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a good scholar and translated Homer, but Greek poetry left no mark on his style; the others were innocent of ancient learning, and they were united in this also, that they are exclusively, almost provincially, British.

Meanwhile, the old classical tradition did not perceive itself to be undermined. If criticism touched these poets at all-Blake evaded it, by Burns it was bewildered-it judged them complacently by the old canons. They did not possess, in the eyes of contemporaries, anything of the supreme isolation which we now award to them. The age saw them accompanied by a crowd of bards of the old class, marshalled under the laureateship of Whitehead, and of these several had an air of importance. Among these minnows, ERASMUS DARWIN was a triton who threw

After the Portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby

his preposterous scientific visions into verse of metallic brilliance, and succeeded in finishing what Dryden had begun. But with this partial and academic exception, everything that was written, except in the form of satire, between 1780 and 1798, in the old manner, merely went further to prove the absolute decadence and wretchedness to which the classical school of British poetry was reduced.

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Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), was born at Elston Hall, in Nottinghamshire, on the 12th of December 1731. He was educated at Chesterfield School, and proceeded to St. John's, Cambridge, in 1750. He studied medicine at Edinburgh, and settled as a physician in Lichfield towards the close of 1756. Here he became a useful and prominent man, gradually extending his reputation as a philanthropist as well as a doctor. Darwin built himself a villa just outside Lichfield, with fountains and a grotto, and here he carried on the botanical studies of his middle life. Here, also, he turned to the composition of poetry, but for a long time in secret, lest it should damage his practice. He was nearly fifty years of age before he ventured to publish, anonymously, his earliest work, The Loves of the Plants (1789). Some years before this he had married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Chandos-Pole, and had moved to her estate, Redbourne Hall, near Derby. He afterwards moved into Derby itself, and finally to Breadsall Priory. In 1792 he published The Economy of Vegetation, which, with The Loves of the Plants, formed the poem since called The Botanic Garden. Darwin now turned to prose and produced several theoretical treatises, in particular, Zoonomia (1794) and Phytologia (1800); he also wrote a very curious work on Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797). A final poem The

Temple of Nature, was posthumous (1803). Erasmus Darwin died at Breadsall on the 18th of April 1802, and a highly entertaining life of him-one of the curiosities of biographical literature-was published soon afterwards by another Lichfield poet, Anna Seward (1747-1809), who seems to have wished to revenge the spreta injuria forma. Darwin was the centre of a curious provincial society of amiable pedants and blue stockings, to all of whom he was vastly superior in intellect and character. He was an amateur in philosophy, in verse a tasteless rhetorician, but he was a man of very remarkable force of personal character, amiable, vigorous, and eccentric. It is never to be forgotten that he was the worthy grandfather of a far more eminent contributor to human knowledge, Charles Darwin.

FROM "THE BOTANIC GARDEN."

And now, Philanthropy, thy beams divine
Dart round the globe from Zembla to the Line;
O'er each dark prison plays the cheering light,
As northern lustres o'er the vault of night;
From realm to realm, by cross or crescent crown'd,
Where'er mankind and misery are found,
O'er burning sands, deep waves, or wilds of snow,
Thy Howard, journeying, seeks the house of woe;
Down many a winding step to dungeons dank,
Where anguish wails, and galling fetters clank;
To caves bestrew'd with many a mouldering bone,
And cells, whose echoes only learn to groan ;
Where no kind bars a whispering friend disclose,
No sunbeam enters, and no zephyr blows,
He treads inemulous of fame or wealth,
Profuse of toil, and prodigal of health;
With soft persuasive eloquence expands

Power's rigid heart, and opes his clenching hands;
Leads stern-ey'd Justice to the dark domains,
If not to sever, to relax the chains;

Or guides awaken'd Mercy through the gloom,
And shows the prison sister to the tomb ;
Gives to her babes the self-devoted wife,
To her fond husband liberty and life!

The spirits of the good, who bend from high,
Wide o'er these earthly scenes, their partial eye,
When first, arrayed in Virtue's purest robe,
They saw her Howard traversing the globe;
Saw round his brow, the sun-bright glory blaze
In arrowy circles of unwearied rays,
Mistook a mortal for an angel guest,
And asked what seraph-foot the earth imprest.
Onward he moves, Disease and Death retire,

And murmuring Demons hate him, and admire.

It was a happy instinct to turn once more to foreign forms of poetic utterance, and a certain credit attaches to those who now began to cultivate the sonnet. Two slender collections, the one by THOMAS RUSSELL, and the other by WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES, both of which appeared in 1789, exhibited

VOL. IV.

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the results of the study of Petrarch. Of these two men, Russell, who died prematurely in 1788, was the better as well as the more promising poet; his Philoctetes in Lemnos is doubtless the finest English sonnet of the century.

But he attracted little notice; while Bowles was fortunate enough to extend a powerful and, to say the truth, an unaccountable spell over Coleridge, who doubtless brought to the mild quatorzains of Bowles much more than he found there. Russell was the first English imitator of the budding romantic poetry of Germany. It is necessary to mention here the pre-Wordsworthian, or, more properly, pre-Byronic, publications of Samuel Rogers-the Poems of 1786, the accomplished and mellifluous Pleasures of Memory of 1792, the Epistle to a Friend of 1798. These were written in a style, or in a neutral tint of all safe styles mingled, that elegantly recalls the easier parts of Goldsmith. Here, too, there was some faint infusion of Italian influence. But truly the early Rogers survives so completely on traditional sufferance that it is not needful to say more about it here; a much later Rogers will demand a word a little further on.

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William Lisle Bowles

Of the two clergymen who divide the credit of having re-introduced the sonnet into general practice in England, the Rev. William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), was born at King's Sutton, where his father was vicar. He went to Winchester, where Dr. Joseph Warton (1722-1800), himself a graceful poet, was head-master, and gave a literary character to the school. Bowles proceeded to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1781. In 1789 he published a pamphlet of Fourteen Sonnets, which "delighted and inspired" the youthful S. T. Coleridge, and which were widely read and admired. Bowles rose in the Church, and became in 1828 a canon residentiary of Salisbury Cathedral. In 1806 an edition of Pope, which he brought out, engaged him in a lively. public controversy with Byron. Bowles died at Salisbury in April 1850. The career of the Rev. Thomas Russell (1762-1788) began in close parallelism with that of Bowles, but was soon cut short. Russell was the son of an attorney at Beaminster. He also went to Winchester, and came under the influence of Joseph Warton. He was a precocious and excellent scholar, and, proceeding to Oxford, was elected a Fellow of New College in his nineteenth year. He made a special study of the modern continental literatures of his time. He was attacked by phthisis, and rapidly succumbed to it, dying at Bristol Hot Wells on the 31st of July 1788. Russell published nothing in his life-time, but his posthumous Sonnets were collected in 1789, the same year as Bowles's appeared; some miscellaneous lyrics were appended to the little volume. Russell's great sonnet on Philoctetes has been universally admired.

side.

SONNET.

(Supposed to be written at Lemnos.)

On this lone Isle, whose rugged rocks affright
The cautious Pilot, ten revolving years

Great Pæan's son, unwonted erst to tears,
Wept o'er his wound: alike each rolling light
Of heaven he watch'd, and blam'd its lingering flight;
By day the sea-mew screaming round his cave
Drove slumber from his eyes, the chiding wave
And savage howlings chas'd his dreams by night.
Hope still was his in each low breeze, that sigh'd
Thro' his rude grot, he heard a coming oar,
In each white cloud a coming sail he spied;
Nor seldom listen'd to the fancied roar

:

Of Oeta's torrents, or the hoarser tide

That parts fam'd Trachis from th' Euboic shore.

Coleridge.

But an event was now preparing of an importance in the history of WordsEnglish literature so momentous that all else appears insignificant by its worth and In June 1797 a young Cambridge man named SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, who was devoted to poetry, paid a visit to another young Cambridge man named WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, who was then settled with his sister Dorothy near Crewkerne, in Dorset. The Wordsworths had been deeply concerned in poetical experiment, and William showed to his guest a fragment which he had lately composed in blank verse; we may read it now as the opening of the first book of the Excursion. Coleridge was overwhelmed; he pronounced the poem "superior to anything in our language which in any way resembled it," and he threw in his lot unreservedly with Wordsworth. The brother and sister were then just in the act to move to a house called Alfoxden, in West Somerset, where they settled in July 1797. Coleridge was then living at Nether Stowey, close by, a spur of the Quantocks After the Portrait by Robert Hancock and two romantic coombes lying between them.

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William Wordsworth

On these delicious hills, in sight of the yellow Bristol Channel, English poetry was born again during the autumn months of 1797, in the endless walks and talks of the three enthusiasts-three, since Dorothy Wordsworth, though she wrote not, was a sharer, if not an originator, in all their audacities and inspirations.

Wordsworth and Coleridge had each published collections of verses, containing some numbers of a certain merit, founded on the best descriptive masters of the eighteenth century. But what they had hitherto given to the public appeared to them mere dross by the glow of their new illumina

tion. Dorothy Wordsworth appears to have long been drawn towards the minute and sensitive study of natural phenomena; William Wordsworth already divined his philosophy of landscape; Coleridge was thus early an impassioned and imaginative metaphysician. They now distributed their gifts to one another, and kindled in each a hotter fire of impulse. A year went by, and the enthusiasts of the Quantocks published, in September 1798, the little volume of Lyrical Ballads which put forth in modest form the results of their combined lucubrations. Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, who was not admitted to the meditations of the poetic three, gaily announced that "the Lyrical Ballads are not liked at all by any," and this was, rather crudely put, the general first opinion of the public. It is proper that we should remind ourselves what this epoch-making volume contained.

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Cottage at Nether Stowey occupied by S. T. Coleridge, 1797-1800

It was anonymous, and nothing indicated the authorship, although the advertisements might reveal that Southey, Lamb, Lloyd, and Coleridge himself were of the confraternity to which its author or authors belonged. The contributions of Wordsworth were nineteen, of Coleridge only four; but among these last, one, the Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, was of preponderating length and value, "professedly written," so the preface said, "in imitation of the style as well as of the spirit of the elder poets." This very wonderful poem, Coleridge's acknowledged masterpiece, had been composed in November 1797, and finished, so Dorothy records, on "a beautiful evening, very starry, the hornèd moon shining." A little later Christabel was begun, and, in "a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Lynton (probably early in 1798), Kubla Khan. Neither of these, however, nor the magnificent Ode to France, nor Fears in Solitude, make their appearance in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. In this volume Wordsworth is predominant, and his contributions exemplify two of his chief aims in poetical revolution. He desired to destroy the pompous artificiality of versediction and to lower the scale of subjects deemed worthy of poetical treatment; in this he was but partly judicious, and such experiments as "Anecdote for Fathers" and the "Idiot Boy" gave scoffers an occasion to blaspheme. But Wordsworth also designed to introduce into verse an impassioned consideration of natural scenes and objects as a reflection of the complex life of man, and in this he effected a splendid revolution. To match such a lyric as the "Tables Turn'd" it was necessary to return to the age of Milton, and in the "Lines written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,"

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