Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel, that he is remembered. In these poems he was using material the most unusual, often frankly supernatural; but by the witchery of his art was able to induce in the reader what he himself in a fine phrase calls the "momentary suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith." He was one of the great geniuses of English literature, and one of the pathetic group the promise of whose early years was never completely fulfilled. But in the case of Coleridge the actual accomplishment, fragmentary though it is, is sufficient to merit all the praise that time has brought him.

The best edition of Coleridge's poetry is the two volume publication of the Oxford University Press; the Globe (Macmillan) is convenient, and contains an admirable biographical sketch by J. D. Campbell, which is not surpassed in value by Traill's Life in the E. M. L. William Hazlitt's My First Acquaintance With Poets is a classic portrait of Coleridge as he appeared to a gifted contemporary; Carlyle's portrait in his Life of John Sterling (chap. "Coleridge") is brilliant if somewhat unsympathetic.

SCOTT (1771-1832)

Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, in 1771, the son of an attorney, and a member of the Clan Buccleuch. After a boyhood spent in reading, and assimilating Scottish legend, he entered the University of Edinburgh, but did not take a degree. When he was twenty-one he was called to the bar, and though his practice was never extensive, he was always in more or less intimate contact with the law. His first literary work of importance was a group of translations from the German, Bürger's Lenore appearing as Scott's William and Helen. In 1802-03 he published The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, the best collection of Scottish ballads until Child's great work began to appear in 1882. Between 1805 and 1810 Scott won an international reputation as a narrative poet through The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake. In 1813 he bought Abbotsford, where he established himself as a country gentleman. About this time Byron's poetry began winning the popularity which Scott's had formerly enjoyed. Realizing that he could not compete with Byron, Scott took up a manuscript untouched since 1805, wrote the last two-thirds of it in six weeks, and in 1814 published Waverley, the first of his historical novels. Between 1814 and 1832 he wrote in all thirty-two novels, and did a good deal of other literary work besides. At the accession of George IV Scott was knighted and created a baronet; at this time-1821-he was probably the largest figure in the English literary world. But in 1826 the wheel of Fortune turned. this year two publishing houses in which Scott was interested failed with large liabilities. Refusing to take advantage of the bankruptcy laws, although he knew that he was legally entitled to their protection, Scott undertook single-handed to pay off an indebtedness of nearly one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. For six years he

In

worked at the task, writing novels and receiving compensation at a rate unheard of, and turning over the proceeds to the creditors. But his life was not long enough. In 1831 a paralytic stroke enfeebled his powers, if not his will; in 1832 he died, leaving a part of the debt to be cleared off by royalties received after his death.

Scott's contribution to English literature was great and many-sided. His work as editor and collector of Scottish ballads was more valuable than that of any of his contemporaries; his poetical romances are among the best examples of English narrative verse. But his chief glory is the magnificent series of novels: the studies of Scottish life and manners, such as The Heart of Midlothian, and the tales of past history, such as Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward. Through these novels Scott made the largest single contribution to the great stock of English fiction.

The best source of information about Scott is the Life by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart (7 vols., Black). Briefer biographies are Hutton's, in the E. M. L., and Saintsbury's (Scribner's). Sir Walter's own Journal (David Douglas) gives interesting first-hand information concerning the later years of his life.

BYRON (1788-1824)

George Gordon Byron was born in London, January, 1788, but lived for some years of his youth in Scotland. In 1798, through the death of a great-uncle, he became the sixth Baron Byron, and the inheritor of the ruined family seat, Newstead Abbey. As a boy he was hot-tempered, proud, and unnecessarily sensitive on account of a lameness that never left him. In 1805 he began at Trinity College, Cambridge, a career which was boisterously irregular, and only slightly distinguished by the appearance in 1807 of a volume of poems called Hours of Idleness. In 1809, when he had come of age, he took his seat in the House of Lords, and in the same year began the wanderings over Europe which were later to be described in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, of which the first two cantos appeared in 1812. The result of this publication Byron has recorded in his statement that he awoke one morning and found himself famous. The next year, 1813, The Giaour began the series of oriental tales that outdid even Childe Harold in popularity. In January, 1815, he married Miss Anna Milbanke; a year later the two had separated, Lady Byron returning to her father's home, and the poet, ostracized by society, going to Switzerland, where for some time he was in the company of the Shelleys. From 1816 to 1819 he was much of the time in Venice, living a life that was currently reported to be a riot of debauchery, and in which, when all allowances have been made for the exaggerations of scandalous gossip, there were many black passages. The third and fourth cantos of Harold appeared in 1818; the same year he began Don Juan, publishing it at intervals from 1819 till his death. His dramas, of which Cain and Manfred are the greatest, appeared between 1821 and 1824; in 1822 he published the Vision of Judgment, a reply

to Southey's eulogy of George III, and one of the most successful of all parodies. In 1823 the Greek revolutionists appealed to Byron for help against Turkey; to their call he responded enthusiastically and unselfishly. In January, 1824, he reached Greece; three months he spent at Missolonghi, drilling troops and combating fever; and then he died.

Byron has to his credit four distinct accomplishments, any one of which, unless it be the first, would have made him a poet of rank. He expressed in his verse, and in his personality, the melancholy pride and despair, and the revolt against society, which were general in Europe during the years following the collapse of the French Revolution, but which have come to be considered characteristically "Byronic." He was a brilliant teller of tales, which, though lacking many of the finer poetic qualities, are yet masterly narratives. He was a descriptive poet whose pictures of the grander manifestations of Nature's power were painted with a sweep and magnificence unequalled in English verse. And in Don Juan, his masterpiece, he showed himself a daring and trenchant critic of contemporary society, and of the foibles of human nature at large. It is to his carelessness of form, and his lack of intellectual power, that Byron owes the refusal of the world to grant him a place in the small circle of the greatest poets.

The best one volume edition of Byron is the Cambridge (Houghton Mifflin); . the standard library edition is that of G. E. Prothero and E. H. Coleridge (John Murray). Essays and biographical memoirs have been numerous; Nichol's Life, in the E. M. L., and Noel's, in the Great Writers series, are both good. Matthew Arnold's volume of selections in the Golden Treasury series is prefaced by a valuable essay.

SHELLEY (1792-1822)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in Field Place, Sussex, in 1792. After some years at Eton, where the yoke of educational tradition galled him, he went up to Oxford in October, 1810. In March, 1811, he was expelled for having written a pamphlet entitled On the Necessity of Atheism, and left college determined to give his life to the cause of intellectual freedom. During the summer of the same year he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a London school-girl, whom he married in Edinburgh. His life with her came to an end in the summer of 1814 when he left England with Mary Godwin, the brilliant daughter of William Godwin, whose philosophical liberalism strengthened Shelley in his defiance of law and tradition. In 1816 Harriet Westbrook Shelley drowned herself; shortly thereafter Shelley married Mary Godwin. By 1818 he was living in Italy, virtually as an exile, deprived by law of the custody of Harriet's children, and fearing to return to England lest further legal action be taken against him. But here in Italy he did his greatest work, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Adonais, and Hellas, besides a large number of magnificent lyrics, all appearing between 1818 and 1822. In

July of 1822 Shelley was drowned while sailing in the Gulf of Spezzia.

To understand Shelley one must think of him as both poet and philosopher. His poetical reputation rests primarily upon his lyric power. Even in Prometheus it is the lyrical and not the dramatic elements that make the work successful; in the better known and briefer works, such as The Cloud, To a Skylark, To Night, and the Ode to the West Wind, the imagery is daringly magnificent, and the technique virtually perfect. But Shelley was at least as much interested in his message as in the form which this message assumed. Living in the years when the conservative reaction after the failure of the French Revolution was most pronounced, he never allowed his faith in humanity to be shaken, but constantly urged the perfectibility of mankind, and the power of love to regenerate the world. When once custom had been abolished, warfare ended, and the tyranny of church and state forever broken, then, Shelley believed, the golden age of freedom and love shadowed forth in the last act of Prometheus Unbound would be realized on the earth. There was, of course, much of the dreamer in Shelley; but to call him with Arnold "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain," is to do him scant justice. For in some respects-as witness his sympathy for animals, his hatred of war, and his passionate longing for intellectual and religious freedom,-Shelley's weakness was only that of the man "ahead of his times." And the very essence of his philosophy, self-sacrifice for the good of the world, was nearer the essence of Christianity than the Churchmen who condemned him for atheism were willing to admit.

Good one volume editions of Shelley's poetry are the Globe (Macmillan), Cambridge (Houghton Mifflin), and Oxford (Oxford Univ. Press). The Life by Dowden (two vols., Lippincott), is exhaustive, but is somewhat injured by a good deal of special pleading. Symonds's Life, in the E. M. L., is an excellent brief biography. Trelawney's Recollections of the Last Days of Byron and Shelley is a vivid contemporary account of the close of Shelley's life.

KEATS (1795-1821)

John Keats was born in London, in 1795. He was the son of Thomas Keats, at first chief hostler and later manager of the "Swan and Hoop" inn, and of Frances Jennings, whose father was the proprietor of the inn. When Keats was eight years old his parents, eager for his advancement, sent him to school at Enfield. Here he won the literary prizes "as a matter of course." His father died in 1804, and at the death of his mother in 1810 Keats found himself under the guardianship of two successful but somewhat narrowminded merchants. They at once withdrew him from school and apprenticed him to a surgeon at Edmonton. In 1814, when his indenture was cancelled by mutual agreement, he was sufficiently interested in medicine to continue his studies in the London hospitals. But already his chief

concern was with poetry, and in 1815 he wrote at least one of his great sonnets, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer. By the latter part of 1816 he had definitely made up his mind to give his life to poetry; in 1817 appeared his first volume, Poems by John Keats, containing the sonnet on Homer and Sleep and Poetry, besides some less noteworthy verse. In the spring of 1818 came Endymion, which at first passed unnoticed, but later was savagely attacked by Blackwood's and the Quarterly for its formlessness and lack of restraint. Towards the end of 1818 Keats met Fanny Brawne, with whom he was soon in love, but whom he could not marry on account of his poor health. In February of 1820 he was definitely threatened with consumption; when in July his third volume, containing the great odes and The Eve of St. Agnes, appeared, Keats was so ill that a voyage to Italy was proposed as the only means of saving his life. In the middle of September he sailed with his friend Severn, and reached Rome in December. Here, in February, 1821, he died, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

Keats was first and last an artist, keenly sensitive to beauty, and comparatively unaffected by the changes that came over Europe during his lifetime. Yearning for an ideal beauty as his own hero Endymion longed for his moon-goddess, Keats gratified this desire through the creation of beauty in his verse. In the 1817 volume, and in Endymion, it was largely beauty of detail that occupied him, beauty of lines and passages rich with "a fine excess" of sensuous imagery. But the poems of 1820, especially St. Agnes and the odes, have all the imaginative richness of the earlier work, and are strengthened by a sense of form that had hitherto been lacking.

Good editions of Keats's poems are the Cambridge (Houghton Mifflin), the Globe (Macmillan), and the Oxford (Oxford Univ. Press). The best is H. Buxton Forman's (Gowans and Gray, Glasgow; 4 vols.). Sir Sidney Colvin's Life in the E. M. L. is a good brief biography.

LAMB (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb was born in London in 1775, the son of a lawyer's clerk. From 1782 to 1789 he was a student at Christ's Hospital, where he formed with Coleridge a friendship that was to be life-long. After leaving school he went to work as a clerk in the South Sea House; in April of 1792 he moved to the East India House and began the service that was to be ended thirty-three years later when Lamb was pensioned by the Company. The year 1796 brought tragedy into the household of his father, with whom Lamb was still living. A taint of insanity ran in the family; in this year Mary Lamb became violently insane and killed her mother. The rest of his life Lamb spent in caring for his sister-the Bridget Elia of the essays who was subject to the recurrence of her malady, but who in her rational periods was a sympathetic and stimulating companion. Lamb's first literary work of importance was

written in actual collaboration with his sister: the Tales from Shakespeare (1807). But although Lamb had written some verse and a good deal of prose before the Tales appeared, and had published his collected Works in 1818, it was not till 1820 that he began the series of essays by which he is best known. In this year the London Magazine was established; to it Lamb contributed the Essays of Elia. The latter years of his life were uneventful. His sister demanded an increasing amount of care, and though his pension brought him leisure, he did little after its bestowal to add to his reputation as a man of letters.

The charm of Lamb's essays is due in part to the humor and pathos which pervade them, and in part to the intimate relationship which Lamb at once establishes between himself and the reader. Writing as if for a circle of friends, Lamb has put his own personality into his essays so completely that he has become one of the best known of English writers, while by his simple unpretentiousness he has concealed an art as great as Addison's, albeit of a very different

sort.

The best edition of Lamb's works is that of E. V. Lucas (Methuen), who is also the author of the best biography.

HAZLITT (1778-1830)

William Hazlitt, the son of a Unitarian minister, was educated for the ministry, studied art for a time, was encouraged by Coleridge to pursue an interest in metaphysics, and first came before the public as a writer on philosophical subjects. The maturing of his tastes finally led him to literature and journalism. He wrote for several of the dailies and periodicals, doing most work for Leigh Hunt's Examiner. He was acquainted with the Lake poets, Lamb, and the London literary set, and though he sooner or later quarrelled with almost all his friends the estrangement was not usually permanent. His work of greatest general interest was done in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), Lectures on the English Poets (1818), English Comic Writers (1819), Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1821), and two collections of miscellaneous essays, Table Talk and The Plain Speaker. His interest in the French Revolution and Napoleon led him to write a life of Napoleon, not very much esteemed. Personally Hazlitt was shy, irascible, and curiously susceptible to feminine attraction. As a critic he is at once independent and dogmatic, of fine taste, and on the whole sympathetic in his attitude toward the newer spirit in literature. With Lamb and Coleridge he did valuable service to the cause of literature by helping to establish a proper appreciation of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists. His style, not so intimate or charming as Lamb's, has a rich personal flavor and vivacity, and is superior to Lamb's in point and vigor.

The standard edition of Hazlitt is edited by Waller and Glover (Dent). Augustine Birrel's Life (E. M. L.) is good; more extensive are the Memoirs (2 vols., 1867) by W. C. Hazlitt.

DE QUINCEY (1785-1859) Thomas De Quincey was born at Manchester in 1785. He was a precocious boy, and when in 1803 he went up to Oxford University he took with him not only the ability to converse with ease in Greek and Latin, but a considerable experience with modern life as well,-experience gained during a runaway sojourn in Wales and a year's existence in the slums of London. He left Oxford in 1808 to begin the study of law; in 1809, however, he leased Wordsworth's old home at Grasmere, and began his career as a man of letters. Here he remained till 1820, when he went up to London to write for the London Magasine, to which during 1821 he contributed the Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In 1828 he moved again, this time to Edinburgh, where he wrote for Blackwood's and the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. He died in Edinburgh towards the close of 1859, after half a century of arduous and persistent journalistic work.

De Quincey's fame would be greater had he done less discursive and trivial work; the Confessions, however, have placed him among the masters of English prose. This, his most characteristic production, is in part a record of his experiences with opium, and in part a chronicle of his early years. He first tasted opium during his residence at Oxford; by 1819 he was in complete bondage to the drug. The Suspiria de Profundis, in which the eloquent prose of the Confessions becomes even richer and more exotic in its splendor, is also associated with opium, for it is here that De Quincey pictures with poetic magnificence the phantasmagoric creations of his dreams. It is in large part this stylistic richness that makes De Quincey's work memorable; his is thoroughly romantic prose; prose that could have been written only during the early years of the nineteenth century, or, with some differences of language, in the seventeenth. To the writers of Elizabethan England De Quincey undoubtedly owed much; the rarest qualities of his style, however, he imitated from nobody.

De Quincey's chief works are accessible in many
editions; an excellent collected edition is that by
Lord Morley's
David Masson (A. and C. Black).
Life (E. M. L.) is a good biography.

LANDOR (1775-1864)

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TENNYSON (1809-1892)

The year 1809 was good to England, for it gave her Gladstone, Darwin, Edward Fitzgerald, and Alfred Tennyson. The last was born in the little village of Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where his father was rector. The family was a large one, consisting of eight brothers (of whom Alfred was the fourth) and four sisters, and poetry ran in it, for they nearly all wrote verse, and Charles and Frederick gained some reputation as poets. The Tennysons used to spend their summers at Mablethorpe, where the "league-long rollers" of the North Sea thunder in upon flat beaches; Tennyson's many and varied descriptions of waves are to be traced back to this early acquaintance with the ocean, just as his landscapes frequently recall the rolling wolds of the Lincolnshire country. Charles and Alfred went together to Louth Grammar School, but after 1820 were taught at home by their father.

In 1827 a Louth bookseller printed a little volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers, the authors being Charles and Alfred Tennyson. These juvenilia make a somewhat amusing parade of schoolboy learning, and are pervaded by an assumed melancholy, in which the great contemporary influence of Byron is evident. Alfred was an ardent admirer of Byron. He has told us how he was affected by the news of Byron's death in 1824: "I thought the whole world was at an end; I thought everything was over and finished for everyone that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out alone and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone." In 1828 the two brothers went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where they formed friendships with several men later

well known; in particular, the intimacy of Alfred with Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, was to bear the noblest poetic fruit. He continued writing verse, and in 1829 gained the Chancellor's medal with his poem Timbuctoo, in which now and then we catch the first faint echoes of the sonorous roll and melody of the Tennysonian blank verse. He left Cambridge in February, 1831, without taking a degree, recalled to Somersby by the illness of his father, who died in March. While yet at Cambridge he had published the first volume bearing his own name, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, containing among much that was merely pretty and too sugary some really good things like Mariana and The Poet. Late in 1832 appeared another volume of Poems, wherein the presence of such things as The Lady of Shalott, Oenone, The Palace of Art, and A Dream of Fair Women foreshadowed the coming greatness.

In 1833 Arthur Hallam died in Vienna. The blow fell heavily on Tennyson, and for ten years he published no more poetry. The years were far from wasted, however, for he was busy constantly revising old verse and writing new. The result of this steady labor of self-criticism was seen in the two volumes of Poems of 1842. The more varied interest, the broader human sympathy, and the perfect artistry of this work made Tennyson's fame secure. Many of the poems of 1832 were reprinted in their present form, and Tennyson never wrote finer poetry than in Ulysses and Morte d'Arthur. One result of the public recognition accorded to these volumes was the granting to the poet in 1845 of an annual pension of two hundred pounds. The Princess appeared in 1847, though the lyrics which constitute one of its chief beauties were not added till a third edition. The year 1850 was, as Hallam Tennyson says, the "golden year" of Tennyson's life. He published In Memoriam, upon which he had been working for sixteen years; he married Emily Sellwood, with whom he had been in love for years, but whom he had been unable to marry because of comparative poverty; and on the death of Wordsworth he was made Laureate. Three years later the Tennysons moved to the house in Farringford, in the Isle of Wight, which was their home for the rest of their lives. Maud came out in 1855, and four years later the first four of the Idylls of the King; four more were added in 1869, one in 1871, one in 1872, and the series was completed in 1885. In 1864 were printed Enoch Arden and many of the English idylls. Late in life Tennyson turned to the writing of poetic drama, writing a trilogy on English history, Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1877), and Becket (1884), of which the last was acted with great popular favor by Henry Irving. Two or three other plays also made acting successes. The last years of Tennyson's life were full of travel, of work, and of honor. He was raised to the peerage in 1884, an honor which he accepted as a tribute to literature rather than to himself. He died in 1892, and was buried in Westminster Abbey beside his friend Browning.

Tennyson has been called the representative poet, and In Memoriam the representative poem

of the Victorian era, because it expresses the compromise between religion and science which the era worked out. Tennyson accepts the nebular hypothesis, the theory of evolution, and other teachings of modern science, but succeeds in reconciling them with his faith in a benevolent and loving Power which makes all things work together for good. Along other lines, too, Tennyson best represents the thought of England during his period. He is thoroughly and typically English in his political ideas, standing conservatively for sobriety in freedom against what he considered the tendency to rash excess across the channel. As poet laureate he wrote a good deal of patriotic verse glorifying England and her great men. Although the English idylls contain many pictures and figures from common life, Tennyson was by temper aristocratic, never, for instance, speaking for humanity as do Burns and Wordsworth.

Tennyson is a good, if not a great, story teller, but the idyll is the form he manages most successfully, a form in which he can use ornament freely, and upon which he can bestow his remarkable power of detailed description. The Idylls of the King and The Princess are full of superb descriptive passages, and no poet has been more successful in providing a suitable setting and creating a proper atmosphere for his narrative. In sheer artistry Tennyson is perhaps the first of English poets. In majesty and harmony his blank verse rivals that of Milton, and has a flexibility and variety surpassing Milton's. In lyric verse, too, Tennyson is one of the supreme artists, exhibiting a felicity of phrase and a command of poetic device which at times, as in The Bugle Song, rise to pure magic.

The new Works of Tennyson (Macmillan 1913), with a memoir by the poet's son and Tennyson's own notes, is the best single-volume edition. The authoritative life is the two-volume Memoir by Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson (Macmillan). Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life, by Stopford Brooke (G. P. Putnam's Sons) is a good commentary.

BROWNING (1812-1889)

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, on the outskirts of London, three years after Tennyson. Of formal schooling the boy had not much. A few years in a private school near home, some private tutoring, a few months in the University of London-this sums it up. His real education was gained in the family circle. Robert Browning, Senior, a clerk in the Bank of England, was scholarly and artistic by temperament, a good linguist, and the possessor of a large and curiously varied library. Young Browning was an omnivorous reader, and in his father's library he made the acquaintance of many of the odd, obscure people who figure so largely in his poetry. His mother, moreover, was something of an artist, and a good musician, and the boy inherited her love of art and music. An understanding of Browning's family life, of the manner of his training, and of the nature of his reading, makes