termed conclusively Victorian; it gives the era a stamp of its own and distinguishes it as the most varied in intellectual riches in the whole course of our literature. Circumstances have seldom in the world been more favourable to a great outburst of literary energy. The nation was secure and prosperous to an unexampled degree, conscious of the will and the power to expand still further. The canons of taste were still aristocratic. Books were made and unmade according to a regular standard. Literature was the one form of art which the English understood, in which they had always excelled since 1579, and in which their originality was supreme. To the native genius for poetry was now added the advantage of materials for a prose which in lucidity and versatility should surpass even that of Goldsmith and Hazlitt. The diversity of form and content of this great literature was commensurate with the development of human knowledge and power which marked its age. In this and some other respects it resembles the extraordinary contemporary development in French literature which began under the reign of Louis Philippe. The one signally disconcerting thing about the great Victorian writers is their amazing prolixity. Not content with two or three long books, they write whole literatures. A score of volumes, each as long as the Bible or Shakespeare, barely represents the output of such authors as Carlyle, Ruskin, Froude, Dickens, Thackeray, Newman, Spencer or Trollope. They obtained vast quantities of new readers, for the middle class was beginning to read with avidity; but the quality of brevity, the knowledge when to stop, and with it the older classic conciseness and the nobler Hellenic idea of a perfect measure--these things were as though they had not been. Meanwhile, the old schools were broken up and the foolscap addressed to the old masters. Singers, entertainers, critics and historians abound. Every man may say what is in him in the phrases that he likes best, and the sole motto that compels is "every style is permissible except the style that is tiresome." The old models are strangely discredited, and the only conventions which hold are those concerning the subjects which English delicacy held to be tabooed. These conventions were inordinately strict, and were held to include all the unrestrained, illicit impulses of love and all the more violent aberrations from the Christian code of faith and ethics. Infidel speculation and the liaisons of lawless love (which had begun to form the staple of the new French fiction--hence regarded by respectable English critics of the time as profoundly vitiated and scandalous) had no recognized existence and were totally ignored in literature designed for general reading. The second or Goody-two-Shoes convention remained strictly in force until the penultimate decade of the 19th century, and was acquiesced in or at least submitted to by practically all the greatest writers of the Victorian age. The great poets and novelists of that day easily out-topped their fellows. Society had no difficulty in responding to the summons of its literary leaders. Nor was their fame

## partial, social or sectional. The great novelists of early Victorian

days were aristocratic and democratic at once. Their popularity was universal within the limits of the language and beyond it. The greatest of men were men of imagination rather than men of ideas, but such sociological and moral ideas as they derived from their environment were poured helter-skelter into their novels, which took the form of huge pantechnicon magazines. Another distinctive feature of the Victorian novel is the position it enabled women to attain in literature, a position attained by them in creative work neither before nor since.

Dickens.

The novelists to a certain extent created their own method like the great dramatists, but such rigid prejudices or conventions as they found already in possession they respected without demur. Both Dickens and Thackeray write as if they were almost entirely innocent of the existence of sexual vice. As artists and thinkers they were both formless. But the enormous self-complacency of the England of their time, assisted alike by the part played by the nation from 1793 to 1815, evangelicalism, free trade (which was originally a system of super-nationalism) and later, evolution, generated in them a great benignity and a strong determination towards a liberal and humanitarian philosophy. Despite, however, the diffuseness of the envelope and the limitations of horizon referred to, the unbookish and almost unlettered genius of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the son of a poor lower middle-class clerk, almost entirely self-educated, has asserted for itself the foremost place in the literary history of the period. Dickens broke every rule, rioted in absurdity and bathed in extravagance. But everything he wrote was received with an almost frantic joy by those who recognized his creations as deifications of themselves, his scenery as drawn by one of the quickest and intensest observers that ever lived, and his drollery as an accumulated dividend from the treasury of human laughter. Dickens's mannerisms were severe, but his geniality as a writer broke down every obstruction, reduced Jeffrey to tears and Sydney Smith to helpless laughter.

Thackeray.

The novel in France was soon to diverge and adopt the form of an anecdote illustrating the traits of a very small group of persons, but the English novel, owing mainly to the predilection of Dickens for those Gargantuan entertainers of his youth, Fielding and Smollett, was to remain anchored to the history. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was even more historical than Dickens, and most of his leading characters are provided with a detailed genealogy. Dickens's great works, excepting _David Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_, had all appeared when Thackeray made his mark in 1848 with _Vanity Fair_, and Thackeray follows most of his predecessor's conventions, including his conventional religion, ethics and politics, but he avoids his worse faults of theatricality. He never forces the note or lashes himself into fury or sentimentality; he limits himself in satire to the polite sphere which he understands, he is a great master of style and possesses every one of its fairy gifts except brevity. He creates characters and scenes worthy of Dickens, but within a smaller range and without the same abundance. He is a traveller and a cosmopolitan, while Dickens is irredeemably Cockney. He is often content to criticize or annotate or to preach upon some congenial theme, while Dickens would be in the flush of humorous creation. His range, it must be remembered, is wide, in most respects a good deal wider than his great contemporary's, for he is at once novelist, pamphleteer, essayist, historian, critic, and the writer of some of the most delicate and sentimental _vers d'occasion_ in the language.

Charlotte Bronte.

George Eliot.

Kingsley. Trollope. Reade. Meredith. Hardy.

The absorption of England in itself is shown with exceptional force in the case of Thackeray, who was by nature a cosmopolitan, yet whose work is so absorbed with the structure of English society as to be almost unintelligible to foreigners. The exploration of the human heart and conscience in relation to the new problems of the time had been almost abandoned by the novel since Richardson's time. It was for woman to attempt to resolve these questions, and with the aid of powerful imagination to propound very different conclusions. The conviction of Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) was that the mutual passionate love of one man and one woman is sacred and creates a centre of highest life, energy and joy in the world. George Eliot (1819-1880), on the other hand, detected a blind and cruel egoism in all such ecstasy of individual passion. It was in the autumn of 1847 that _Jane Eyre_ shocked the primness of the coteries by the unconcealed ardour of its love passages. Twelve years later _Adam Bede_ astonished the world by the intensity of its ethical light and shade. The introspective novel was now very gradually to establish a supremacy over the historical. The romance of the Brontes' forlorn life colours _Jane Eyre_, colours _Wuthering Heights_ and colours _Villette_; their work is inseparable from their story to an extent that we perhaps hardly realize. George Eliot did not receive this adventitious aid from romance, and her work was, perhaps, unduly burdened by ethical diatribe, scientific disquisition and moral and philosophical asides. It is more than redeemed, however, by her sovereign humour, by the actual truth in the portrayal of that absolutely self-centred Midland society of the 'thirties and 'forties, and by the moral significance which she extracts from the smaller

## actions and more ordinary characters of life by means of sympathy,

imagination and a deep human compassion. Her novels are generally admitted to have obtained twin summits in _Adam Bede_ (1859) and _Middlemarch_ (1872). An even nicer delineator of the most delicate shades of the curiously remote provincial society of that day was Mrs Gaskell (1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ and _Wives and Daughters_ attain to the perfection of easy, natural and unaffected English narrative. Enthusiasm and a picturesque boyish ardour and partisanship are the chief features of _Westward Ho!_ and the other vivid and stirring novels of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), to which a subtler gift in the discrimination of character must be added in the case of his brother Henry Kingsley (1830-1876). Charles, however, was probably more accomplished as a poet than in the to him too exciting operation of taking sides in a romance. The novels of Trollope, Reade and Wilkie Collins are, generally speaking, a secondary product of the literary forces which produced the great fiction of the 'fifties. The two last were great at structure and sensation: Trollope dogs the prose of every-day life with a certainty and a clearness that border upon inspiration. The great novels of George Meredith range between 1859 and 1880, stories of characters deeply interesting who reveal themselves to us by flashes and trust to our inspiration to do the rest. The wit, the sparkle, the entrain and the horizon of these books, from _Richard Feverel_ to the master analysis of _The Egoist_, have converted the study of Meredith into an exact science. Thomas Hardy occupies a place scarcely inferior to Meredith's as a stylist, a discoverer of new elements of the plaintive and the wistful in the vanishing of past ideals, as a depicter of the old southern rustic life of England and its tragi-comedy, in a series of novels which take rank with the greatest.

Tennyson.

If Victorian literature had something more than a paragon in Dickens, it had its paragon too in the poet Tennyson. The son of a Lincolnshire parson of squirearchal descent, Alfred Tennyson consecrated himself to the vocation of poesy with the same unalterable conviction that had characterized Milton, Pope, Thomson, Wordsworth and Keats, and that was yet to signalize Rossetti and Swinburne, and he became easily the greatest virtuoso of his time in his art. To lyrics and idylls of a luxurious and exotic picturesqueness he gave a perfection of technique which criticism has chastened only to perfect in such miracles of description as "The Lotus Eaters," "The Dream of Fair Women," and "Morte d'Arthur." He received as vapour the sense of uneasiness as to the problems of the future which pervaded his generation, and in the elegies and lyrics of _In Memoriam_, in _The Princess_ and in _Maud_ he gave them back to his contemporaries in a running stream, which still sparkles and radiates amid the gloom. After the lyrical monodrama of _Maud_ in 1855 he devoted his flawless technique of design, harmony and rhythm to works primarily of decoration and design (_The Idylls of the King_), and to experiments in metrical drama for which the time was not ripe; but his main occupation was varied almost to the last by lyrical blossoms such as "Frater Ave," "Roman Virgil," or "Crossing the Bar," which, like "Tears, Idle Tears" and "O that 'twere possible," embody the aspirations of Flaubert towards a perfected art of language shaping as no other verse probably can.

Browning.

Few, perhaps, would go now to _In Memoriam_ as to an oracle for illumination and guidance as many of Queen Victoria's contemporaries did, from the Queen herself downwards. And yet it will take very long ere its fascination fades. In language most musical it rearticulates the gospel of Sorrow and Love, and it remains still a pathetic expression of emotions, sentiments and truths which, as long as human nature remains the same, and as long as calamity, sorrow and death are busy in the world, must be always repeating themselves. Its power, perhaps, we may feel of this poem and indeed of most of Tennyson's poetry, is not quite equal to its charm. And if we feel this strongly, we shall regard Robert Browning as the typical poet of the Victorian era. His thought has been compared to a galvanic battery for the use of spiritual paralytics. The grave defect of Browning is that his ideas, however excellent, are so seldom completely won; they are left in a twilight, or even a darkness more Cimmerian than that to which the worst of the virtuosi dedicate their ideas. Similarly, even in his "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics" (1845) or his "Men and Women" (1855) he rarely depicts action, seldom goes further than interpreting the mind of man as he approaches action. If Dickens may be described as the eye of Victorian literature, Tennyson the ear attuned to the subtlest melodies, Swinburne the reed to which everything blew to music, Thackeray the velvet pulpit-cushion, Eliot the impending brow, and Meredith the cerebral dome, then Browning might well be described as the active brain itself eternally expounding some point of view remote in time and place from its own. Tennyson was ostensibly and always a poet in his life and his art, in his blue cloak and sombrero, his mind and study alike stored with intaglios of the thought of all ages, always sounding and remodelling his verses so that they shall attain the maximum of sweetness and symmetry. He was a recluse. Browning on the other hand dissembled his poethood, successfully disguised his muse under the semblance of a stock merchant, was civil to his fellowmen, and though nervous with bores, encountered every one he met as if he were going to receive more than he could impart. In Tennyson's poetry we are always discovering new beauties. In Browning's we are finding new blemishes. Why he chose rhythm and metre for seven-eighths of his purpose is somewhat of a mystery. His protest against the materialistic view of life is, perhaps, a more valid one than Tennyson's; he is at pains to show us the noble elements valuable in spite of failure to achieve tangible success. He realizes that the greater the man, the greater is the failure, yet protests unfailingly against the despondent or materialist view of life. His nimble appreciation of character and motive attracts the attentive curiosity of highly intellectual people; but the question recurs with some persistence as to whether poetry, after all, was the right medium for the expression of these views.

Ruskin. Morris. Symonds. Pater.

Many of Browning's ideas and fertilizations will, perhaps, owing to the difficulty and uncertainty which attaches to their form, penetrate the future indirectly as the stimulant of other men's work. This is especially the case with those remarkable writers who have for the first time given the fine arts a considerable place in English literature, notably John Ruskin (_Modern Painters_, 1842, _Seven Lamps_, 1849, _Stones of Venice_, 1853), William Morris, John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater. Browning, it is true, shared the discipleship of the first two with Kingsley and Carlyle. But Ruskin outlived all discipleships and transcended almost all the prose writers of his period in a style the elements of emotional power in which still preserve their secret.

Arnold.

More a poet of doubt than either Tennyson or the college friend, A.H. Clough, whose loss he lamented in one of the finest pastoral elegies of all ages, Matthew Arnold takes rank with Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne alone among the Dii Majores of Victorian poetry. He is perhaps a disciple of Wordsworth even more than of Goethe, and he finds in Nature, described in rarefied though at times intensely beautiful phrase, the balm for the unrest of man's unsatisfied yearnings, the divorce between soul and intellect, and the sense of contrast between the barren toil of man and the magic operancy of nature. His most delicate and intimate strains are tinged with melancholy. The infinite desire of what might have been, the _lacrimae rerum_, inspires "Resignation," one of the finest pieces in his volume of 1849 (_The Strayed Reveller_). In the deeply-sighed lines of "Dover Beach" in 1867 it is associated with his sense of the decay of faith. The dreaming garden trees, the full moon and the white evening star of the beautiful English-coloured _Thyrsis_ evoke the same mood, and render Arnold one of the supreme among elegiac poets. But his poetry is the most individual in the circle and admits the popular heart never for an instant. As a popularizer of Renan and of the view of the Bible, not as a talisman but as a literature, and, again, as a chastener of his contemporaries by means of the iteration of a few telling phrases about philistines, barbarians, sweetness and light, sweet reasonableness, high seriousness, Hebraism and Hellenism, "young lions of the _Daily Telegraph_," and "the note of provinciality," Arnold far eclipsed his fame as a poet during his lifetime. His crusade of banter against the bad civilization of his own class was one of the most audaciously successful things of the kind ever accomplished. But all his prose theorizing was excessively superficial. In poetry he sounded a note which the prose Arnold seemed hopelessly unable ever to fathom.

Rossetti.

It is easier to speak of the virtuoso group who derived their first incitement to poetry from Chatterton, Keats and the early exotic ballads of Tennyson, far though these yet were from attaining the perfection in which they now appear after half a century of assiduous correction. The chief of them were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The founders of this school, which took and acquired the name Pre-Raphaelite, were profoundly impressed by the Dante revival and by the study of the early Florentine masters. Rossetti himself was an accomplished translator from Dante and from Villon. He preferred Keats to Shelley because (like himself) he had no philosophy. The 18th century was to him as if it had never been, he dislikes Greek lucidity and the open air, and prefers lean medieval saints, spectral images and mystic loves. The passion of these students was retrospective; they wanted to revive the literature of a forgotten past, Italian, Scandinavian, French, above all, medieval. To do this is a question of enthusiastic experiment and adventure. Rossetti leads the way with his sonnets and ballads. Christina follows with _Goblin Market_, though she subsequently, with a perfected technique, writes poetry more and more confined to the religious emotions. William Morris publishes in 1858 his _Defence of Guenevere_, followed in ten years by _The Earthly Paradise_, a collection of metrical tales, which hang in the sunshine like tapestries woven of golden thread, where we should naturally expect the ordinary paperhanging of prose romance.

Swinburne.

From the verdurous gloom of the studio with its mysterious and occult properties in which Rossetti compounded his colours, Morris went forth shortly to chant and then to narrate Socialist songs and parables. Algernon Charles Swinburne set forth to scandalize the critics of 1866 with the roses and lilies of vice and white death in _Poems and Ballads_, which was greeted with howls and hisses, and reproach against a "fleshly school of modern poetry." Scandalous verses these were, rioting on the crests of some of these billows of song. More discerning persons perceived the harmless impersonal unreality and mischievous youthful extravagance of all these Cyprian outbursts, that the poems were the outpourings of a young singer up to the chin in the Pierian flood, and possessed by a poetic energy so urgent that it could not wait to apply the touchstones of reality or the chastening planes of experience. Swinburne far surpassed the promoters of this exotic school in technical excellence, and in _Atalanta in Calydon_ and its successors may be said to have widened the bounds of English song, to have created a new music and liberated a new harmonic scale in his verse. Of the two elements which, superadded to a consummate technique, compose the great poet, intensity of imagination and intensity of passion, the latter in Swinburne much predominated. The result was a great abundance of heat and glow and not perhaps quite enough defining light. Hence the tendency to be incomprehensible, so fatal in its fascination for the poets of the last century, which would almost justify the title of the triumvirs of twilight to three of the greatest. It is this incomprehensibility which alienates the poet from the popular understanding and confines his audience to poets, students and scholars. Poetry is often comparable to a mountain range with its points and aiguilles, its peaks and crags, its domes and its summits. But Swinburne's poetry, filled with the sound and movement of great waters, is as incommunicable as the sea. Trackless and almost boundless, it has no points, no definite summits. The poet never seems to know precisely when he is going to stop. His metrical flow is wave-like, beautiful and rather monotonous, inseparable from the general effect. His endings seem due to an exhaustion of rhythm rather than to an exhaustion of sense. A cessation of meaning is less perceptible than a cessation of magnificent sound.

Newman and the Church.

Akin in some sense to the attempt made to get behind the veil and to recapture the old charms and spells of the middle ages, to discover the open sesame of the _Morte D'Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_ and to reveal the old Celtic and monastic life which once filled and dominated our islands, was the attempt to overthrow the twin gods of the 'forties and 'fifties, state-Protestantism and the sanctity of trade. The curiously assorted Saint Georges who fought these monsters were John Henry Newman and Thomas Carlyle. The first cause of the movement was, of course, the anomalous position of the Anglican Church, which had become a province of the oligarchy officered by younger sons. It stood apart from foreign Protestantism; its ignorance of Rome, and consequently of what it protested against, was colossal; it was conscious of itself only as an establishment--it had produced some very great men since the days of the non-jurors, when it had mislaid its historical conscience, but these had either been great scholars in their studies, such as Berkeley, Butler, Warburton, Thomas Scott, or revivalists, evangelicals and missionaries, such as Wilson, Wesley, Newton, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Martyn, who were essentially Congregationalists rather than historical Churchmen. A new spiritual beacon was to be raised; an attempt was to be made to realize the historical and cosmic aspects of the English Church, to examine its connexions, its descent and its title-deeds. In this attempt Newman was to spend the best years of his life.

The growth of liberal opinions and the denudation of the English Church of spiritual and historical ideas, leaving "only pulpit orators at Clapham and Islington and two-bottle orthodox" to defend it, seemed to involve the continued existence of Anglicanism in any form in considerable doubt. Swift had said at the commencement of the 18th century that if an act was passed for the extirpation of the gospel, bank stock might decline 1%; but a century later it is doubtful whether the passing of such a bill would have left any trace, however evanescent, upon the stability of the money market. The Anglican _via media_ had enemies not only in the philosophical radicals, but also in the new caste of men of science. Perhaps, as J.A. Froude suggests, these combined enemies, _The Edinburgh Review_, Brougham, Mackintosh, the Reform Ministry, Low Church philosophy and the London University were not so very terrible after all. The Church was a vested interest which had a greater stake in the country and was harder to eradicate than they imagined. But it had nothing to give to the historian and the idealist. They were right to fight for what their souls craved after and found in the Church of Andrewes, Herbert, Ken and Waterland. Belief in the divine mission of the Church lingered on in the minds of such men as Alexander Knox or his disciple Bishop Jebb; but few were prepared to answer the question--"What is the Church as spoken of in England? Is it the Church of Christ?"--and the answers were various. Hooker had said it was "the nation"; and in entirely altered circumstances, with some qualifications, Dr Arnold said the same. It was "the Establishment" according to the lawyers and politicians, both Whig and Tory. It was an invisible and mystical body, said the Evangelicals. It was the aggregate of separate congregations, said the Nonconformists. It was the parliamentary creation of the Reformation, said the Erastians. The true Church was the communion of the Pope; the pretended Church was a legalized schism, said the Roman Catholics. All these ideas were floating about, loose and vague, among people who talked much about the Church.

One thing was persistently obvious, namely, that the nationalist church had become opportunist in every fibre, and that it had thrown off almost every semblance of ecclesiastical discipline. The view was circulated that the Church owed its continued existence to the good sense of the individuals who officered it, and to the esteem which possession and good sense combined invariably engendered in the reigning oligarchy. But since Christianity was true--and Newman was the one man of modern times who seems never to have doubted this, never to have overlooked the unmistakable threat of eternal punishment to the wicked and unbelieving--modern England, with its march of intellect and its chatter about progress, was advancing with a light heart to the verge of a bottomless abyss. By a diametrically opposite chain of reasoning Newman reached much the same conclusion as Carlyle. Newman sought a haven of security in a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. The medieval influences already at work in Oxford began to fan the flame which kindled to a blaze in the ninetieth of the celebrated _Tracts for the Times_. It proved the turning of the ways leading Keble and Pusey to Anglican ritual and Newman to Rome. This anti-liberal campaign was poison to the state-churchmen and Protestants, and became perhaps the chief intellectual storm centre of the century. Charles Kingsley in 1864 sought to illustrate by recent events that veracity could not be considered a Roman virtue.

Scientific cross-currents.

Macaulay.

After some preliminary ironic sparring Newman was stung into writing what he deliberately called _Apologia pro vita sua_. In this, apart from the masterly dialectic and exposition in which he had already shown himself an adept, a volume of autobiography is made a chapter of general history, unsurpassed in its kind since the _Confessions_ of St Augustine, combined with a perfection of form, a precision of phrasing and a charm of style peculiar to the genius of the author, rendering it one of the masterpieces of English prose. But while Newman was thus sounding a retreat, louder and more urgent voices were signalling the advance in a totally opposite direction. The _Apologia_ fell in point of time between _The Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_, in which Charles Darwin was laying the corner stones of the new science of which Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace were to be among the first apostles, and almost coincided with the _First Principles_ of a synthetic philosophy, in which Herbert Spencer was formulating a set of probabilities wholly destructive to the acceptance of positive truth in any one religion. The typical historian of the 'fifties, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and the seminal thinker of the 'sixties, John Stuart Mill, had as determinedly averted their faces from the old conception of revealed religion. Nourished in the school of the great Whig pamphleteer historians, George Grote and Henry Hallam, Macaulay combined gifts of memory, enthusiastic conviction, portraiture and literary expression, which gave to his historical writing a resonance unequalled (even by Michelet) in modern literature. In spite of faults of taste and fairness, Macaulay's resplendent gifts enabled him to achieve for the period from Charles II. to the peace of Ryswick what Thucydides had done for the Peloponnesian War. The pictures that he drew with such exultant force are stamped ineffaceably upon the popular mind. His chief faults are not of detail, but rather a lack of subtlety as regards characterization and motive, a disposition to envisage history too exclusively as a politician, and the sequence of historical events as a kind of ordered progress towards the material ideals of universal trade and Whig optimism as revealed in the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Carlyle.

Macaulay's tendency to disparage the past brought his whole vision of the Cosmos into sharp collision with that of his rival appellant to the historical conscience, Thomas Carlyle, a man whose despair of the present easily exceeded Newman's. But Carlyle's despondency was totally irrespective of the attitude preserved by England towards the Holy Father, whom he seldom referred to save as "the three-hatted Papa" and "servant of the devil." It may be in fact almost regarded as the reverse or complement to the excess of self-complacency in Macaulay. We may correct the excess of one by the opposite excess of the other. Macaulay was an optimist in ecstasy with the material advance of his time in knowledge and power; the growth of national wealth, machinery and means of lighting and locomotion caused him to glow with satisfaction. Carlyle, the pessimist, regards all such symptoms of mechanical development as contemptible. Far from panegyrizing his own time, he criticizes it without mercy. Macaulay had great faith in rules and regulations, reform bills and parliamentary machinery. Carlyle regards them as wiles of the devil. Frederick William of Prussia, according to Macaulay, was the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and Puck, his palace was hell, and Oliver Twist and Smike were petted children compared with his son the crown prince. In the same bluff and honest father Carlyle recognized the realized ideal of his fancy and hugged the just man made perfect to his heart of hearts. Such men as Bentham and Cobden, Mill and Macaulay, had in Carlyle's opinion spared themselves no mistaken exertion to exalt the prosperity and happiness of their own day. The time had come to react at all hazards against the prevalent surfeit of civilization. Henceforth his literary activity was to take two main directions. First, tracts for the times against modern tendencies, especially against the demoralizing modern talk about progress by means of money and machinery which emanated like a miasma from the writings of such men as Mill, Macaulay, Brougham, Buckle and from the Quarterlies. Secondly, a cyclopean exhibition of Caesarism, discipline, the regimentation of workers, and the convertibility of the Big Stick and the Bible, with a preference to the Big Stick as a panacea. The snowball was to grow rapidly among such writers as Kingsley, Ruskin, George Borrow, unencumbered by reasoning or deductive processes which they despised. Carlyle himself felt that the condition of England was one for anger rather than discussion. He detested the rationalism and symmetry of such methodists of thought as Mill, Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, Lecky, Ricardo and other demonstrations of the dismal science--mere chatter he called it. The palliative philanthropy of the day had become his aversion even more than the inroads of Rome under cover of the Oxford movement which Froude, Borrow and Kingsley set themselves to correct. As an historian of a formal order Carlyle's historical portraits cannot bear a strict comparison with the published work of Gibbon and Macaulay, or even of Maine and Froude in this period, but as a biographer and autobiographer Carlyle's caustic insight has enabled him to produce much which is of the very stuff of human nature. Surrounded by philomaths and savants who wrote smoothly about the perfectibility of man and his institutions, Carlyle almost alone refused to distil his angry eloquence and went on railing against the passive growth of civilization at the heart of which he declared that he had discovered a cancer. This uncouth Titan worship and prostration before brute force, this constant ranting about jarls and vikings trembles often on the verge of cant and comedy, and his fiddling on the one string of human pretension and bankruptcy became discordant almost to the point of chaos. Instinctively destructive, he resents the apostleship of teachers like Mill, or the pioneer discoveries of men like Herbert Spencer and Darwin. He remains, nevertheless, a great incalculable figure, the cross grandfather of a school of thought which is largely unconscious of its debt and which so far as it recognizes it takes Carlyle in a manner wholly different from that of his contemporaries.

New schools.

History.

The deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot (and also of George Borrow) in 1881 make a starting-point for the new schools of historians, novelists, critics and biographers, and those new nature students who claim to cure those evil effects of civilization which Carlyle and his disciples had discovered. History in the hands of Macaulay, Buckle and Carlyle had been occupied mainly with the bias and tendency of change, the results obtained by those who consulted the oracle being more often than not diametrically opposite. With Froude still on the one hand as the champion of Protestantism, and with E.A. Freeman and J.R. Green on the other as nationalist historians, the school of applied history was fully represented in the next generation, but as the records grew and multiplied in print in accordance with the wise provisions made in 1857 by the commencement of the Rolls Series of medieval historians, and the Calendars of State Papers, to be followed shortly by the rapidly growing volumes of Calendars of Historical Manuscripts, historians began to concentrate their attention more upon the process of change as their right subject matter and to rely more and more upon documents, statistics and other impersonal and disinterested forms of material. Such historical writers as Lecky, Lord Acton, Creighton, Morley and Bryce contributed to the process of transition mainly as essayists, but the new doctrines were tested and to a certain extent put into action by such writers as Thorold Rogers, Stubbs, Gardiner and Maitland. The theory that History is a science, no less and no more, was propounded in so many words by Professor Bury in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1903, and this view and the corresponding divergence of history from the traditional pathway of Belles Lettres has become steadily more dominant in the world of historical research and historical writing since 1881. The bulk of quite modern historical writing can certainly be justified from no other point of view.

The novel.

The novel since 1881 has pursued a course curiously analogous to that of historical writing. Supported as it was by masters of the old regime such as Meredith and Hardy, and by those who then ranked even higher in popular esteem such as Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Besant and Rice, Blackmore, William Black and a monstrous rising regiment of lady novelists--Mrs Lynn Linton, Rhoda Broughton, Mrs Henry Wood, Miss Braddon, Mrs Humphry Ward, the type seemed securely anchored to the old formulas and the old ways. In reality, however, many of these popular workers were already moribund and the novel was being honeycombed by French influence.

This is perceptible in Hardy, but may be traced with greater distinctness in the best work of George Gissing, George Moore, Mark Rutherford, and later on of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. The old novelists had left behind them a giant's robe. Intellectually giants, Dickens and Thackeray were equally gigantic spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervent heat above a glowing furnace, into which they flung lavish masses of unshaped metal, caring little for immediate effect or minute dexterity of stroke, but knowing full well that the emotional energy of their temperaments was capable of fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they would produce their great downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell, but the case was desperate; copy had to be despatched at once or the current serial would collapse. Good and bad had to make up the tale against time, and revelling in the very exuberance and excess of their humour, the novelists invariably triumphed. It was incumbent on the new school of novelists to economize their work with more skill, to relieve their composition of irrelevancies, to keep the writing in one key, and to direct it consistently to one end--in brief, to unify the novel as a work of art and to simplify its ordonnance.

The novel, thus lightened and sharpened, was conquering new fields. The novel of the 'sixties remained not, perhaps, to win many new triumphs, but a very popular instrument in the hands of those who performed variations on the old masters, and much later in the hands of Mr William de Morgan, showing a new force and quiet power of its own. The novel, however, was ramifying in other directions in a way full of promise for the future. A young Edinburgh student, Robert Louis Stevenson, had inherited much of the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelitic virtuosos, and combined with their passion for the romance of the historic past a curiosity fully as strong about the secrets of romantic technique. A coterie which he formed with W.E. Henley and his cousin R.A.M. Stevenson studied words as a young art student studies paints, and made studies for portraits of buccaneers with the same minute drudgery that Rossetti had studied a wall or Morris a piece of figured tapestry. While thus forming a new romantic school whose work when wrought by his methods should be fit to be grafted upon the picturesque historic fiction of Scott and Dumas, Stevenson was also naturalizing the short story of the modern French type upon English ground. In this particular field he was eclipsed by Rudyard Kipling, who, though less original as a man of letters, had a technical vocabulary and descriptive power far in advance of Stevenson's, and was able in addition to give his writing an exotic quality derived from Oriental colouring. This regional type of writing has since been widely imitated, and the novel has simultaneously developed in many other ways, of which perhaps the most significant is the psychological study as manipulated severally by Shorthouse, Mallock and Henry James.

Criticism.

The expansion of criticism in the same thirty years was not a whit less marked than the vast divagation of the novel. In the early 'eighties it was still tongue-bound by the hypnotic influence of one or two copy-book formulae--Arnold's "criticism of life" as a definition of poetry, and Walter Pater's implied doctrine of art for art's sake. That two dicta so manifestly absurd should have cast such an augur-like spell upon the free expression of opinion, though it may of course, like all such instances, be easily exaggerated, is nevertheless a curious example of the enslavement of ideas by a confident claptrap. A few representatives of the old schools of motived or scientific criticism, deduced from the literatures of past time, survived the new century in Leslie Stephen, Saintsbury, Stopford Brooke, Austin Dobson, Courthope, Sidney Colvin, Watts-Dunton; but their agreement is certainly not greater than among the large class of emancipated who endeavour to concentrate the attention of others without further ado upon those branches of literature which they find most nutritive. Among the finest appreciators of this period have been Pattison and Jebb, Myers, Hutton, Dowden, A.C. Bradley, William Archer, Richard Garnett, E. Gosse and Andrew Lang. Birrell, Walkley and Max Beerbohm have followed rather in the wake of the Stephens and Bagehot, who have criticized the sufficiency of the titles made out by the more enthusiastic and lyrical eulogists. In Arthur Symons, Walter Raleigh and G.K. Chesterton the new age possessed critics of great originality and power, the work of the last two of whom is concentrated upon the application of ideas about life at large to the conceptions of literature. In exposing palpable nonsense as such, no one perhaps did better service in criticism than the veteran Frederic Harrison.

In the cognate work of memoir and essay, the way for which has been greatly smoothed by co-operative lexicographical efforts such as the _Dictionary of National Biography_, the _New English Dictionary_, the _Victoria County History_ and the like, some of the most dexterous and permeating work of the transition from the old century to the new was done by H.D. Traill, Gosse, Lang, Mackail, E.V. Lucas, Lowes Dickinson, Richard le Gallienne, A.C. Benson, Hilaire Belloc, while the open-air relief work for dwellers pent in great cities, pioneered by Gilbert White, has been expanded with all the zest and charm that a novel pursuit can endow by such writers as Richard Jefferies, an open-air and nature mystic of extraordinary power at his best, Selous, Seton Thompson, W.H. Hudson.

Poetry.

The age has not been particularly well attuned to the efforts of the newer poets since Coventry Patmore in the _Angel in the House_ achieved embroidery, often extremely beautiful, upon the Tennysonian pattern, and since Edward FitzGerald, the first of all letter-writing commentators on life and letters since Lamb, gave a new cult to the decadent century in his version of the Persian centoist Omar Khayyam. The prizes which in Moore's day were all for verse have now been transferred to the prose novel and the play, and the poets themselves have played into the hands of the Philistines by disdaining popularity in a fond preference for virtuosity and obscurity. Most kinds of the older verse, however, have been well represented, descriptive and elegiac poetry in particular by Robert Bridges and William Watson; the music of the waters of the western sea and its isles by W.B. Yeats, Synge, Moira O'Neill, "Fiona Macleod" and an increasing group of Celtic bards; the highly wrought verse of the 17th-century lyrists by Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson; the simplicity of a more popular strain by W.H. Davies, of a brilliant rhetoric by John Davidson, and of a more intimate romance by Sturge Moore and Walter de la Mare. Light verse has never, perhaps, been represented more effectively since Praed and Calverley and Lewis Carroll than by Austin Dobson, Locker Lampson, W.S. Gilbert and Owen Seaman. The names of C.M. Doughty, Alfred Noyes, Herbert Trench and Laurence Binyon were also becoming prominent at the opening of the 20th century. For originality in form and substance the palm rests in all probability with A.E. Housman, whose _Shropshire Lad_ opens new avenues and issues, and with W.E. Henley, whose town and hospital poems had a poignant as well as an ennobling strain. The work of Henry Newbolt, Mrs. Meynell and Stephen Phillips showed a real poetic gift. Above all these, however, in the esteem of many reign the verses of George Meredith and of Thomas Hardy, whose _Dynasts_ was widely regarded by the best judges as the most remarkable literary production of the new century.

Drama.

The new printed and acted drama dates almost entirely from the late 'eighties. Tom Robertson in the 'seventies printed nothing, and his plays were at most a timid recognition of the claims of the drama to represent reality and truth. The enormous superiority of the French drama as represented by Augier, Dumas _fils_ and Sardou began to dawn slowly upon the English consciousness. Then in the 'eighties came Ibsen, whose daring in handling actuality was only equalled by his intrepid stage-craft. Oscar Wilde and A.W. Pinero were the first to discover how the spirit of these new discoveries might be adapted to the English stage. Gilbert Murray, with his fascinating and tantalizing versions from Euripides, gave a new flexibility to the expansion that was going on in English dramatic ideas. Bernard Shaw and his disciples, conspicuous among them Granville Barker, gave a new seasoning of wit to the absolute novelties of subject, treatment and application with which they transfixed the public which had so long abandoned thought upon entering the theatre. This new adventure enjoyed a _succes de stupeur_, the precise range of which can hardly be estimated, and the force of which is clearly by no means spent.

20th-century changes.

English literature in the 20th century still preserves some of the old arrangements and some of the consecrated phrases of patronage and aristocracy; but the circumstances of its production were profoundly changed during the 19th century. By 1895 English literature had become a subject of regular instruction for a special degree at most of the universities, both in England and America. This has begun to lead to research embodied in investigations which show that what were regarded as facts in connexion with the earlier literature can be regarded so no longer. It has also brought comparative and historical treatment of a closer kind and on a larger scale to bear upon the evolution of literary types. On the other hand it has concentrated an excessive attention perhaps upon the grammar and prosody and etymology of literature, it has stereotyped the admiration of lifeless and obsolete forms, and has substituted antiquarian notes and ready-made commentary for that live enjoyment, which is essentially individual and which tends insensibly to evaporate from all literature as soon as the circumstance of it changes. It is prone, moreover, to force upon the immature mind a rapt admiration for the mirror before ever it has scanned the face of the original. A result due rather to the general educational agencies of the time is that, while in the middle of the 19th century one man could be found to write competently on a given subject, in 1910 there were fifty. Books and apparatus for reading have multiplied in proportion. The fact of a book having been done quite well in a certain way is no longer any bar whatever to its being done again without hesitation in the same way. This continual pouring of ink from one bottle into another is calculated gradually to raise the standard of all subaltern writing and compiling, and to leave fewer and fewer books securely rooted in a universal recognition of their intrinsic excellence, power and idiosyncrasy or personal charm. Even then, of what we consider first-rate in the 19th century, for instance, but a very small residuum can possibly survive. The one characteristic that seems likely to cling and to differentiate this voluble century is its curious reticence, of which the 20th century has already made uncommonly short work. The new playwrights have untaught England a shyness which came in about the time of Southey, Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. That the best literature has survived hitherto is at best a pious opinion. As the area of experience grows it is more and more difficult to circumscribe or even to describe the supreme best, and such attempts have always been responsible for base superstition. It is clear that some limitation of the literary stock-in-trade will become increasingly urgent as time goes on, and the question may well occur as to whether we are insuring the right baggage. The enormous apparatus of literature at the present time is suitable only to a peculiar phasis and manner of existence. Some hold to the innate and essential aristocracy of literature; others that it is bound to develop on the popular and communistic side, for that at present, like machinery and other deceptive benefits, it is a luxury almost exclusively advantageous to the rich. But to predict the direction of change in literature is even more futile than to predict the direction of change in human history, for of all factors of history, literature, if one of the most permanent, is also one of the least calculable.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--_The Age of Wordsworth_ and _The Age of Tennyson_ in Bell's "Handbooks of English Literature" are of special value for this period. Prof. Dowden's and Prof. Saintsbury's 19th-century studies fill in interstices; and of the "Periods of European Literature," the _Romantic Revolt_ and _Romantic Triumph_ are pertinent, as are the literary chapters in vols. x. and xi. of the _Cambridge Modern History_. Of more specific books George Brandes's _Literary Currents of the Nineteenth Century_, Stedman's _Victorian Poets_, Holman Hunt's _Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_, R.H. Hutton's _Contemporary Thought_ (and companion volumes), Sir Leslie Stephen's _The Utilitarians_, Buxton Forman's _Our Living Poets_, Dawson's _Victorian Novelists_, Thureau-Dangin's _Renaissance des idees catholiques en Angleterre_, A. Chevrillon's _Sydney Smith et la renaissance des idees liberales en Angleterre_, A.W. Benn's _History of English Thought in the Nineteenth Century_, the publishing histories of Murray, Blackwood, Macvey Napier, Lockhart, &c., J.M. Robertson's _Modern Humanists_, and the critical miscellanies of Lord Morley, Frederic Harrison, W. Bagehot, A. Birrell, Andrew Lang and E. Gosse, will be found, in their several degrees, illuminating. The chief literary lives are those of Scott by Lockhart, Carlyle by Froude, Macaulay by Trevelyan, Dickens by Forster and Charlotte Bronte by Mrs Gaskell. (T. Se.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _Piers Plowman_ has been so long attributed as a whole to Langland (q.v.), that in spite of modern analytical criticism it is most conveniently discussed under that name.

ENGLISHRY (_Englescherie_), a legal name given, in the reign of William the Conqueror, to the presentment of the fact that a person slain was an Englishman. If an unknown man was found slain, he was presumed to be a Norman, and the hundred was fined accordingly, unless it could be proved that he was English. Englishry, if established, excused the hundred. Dr W. Stubbs (_Constitutional History_, i. 196) says that possibly similar measures were taken by King Canute. Englishry was abolished in 1340.

See _Select Cases from the Coroners' Rolls, 1265-1413_, ed. C. Gross, Selden Society (London, 1896).

ENGRAVING, the process or result of the action implied by the verb "to engrave" or mark by incision, the marks (whether for inscriptive, pictorial or decorative purposes) being produced, not by simply staining or discolouring the material (as with paint, pen or pencil), but by cutting into or otherwise removing a portion of the substance. In the case of pictures, the engraved surface is reproduced by printing; but this is only one restricted sense of "engraving," since the term includes seal-engraving (where a cast is taken), and also the chased ornamentation of plate or gems, &c.

The word itself is derived from an O. Fr. _engraver_ (not to be confused with the same modern French word used for the running of a boat's keel into the beach, or for the sticking of a cart's wheels in the mud,--from _greve_, Provencal _grava_, sands of the sea or river shore; cf. Eng. "gravel"); it was at one time supposed that the Gr. _[Greek: graphein]_, to write, was etymologically connected, but this view is not now accepted, and (together with "grave," meaning either to engrave, or the place where the dead are buried) the derivation is referred to a common Teutonic form signifying "to dig" (O. Eng. _grafan_, Ger. _graben_). The modern French _graver_, to engrave, is a later adoption. The idea of a furrow, by digging or cutting, is thus historically associated with an engraving, which may properly include the rudest marks cut into any substance. In old English literature it included carving and sculpture, from which it has become convenient to differentiate the terminology; and the ancients who chiselled their writing on slabs of stone were really "engraving." The word is not applicable, therefore, either strictly to lithography (q.v.), nor to any of the photographic processes (see PROCESS), except those in which the surface of the plate is actually eaten into or lowered. In the latter case, too, it is convenient to mark a distinction and to ignore the strict analogy. In modern times the term is, therefore, practically restricted--outside the spheres of gem-engraving and seal-engraving (see GEM), or the inscribing or ornamenting of stone, plate, glass, &c.--to the art of making original pictures (i.e. by the draughtsman himself, whether copies of an original painting or not), either by incised lines on metal plates (see LINE-ENGRAVING), or by the corrosion of the lines with acid (see ETCHING), or by the roughening of a metal surface without actual lines (see MEZZOTINT), or by cutting a wood surface away so as to leave lines in relief (see WOOD-ENGRAVING); the result in each case may be called generically an engraving, and in common parlance the term is applied, though incorrectly, to the printed reproduction or "print."

Of these four varieties of engraving--line-engraving, etching, mezzotint or wood-engraving--the woodcut is historically the earliest. Line-engraving is now practically obsolete, while etching and mezzotint have recently come more and more to the front. To the draughtsman the difference in technical handling in each case has in most cases some relation to his own artistic impulse, and to his own feeling for beauty. A line engraver, as P.G. Hamerton said, will not see or think like an etcher, nor an etcher like an engraver in mezzotint. Each kind, with its own sub-varieties, has its peculiar effect and attraction. A real knowledge of engraving can only be attained by a careful study and comparison of the prints themselves, or of accurate facsimiles, so that books are of little use except as guides to prints when the reader happens to be unaware of their existence, or else for their explanation of technical processes. The value of the prints varies not only according to the artist, but also according to the fineness of the impression, and the "state" (or stage) in the making of the plate, which may be altered from time to time. "Proofs" may also be taken from the plate, and even touched up by the artist, in various stages and various degrees of fineness of impression.

The department of art-literature which classifies prints is called _Iconography_, and the classifications adopted by iconographers are of the most various kinds. For example, if a complete book were written on Shakespearian iconography it would contain full information about all prints illustrating the life and works of Shakespeare, and in the same way there may be the iconography of a locality or of a single event.

The history of engraving is a part of iconography, and various histories of the art exist in different languages. In England W.Y. Ottley wrote an _Early History of Engraving_, published in two volumes 4to (1816), and began what was intended to be a series of notices on engravers and their works. The facilities for the reproduction of engravings by the photographic processes have of late years given an impetus to iconography. One of the best modern writers on the subject was Georges Duplessis, the keeper of prints in the national library of France. He wrote a _History of Engraving in France_ (1888), and published many notices of engravers to accompany the reproductions by M. Amand Durand. He is also the author of a useful little manual entitled _Les Merveilles de la gravure_ (1871). Jansen's work on the origin of wood and plate engraving, and on the knowledge of prints of the 15th and 16th centuries, was published at Paris in two volumes 8vo in 1808. Among general works see Adam Bartsch, _Le Peintre-graveur_ (1803-1843); J.D. Passavant, _Le Peintre-graveur_ (1860-1864); P.G. Hamerton, _Graphic Arts_ (1882); William Gilpin, _Essay on Prints_ (1781); J. Maberly, _The Print Collector_ (1844); W.H. Wiltshire, _Introduction to the Study and Collection of Ancient Prints_ (1874); F. Wedmore, _Fine Prints_ (1897). See also the lists of works given under the separate headings for LINE-ENGRAVING, ETCHING, MEZZOTINT and WOOD-ENGRAVING.

ENGROSSING, a term used in two legal senses: (1) the writing or copying of a legal or other document in a fair large hand (_en gros_), and (2) the buying up of goods wholesale in order to sell at a higher price so as to establish a monopoly. The word "engross" has come into English ultimately from the Late Lat. _grossus_, thick, stout, large, through the A. Fr. _engrosser_, Med. Lat. _ingrossare_, to write in a large hand, and the French phrase _en gros_, in gross, wholesale. Engrossing and the kindred practices of forestalling and regrating were early regarded as serious offences in restraint of trade, and were punishable both at common law and by statute. They were of more particular importance in relation to the distribution of corn supplies. The statute of 1552 defines engrossing as "buying corn growing, or any other corn, grain, butter, cheese, fish or other dead victual, with _intent to sell the same again_." The law forbade all dealing in corn as an article of ordinary merchandise, apart from questions of foreign import or export. The theory was that when corn was plentiful in any district it should be consumed at what it would bring, without much respect to whether the next harvest might be equally abundant, or to what the immediate wants of an adjoining province of the same country might be. The first statute on the subject appears to have been passed in the reign of Henry III., though the general policy had prevailed before that time both in popular prejudice and in the feudal custom. The statute of Edward VI. (1552) was the most important, and in it the offences were elaborately defined; by this statute any one who bought corn to sell it again was made liable to two months' imprisonment with forfeit of the corn. A second offence was punished by six months' imprisonment and forfeit of double the value of the corn, and a third by the pillory and utter ruin. Severe as this statute was, liberty was given by it to transport corn from one part of the country under licence to men of approved probity, which implied that there was to be some buying of corn to sell it again and elsewhere. Practically "engrossing" came to be considered buying wholesale to sell again wholesale. "Forestalling" was different, and the statutes were directed against a class of dealers who went forward and bought or contracted for corn and other provisions, and spread false rumours in derogation of the public and open markets appointed by law, to which our ancestors appear to have attached much importance, and probably in these times not without reason. The statute of Edward VI. was modified by many subsequent enactments, particularly by the statute of 1663, by which it was declared that there could be no "engrossing" of corn when the price did not exceed 48s. per quarter, and which Adam Smith recognized, though it adhered to the variable and unsatisfactory element of price, as having contributed more to the progress of agriculture than any previous law in the statute book. In 1773 these injurious statutes were abolished, but the penal character of "engrossing" and "forestalling" had a root in the common law of England, as well as in the popular prejudice, which kept the evil alive to a later period. As the public enlightenment increased the judges were at no loss to give interpretations of the common law consistent with public policy. Subsequent to the act of 1773, for example, there was a case of conviction and punishment for engrossing hops, _R._ v. _Waddington_, 1800, 1 East, 143, but though this was deemed a sound and proper judgment at the time, yet it was soon afterwards overthrown in other cases, on the ground that buying wholesale to sell wholesale was not in "restraint of trade" as the former judges had assumed.

In 1800, one John Rusby was indicted for having bought ninety quarters of oats at 41s. per quarter and selling thirty of them at 43s. the same day. Lord Kenyon, the presiding judge, animadverted strongly against the repealing act of 1773, and addressed the jury strongly against the accused. Rusby was heavily fined, but, on appeal, the court was equally divided as to whether engrossing, forestalling and regrating were still offences at common law. In 1844, all the statutes, English, Irish and Scottish, defining the offences, were repealed and with them the supposed common law foundation. In the United States there have been strong endeavours by the government to suppress trusts and combinations for engrossing. (See also TRUSTS; MONOPOLY.)

AUTHORITIES.--D. Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_ (1805); J.S. Girdler, _Observations on Forestalling, Regrating and Ingrossing_ (1800); W. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_; W.J. Ashley, _Economic History_; Sir J. Stephen, _History of Criminal Law_; Murray, _New English Dictionary_.

ENGYON, an ancient town of the interior of Sicily, a Cretan colony, according to legend, and famous for an ancient temple of the Matres which aroused the greed of Verres. Its site is uncertain; some topographers have identified it with Gangi, a town 20 m. S.S.E. of Cefalu, but only on the ground of the similarity of the two names.

See C. Hulsen in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopadie_, v. 2568.

ENID, a city and the county-seat of Garfield county, Oklahoma, U.S.A., about 55 m. N.W. of Guthrie. Pop. (1900) 3444; (1907) 10,087 (355 of negro descent); (1910) 13,799. Enid is served by the St Louis & San Francisco, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific railways, and by several branch lines, and is an important railway centre. It is the seat of the Oklahoma Christian University (1907; co-educational). Enid is situated in a flourishing agricultural and stock-raising region, of which it is the commercial centre, and has various manufactures, including lumber, brick, tile and flour. Natural gas was discovered near the city in 1907. Enid was founded in 1893 and was chartered as a city in the same year.

ENIGMA (Gr. [Greek: ainigma]), a riddle or puzzle, especially a form of verse or prose composition in which the answer is concealed by means of metaphors. Such were the famous riddle of the Sphinx and the riddling answers of the ancient oracles. The composition of enigmas was a favourite amusement in Greece and prizes were often given at banquets for the best solution of them (Athen. x. 457). In France during the 17th century enigma-making became fashionable. Boileau, Charles Riviere Dufresny and J.J. Rousseau did not consider it beneath their literary dignity. In 1646 the abbe Charles Cotier (1604-1682) published a _Recueil des enigmes de ce temps_. The word is applied figuratively to anything inexplicable or difficult of understanding.

ENKHUIZEN, a seaport of Holland in the province of North Holland, on the Zuider Zee, and a railway terminus, 11-1/2 m. N.E. by E. of Hoorn, with which it is also connected by steam tramway. In conjunction with the railway service there is a steamboat ferry to Stavoren in Friesland. Pop. (1900) 6865. Enkhuizen, like its neighbour Hoorn, exhibits many interesting examples of domestic architecture dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, when it was an important and flourishing city. The facades of the houses are usually built in courses of brick and stone, and adorned with carvings, sculptures and inscriptions. Some ruined gateways belonging to the old city walls are still standing; among them being the tower-gateway called the Dromedary (1540), which overlooks the harbour. The tower contains several rooms, one of which was formerly used as a prison. Among the churches mention must be made of the Zuiderkerk, or South church, with a conspicuous tower (1450-1525); and the Westerkerk, or West church, which possesses a beautifully carved Renaissance screen and pulpit of the middle of the 16th century, and a quaint wooden bell-house (1519) built for use before the completion of the bell-tower. There are also a Roman Catholic church and a synagogue. The picturesque town hall (1688) contains some finely decorated rooms with paintings by Johan van Neck, a collection of local antiquities and the archives. Other interesting buildings are the orphanage (1616), containing some 17th and 18th century portraits and ancient leather hangings; the weigh-house (1559), the upper story of which was once used by the Surgeons' Gild, several of the window-panes (dating chiefly from about 1640), being decorated with the arms of various members; the former mint (1611); and the ancient assembly-house of the dike-reeves of Holland and West Friesland. Enkhuizen possesses a considerable fishing fleet and has some shipbuilding and rope-making, as well as market traffic.

ENNEKING, JOHN JOSEPH (1841- ), American landscape painter, was born, of German ancestry, in Minster, Ohio, on the 4th of October 1841. He was educated at Mount St Mary's College, Cincinnati, served in the American Civil War in 1861-1862, studied art in New York and Boston, and gave it up because his eyes were weak, only to return to it after failing in the manufacture of tinware. In 1873-1876 he studied in Munich under Schleich and Leier, and in Paris under Daubigny and Bonnat; and in 1878-1879 he studied in Paris again and sketched in Holland. Enneking is a "plein-airist," and his favourite subject is the "November twilight" of New England, and more generally the half lights of early spring, late autumn, and winter dawn and evening.

ENNIS (Gaelic, _Innis_, an island; Irish, _Ennis_ and _Inish_), the county town of Co. Clare, Ireland, in the east parliamentary division, on the river Fergus, 25 m. W.N.W. from Limerick by the Great Southern & Western railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5093. It is the junction for the West Clare line. Ennis has breweries, distilleries and extensive flour-mills; and in the neighbourhood limestone is quarried. The principal buildings are the Roman Catholic church, which is the pro-cathedral of the diocese of Killaloe; the parish church formed out of the ruins of the Franciscan Abbey, founded in 1240 by Donough Carbrac O'Brien; a school on the foundation of Erasmus Smith, and various county buildings. The abbey, though greatly mutilated, is full of interesting details, and includes a lofty tower, a marble screen, a chapter-house, a notable east window, several fine tombs and an altar of St Francis. On the site of the old court-house a colossal statue in white limestone of Daniel O'Connell was erected in 1865. The interesting ruins of Clare Abbey, founded in 1194 by Donnell O'Brien, king of Munster, are half-way between Ennis and the village of Clare Castle. O'Brien also founded Killone Abbey, beautifully situated on the lough of the same name, 3 m. S. of the town, possessing the unusual feature of a crypt and a holy well. Five miles N.W. of Ennis is Dysert O'Dea, with interesting ecclesiastical remains, a cross, a round tower and a castle. Ennis was incorporated in 1612, and returned two members to the Irish parliament until the Union, and thereafter one to the Imperial parliament until 1885.

ENNISCORTHY, a market town of Co. Wexford, Ireland, in the north parliamentary division, on the side of a steep hill above the Slaney, which here becomes navigable for barges of large size. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5458. It is 77-1/2 m. S. by W. from Dublin by the Dublin & South-Eastern railway. There are breweries and flour-mills; tanning, distilling and woollen manufactures are also prosecuted to some extent, and the town is the centre of the agricultural trade for the district, which is aided by the water communication with Wexford. There are important fowl markets and horse-fairs. Enniscorthy was taken by Cromwell in 1649, and in 1798 was stormed and burned by the rebels, whose main forces encamped on an eminence called Vinegar Hill, which overlooks the town from the east. The old castle of Enniscorthy, a massive square pile with a round tower at each corner, is one of the earliest military structures of the Anglo-Norman invaders, founded by Raymond le Gros (1176). Ferns, the next station to Enniscorthy on the railway towards Dublin, was the seat of a former bishopric, and the modernized cathedral, and ruins of a church, an Augustinian monastery founded by Dermod Mac-Morrough about 1160, and a castle of the Norman period, are still to be seen. Enniscorthy was incorporated by James I., and sent two members to the Irish parliament until the Union.

ENNISKILLEN, WILLIAM WILLOUGHBY COLE, 3RD EARL OF (1807-1886), British palaeontologist, was born on the 25th of January 1807, and educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford. As Lord Cole he early began to devote his leisure to the study and collection of fossil fishes, with his friend Sir Philip de M.G. Egerton, and he amassed a fine collection at Florence Court, Enniskillen--including many specimens that were described and figured by Agassiz and Egerton. This collection was subsequently acquired by the British Museum. He died on the 21st of November 1886, being succeeded by his son (b. 1845) as 4th earl.

The first of the Coles (an old Devonshire and Cornwall family) to settle in Ireland was Sir William Cole (d. 1653), who was "undertaker" of the northern plantation and received a grant of a large property in Fermanagh in 1611, and became provost and later governor of Enniskillen. In 1760 his descendant John Cole (d. 1767) was created Baron Mountflorence, and the latter's son, William Willoughby Cole (1736-1803), was in 1776 created Viscount Enniskillen and in 1789 earl. The 1st earl's second son, Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole (1772-1842), was a prominent general in the Peninsular War, and colonel of the 27th Inniskillings, the Irish regiment with whose name the family was associated.

ENNISKILLEN [INNISKILLING], a market town and the county town of county Fermanagh, Ireland, in the north parliamentary division, picturesquely situated on an island in the river connecting the upper and lower loughs Erne, 116 m. N.W. from Dublin by the Great Northern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5412. The town occupies the whole island, and is connected with two suburbs on the mainland on each side by two bridges. It has a brewery, tanneries and a small manufactory of cutlery, and a considerable trade in corn, pork and flax. In 1689 Enniskillen defeated a superior force sent against it by James II. at the battle of Crom; and part of the defenders of the town were subsequently formed into a regiment of cavalry, which still retains the name of the Inniskilling Dragoons. The town was incorporated by James I., and returned two members to the Irish parliament until the Union; thereafter it returned one to the Imperial parliament until 1885. There are wide communications by water by the river and the upper and lower loughs Erne, and by the Ulster canal to Belfast. The loughs contain trout, large pike and other coarse fish. Two miles from Enniskillen in the lower lough is Devenish Island, with its celebrated monastic remains. The abbey of St Mary here was founded by St Molaise (Laserian) in the 6th century; here too are a fine round tower 85 ft. high, remains of domestic buildings, a holed stone and a tall well-preserved cross. The whole is carefully preserved by the commissioners of public works under the Irish Church Act of 1869. Steamers ply between Enniskillen and Belleek on the lower lake, and between Enniskillen and Knockninny on the upper lake.

ENNIUS, QUINTUS (239-170 B.C.), ancient Latin poet, was born at Rudiae in Calabria. Familiar with Greek as the language in common use among the cultivated classes of his district, and with Oscan, the prevailing dialect of lower Italy, he further acquired a knowledge of Latin; to use his own expression (Gellius xvii. 17), he had three "hearts" (_corda_), the Latin word being used to signify the seat of intelligence. He is said (Servius on _Aen._ vii. 691) to have claimed descent from one of the legendary kings of his native district, Messapus the eponymous hero of Messapia, and this consciousness of ancient lineage is in accordance with the high self-confident tone of his mind, with his sympathy with the dominant genius of the Roman republic, and with his personal relations to the members of her great families. Of his early years nothing is directly known, and we first hear of him in middle life as serving during the Second Punic War, with the rank of centurion, in Sardinia, in the year 204, where he attracted the attention of Cato the elder, and was taken by him to Rome in the same year. Here he taught Greek and adapted Greek plays for a livelihood, and by his poetical compositions gained the friendship of the greatest men in Rome. Amongst these were the elder Scipio and Fulvius Nobilior, whom he accompanied on his Aetolian campaign (189). Through the influence of Nobilior's son, Ennius subsequently obtained the privilege of Roman citizenship (Cicero, _Brutus_, 20. 79). He lived plainly and simply on the Aventine with the poet Caecilius Statius. He died at the age of 70, immediately after producing his tragedy _Thyestes_. In the last book of his epic poem, in which he seems to have given various details of his personal history, he mentions that he was in his 67th year at the date of its composition. He compared himself, in contemplation of the close of the great work of his life, to a gallant horse which, after having often won the prize at the Olympic games, obtained his rest when weary with age. A similar feeling of pride at the completion of a great career is expressed in the memorial lines which he composed to be placed under his bust after death,--"Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men." From the impression stamped on his remains, and from the testimony of his countrymen, we think of him as a man of a robust, sagacious and cheerful nature (Hor. _Epp._ ii. 1. 50; Cic. _De sen._ 5); of great industry and versatility; combining imaginative enthusiasm and a vein of religious mysticism with a sceptical indifference to popular beliefs and a scorn of religious imposture; and tempering the grave seriousness of a Roman with a genial capacity for enjoyment (Hor. _Epp._ i. 19. 7).

Till the appearance of Ennius, Roman literature, although it had produced the epic poem of Naevius and some adaptations of Greek tragedy, had been most successful in comedy. Naevius and Plautus were men of thoroughly popular fibre. Naevius suffered for his attacks on members of the aristocracy, and, although Plautus carefully avoids any direct notice of public matters, yet the bias of his sympathies is indicated in several passages of his extant plays. Ennius, on the other hand, was by temperament in thorough sympathy with the dominant aristocratic element in Roman life and institutions. Under his influence literature became less suited to the popular taste, more especially addressed to a limited and cultivated class, but at the same time more truly expressive of what was greatest and most worthy to endure in the national sentiment and traditions. He was a man of many-sided activity. He devoted attention to questions of Latin orthography, and is said to have been the first to introduce shorthand writing in Latin. He attempted comedy, but with so little success that in the canon of Volcacius Sedigitus he is mentioned, solely as a mark of respect "for his antiquity," tenth and last in the list of comic poets. He may be regarded also as the inventor of Roman satire, in its original sense of a "medley" or "miscellany," although it was by Lucilius that the character of aggressive and censorious criticism of men and manners was first imparted to that form of literature. The word _satura_ was originally applied to a rude scenic and musical performance, exhibited at Rome before the introduction of the regular drama. The _saturae_ of Ennius were collections of writings on various subjects, written in various metres and contained in four (or six) books. Among these were included metrical versions of the physical speculations of Epicharmus, of the gastronomic researches of Archestratus of Gela (_Hedyphagetica_), and, probably, of the rationalistic doctrines of Euhemerus. It may be noticed that all these writers whose works were thus introduced to the Romans were Sicilian Greeks. Original compositions were also contained in these _saturae_, and among them the panegyric on Scipio, unless this was a drama. The satire of Ennius seems to have resembled the more artistic satire of Horace in its record of personal experiences, in the occasional introduction of dialogue, in the use made of fables with a moral application, and in the didactic office which it assumed.

But the chief distinction of Ennius was gained in tragic and narrative poetry. He was the first to impart to the Roman adaptations of Greek tragedy the masculine dignity, pathos and oratorical fervour which continued to animate them in the hands of Pacuvius and Accius, and, when set off by the acting of Aesopus, called forth vehement applause in the age of Cicero. The titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are known to us, and a considerable number of fragments, varying in length from a few words to about fifteen lines, have been preserved. These tragedies were for the most part adaptations and, in some cases, translations from Euripides. One or two were original dramas, of the class called _praetextae_, i.e. dramas founded on Roman history or legend; thus, the _Ambracia_ treated of the capture of that city by his patron Nobilior, the _Sabinae_ of the rape of the Sabine women. The heroes and heroines of the Trojan cycle, such as Achilles, Ajax, Telamon, Cassandra, Andromache, were prominent figures in some of the dramas adapted from the Greek. Several of the more important fragments are found in Cicero, who expresses a great admiration for their manly fortitude and dignified pathos. In these remains of the tragedies of Ennius we can trace indications of strong sympathy with the nobler and bolder elements of character, of vivid realization of impassioned situations, and of sagacious observation of life. The frank bearing, fortitude and self-sacrificing heroism of the best type of the soldierly character find expression in the persons of Achilles, Telamon and Eurypylus; and a dignified and passionate tenderness of feeling makes itself heard in the lyrical utterances of Cassandra and Andromache. The language is generally nervous and vigorous, occasionally vivified with imaginative energy. But it flows less smoothly and easily than that of the dialogue of Latin comedy. It shows the same tendency to aim at effect by alliterations, assonances and plays on words. The rudeness of early art is most apparent in the inequality of the metres in which both the dialogue and the "recitative" are composed.

But the work which gained him his reputation as the Homer of Rome, and which called forth the admiration of Cicero and Lucretius and frequent imitation from Virgil, was the _Annales_, a long narrative poem in eighteen books, containing the record of the national story from mythical times to his own. Although the whole conception of the work implies that confusion of the provinces of poetry and history which was perpetuated by later writers, and especially by Lucan and Silius Italicus, yet it was a true instinct of genius to discern in the idea of the national destiny the only possible motive of a Roman epic. The execution of the poem (to judge from the fragments, amounting to about six hundred lines), although rough, unequal and often prosaic, seems to have combined the realistic fidelity and freshness of feeling of a contemporary chronicle with the vivifying and idealizing power of genius. Ennius prided himself especially on being the first to form the strong speech of Latium into the mould of the Homeric hexameter in place of the old Saturnian metre. And although it took several generations of poets to beat their music out to the perfection of the Virgilian cadences, yet in the rude adaptation of Ennius the secret of what ultimately became one of the grandest organs of literary expression was first discovered and revealed. The inspiring idea of the poem was accepted, purified of all alien material, and realized in artistic shape by Virgil in his national epic. He deliberately imparted to that poem the charm of antique associations by incorporating with it much of the phraseology and sentiment of Ennius. The occasional references to Roman history in Lucretius are evidently reminiscences of the _Annales_. He as well as Cicero speaks of him with pride and affection as "Ennius noster." Of the great Roman writers Horace had least sympathy with him; yet he testifies to the high esteem in which he was held during the Augustan age. Ovid expresses the grounds of that esteem when he characterizes him as

"Ingenio maximus, arte rudis."

A sentence of Quintilian expresses the feeling of reverence for his genius and character, mixed with distaste for his rude workmanship, with which the Romans of the early empire regarded him: "Let us revere Ennius as we revere the sacred groves, hallowed by antiquity, whose massive and venerable oak trees are not so remarkable for beauty as for the religious awe which they inspire" (_Inst. or._ x. 1. 88).

Editions of the fragments by L. Muller (1884), L. Valmaggi (1900, with notes), J. Vahlen (1903); monographs by L. Muller (1884 and 1893), C. Pascal, _Studi sugli scrittori Latini_ (1900); see also Mommsen, _History of Rome_, bk. iii. ch. 14. On Virgil's indebtedness to Ennius see V. Crivellari, _Quae praecipue hausit Vergilius ex Naevio et Ennio_ (1889).

ENNODIUS, MAGNUS FELIX (A.D. 474-521), bishop of Pavia, Latin rhetorician and poet. He was born at Arelate (Arles) and belonged to a distinguished but impecunious family. Having lost his parents at an early age, he was brought up by an aunt at Ticinum (Pavia); according to some, at Mediolanum (Milan). After her death he was received into the family of a pious and wealthy young lady, to whom he was betrothed. It is not certain whether he actually married this lady; she seems to have lost her money and retired to a convent, whereupon Ennodius entered the Church, and was ordained deacon (about 493) by Epiphanius, bishop of Pavia. From Pavia he went to Milan, where he continued to reside until his elevation to the see of Pavia about 515. During his stay at Milan he visited Rome and other places, where he gained a reputation as a teacher of rhetoric. As bishop of Pavia he played a considerable part in ecclesiastical affairs. On two occasions (in 515 and 517) he was sent to Constantinople by Theodoric on an embassy to the emperor Anastasius, to endeavour to bring about a reconciliation between the Eastern and Western churches. He died on the 17th of July 521; his epitaph still exists in the basilica of St Michael at Pavia (_Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, v. pt. ii. No. 6464).

Ennodius is one of the best representatives of the twofold (pagan and Christian) tendency of 5th-century literature, and of the Gallo-Roman clergy who upheld the cause of civilization and classical literature against the inroads of barbarism. But his anxiety not to fall behind his classical models--the chief of whom was Virgil--his striving after elegance and grammatical correctness, and a desire to avoid the commonplace have produced a turgid and affected style, which, aggravated by rhetorical exaggerations and popular barbarisms, makes his works difficult to understand. It has been remarked that his poetry is less unintelligible than his prose.

The numerous writings of this versatile ecclesiastic may be divided into (1) letters, (2) miscellanies, (3) discourses, (4) poems. The letters on a variety of subjects, addressed to high church and state officials, are valuable for the religious and political history of the period. Of the miscellanies, the most important are: _The Panegyric of Theodoric_, written to thank the Arian prince for his tolerance of Catholicism and support of Pope Symmachus (probably delivered before the king on the occasion of his entry into Ravenna or Milan); like all similar works, it is full of flattery and exaggeration, but if used with caution is a valuable authority; _The Life of St Epiphanius_, bishop of Pavia, the best written and perhaps the most important of all his writings, an interesting picture of the political activity and influence of the church; _Eucharisticon de Vita Sua_, a sort of "confessions," after the manner of St Augustine; the description of the enfranchisement of a slave with religious formalities in the presence of a bishop; _Paraenesis didascalica_, an educational guide, in which the claims of grammar as a preparation for the study of rhetoric, the mother of all the sciences, are strongly insisted on. The discourses (_Dictiones_) are sacred, scholastic, controversial and ethical. The discourse on the anniversary of Laurentius, bishop of Milan, is the chief authority for the life of that prelate; the scholastic discourses, rhetorical exercises for the schools, contain eulogies of classical learning, distinguished professors and pupils; the controversial deal with imaginary charges, the subjects being chiefly borrowed from the _Controversiae_ of the elder Seneca; the ethical harangues are put into the mouth of mythological personages (e.g. the speech of Thetis over the body of Achilles). Amongst the poems mention may be made of two _Itineraria_, descriptions of a journey from Milan to Brigantium (Briancon) and of a trip on the Po; an apology for the study of profane literature; an epithalamium, in which Love is introduced as execrating Christianity; a dozen hymns, after the manner of St Ambrose, probably intended for church use; epigrams on various subjects, some being epigrams proper--inscriptions for tombs, basilicas, baptisteries--others imitations of Martial, satiric pieces and descriptions of scenery.

There are two excellent editions of Ennodius by G. Hartel (vol. vi. of _Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum_, Vienna, 1882) and F. Vogel (vol. vii. of _Monumenta Germaniae historica_, 1885, with exhaustive prolegomena). On Ennodius generally consult M. Fertig, _Ennodius und seine Zeit_ (1855-1860); A. Dubois, _La Latinite d'Ennodius_ (1903); F. Magani, _Ennodio_ (Pavia, 1886); A. Ebert, _Allgemeine Geschichte der Litt. des Mittelalters im Abendlande_, i. (1889); M. Manitius, Geschichte der christlich-lateinischen Poesie (1891); Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Literature_, S 479 (Eng. tr., 1892). French translation by the abbe S. Leglise (Paris, 1906 foll.).

ENNS, a town of Austria, in upper Austria, 11 m. by rail S.E. of Linz. Pop. (1900) 4371. It is situated on the Enns near its confluence with the Danube and possesses a 15th-century castle, an old Gothic church, and a town hall erected in 1565. Three miles to the S.W. lies the Augustinian monastery of St Florian, one of the oldest and largest religious houses of Austria. Founded in the 7th century, it was occupied by the Benedictines till the middle of the 11th century. It was established on a firm basis in 1071, when it passed into the hands of the Augustinians. The actual buildings, which are among the most magnificent in Austria, were constructed between 1686 and 1745. Its library, with over 70,000 volumes, contains valuable manuscripts and also a fine collection of coins. Enns is one of the oldest towns in Austria, and stands near the site of the Roman _Laureacum_. The nucleus of the actual town was formed by a castle, called Anasiburg or Anesburg, erected in 900 by the Bavarians as a post against the incursions of the Hungarians. It soon attained commercial prosperity, and by a charter of 1212 was made a free town. In 1275 it passed into the hands of Rudolph of Habsburg. An encounter between the French and the Austrian troops took place here on the 5th of November 1805.

ENOCH ([Hebrew: hanockh, hanockh], Hanokh, Teaching or Dedication). (1) In Gen. iv. 17, 18 (J), the eldest son of Cain, born while Cain was building a city, which he named after Enoch; nothing is known of the city. (2) In Gen. v. 24, &c. (P), _seventh_ in descent from Adam in the line of Seth; he "walked with God," and after 365 years "was not for God took him." [(1) and (2) are often regarded as both corruptions of the _seventh_ primitive king Evedorachos (Enmeduranki in cuneiform inscriptions), the two genealogies, Gen. iv. 16-24, v. 12-17, being variant forms of the Babylonian list of primitive kings. Enmeduranki is the favourite of the sun-god, cf. Enoch's 365 years.[1]] Heb. xi. 5 says Enoch "was not found, because God _translated_ him." Later Jewish legends represented him as receiving revelations on astronomy, &c., and as the first author; apparently following the Babylonian account which makes Enmeduranki receive instruction in all wisdom from the sun-god.[1] Two apocryphal works written in the name of Enoch are extant, the _Book of Enoch_, compiled from documents written 200-50 B.C., quoted as the work of Enoch, Jude 14 and 15; and the _Book of the Secrets of Enoch_, A.D. 1-50. Cf. 1 Chron. i. 3; Luke iii. 37; Wisdom iv. 7-14; Ecclus. xliv. 16, xlix. 14. (3) Son, i.e. clan, of Midian, in Gen. xxv. 4; 1 Chron. i. 33. (4) Son, i.e. clan, of Reuben, E.V. _Hanoch_, _Henoch_, in Gen. xlvi. 9; Exod. vi. 14; Num. xxvi. 5; 1 Chron. v. 3. There may have been some historical connexion between these two clans with identical names.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Eberhard Schrader, _Die Keilinschriften und das A.T._, 3rd ed., pp. 540 f.

ENOCH, BOOK OF. The _Book of Enoch_, or, as it is sometimes called, the _Ethiopic Book of Enoch_, in contradistinction to the _Slavonic Book of Enoch_ (see later), is perhaps the most important of all the apocryphal or pseudapocryphal Biblical writings for the history of religious thought. It is not the work of a single author, but rather a conglomerate of literary fragments which once circulated under the names of Enoch, Noah and possibly Methuselah. In the _Book of the Secrets of Enoch_ we have additional portions of this literature. As the former work is derived from a variety of Pharisaic writers in Palestine, so the latter in its present form was written for the most part by Hellenistic Jews in Egypt.

The _Book of Enoch_ was written in the second and first centuries B.C. It was well known to many of the writers of the New Testament, and in many instances influenced their thought and diction. Thus it is quoted by name as a genuine production of Enoch in the Epistle of Jude, 14 sq., and it lies at the base of Matt. xix. 28 and John v. 22, 27, and many other passages. It had also a vast indirect influence on the Palestinian literature of the 1st century of our era. Like the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Megilloth, the Pirke Aboth, this work was divided into five parts, with the critical discussion of which we shall deal below. With the earlier Fathers and Apologists it had all the weight of a canonical book, but towards the close of the 3rd and the beginning of the 4th century it began to be discredited, and finally fell under the ban of the Church. Almost the latest reference to it in the early church is made by George Syncellus in his Chronography about A.D. 800. The book was then lost sight of till 1773, when Bruce discovered the Ethiopic version in Abyssinia.

_Original Language._--That the _Book of Enoch_ was written in Semitic is now accepted on all hands, but scholars are divided as to whether the Semitic language in question was Hebrew or Aramaic. Only one valuable contribution on this question has been made, and that by Halevy in the _Journal Asiatique_, Avril-Mai 1867, pp. 352-395. This scholar is of opinion that the entire work was written in Hebrew. Since this publication, however, fresh evidence bearing on the question has been discovered in the Greek fragment (i.-xxxii.) found in Egypt. Since this fragment contains three Aramaic words transliterated in the Greek, some scholars, and among them Schurer, Levi and N. Schmidt, have concluded that not only are chapters i.-xxxvi. derived from an Aramaic original, but also the remainder of the book. In support of the latter statement no evidence has yet been offered by these or any other scholars, nor yet has there been any attempt to meet the positive arguments of Halevy for a Hebrew original of xxxvii.-civ., whose Hebrew reconstructions of the text have been and must be adopted in many cases by every editor and translator of the book. A prolonged study of the text, which has brought to light a multitude of fresh passages the majority of which can be explained by retranslation into Hebrew, has convinced the present writer[1] that, whilst the evidence on the whole is in favour of an Aramaic original of vi.-xxxvi., it is just as conclusive on behalf of the Hebrew original of the greater part of the rest of the book.

_Versions--Greek, Latin and Ethiopic._--The Semitic original was translated into Greek. It is not improbable that there were two distinct Greek versions. Of the one, several fragments have been preserved in Syncellus (A.D. 800), vi.-x. 14, viii. 4-ix. 4, xv. 8-xvi. 1; of the other, i.-xxxii. in the Giza Greek fragment discovered in Egypt and published by Bouriant (_Fragments grecs du