their novels

under the names of George Eliot, and Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, yielded to the charm which compels so large a troop of sensitive natures. In "Jubal" and "The Spanish Gypsy" George Eliot made two serious attempts to justify a claim to the coveted name of poet. Of "Jubal" nothing need be written. As to "The Spanish Gypsy" one may permit oneself an expression of regret that instead of a story manacled in verse which is seldom more than tolerable, which never soars, and is too often pedestrian, the writer did not use her materials to give us, as she might have done, in her native fashion, a glorious novel in admirable prose. George Eliot, posing as a poet, provides a literary analogue to the Apterix among birds: she has everything but the wings, and cannot fly. As to the verse of the sisters Brontë, it was on its first appearance not unnaturally overvalued. None of us could forget the novels, and but few of us were not aware in some measure of the sadness and dreary romance of the three lives. Sympathy often passes into admiration, and in many a loving heart the two are confused from the first. But after a careful re-perusal, it is impossible to see much more in the collection than might have been achieved by dozens of cleverish daughters of rural clergymen; and, strangely enough, Currer Bell's pieces seem to be the least meritorious.

Both Jean Ingelow and Miss Rossetti have done more interesting and distinctive work. The first named, especially, treats from time to time her delicately chosen and daintily handled subjects with a gentleness and womanly grace that go far to subdue the reader. For instance, overprolonged as it is, "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire" is રી monument of pathos, and instinct with the dreary life of the people of the fens.

But

If George Meredith were as victorious over us with his verse as he is with his prose, he would be the most triumphant "of our Conquerors." as a poet he falls into one of two pits: he either loses his idiosyncrasy, and becoming clear he is tame, or else, beginning to speak in his own tongue, he is untamable. We bear with him in his prose because what his style partly veils is so splendid. His wit, his wisdom, his plastic power and his own joy in it, all gleam out on us through the interjected photosphere of his perversities. These we forgive to him, and only greet an unusually tough paragraph or chapter with an affectionate oath. But though we can bear that our prose should be somewhat over purée, we must have the turtle of our poetry clear; so we say to him,. we hope not ungratefully, "Introduce us to more Egoists, let Richard Feverel undergo fresh ordeals, make Shagpat shave himself afresh, negotiate for us another Marriage however Amazing, but let 'Modern Love' and "The Joys of Earth' alone."

Probably few poets of any age, certainly none among our moderns, have started upon the path of fame with so fair a promise as that which was given by "Atalanta in Calydon." Mr. Swinburne took us by storm. The youth who could present a famous but very difficult old myth with the fearlessness and good faith which illumined his poem, and who was capable of writing the best passages in its choruses, to say nothing of a great deal of the blank verse, fully justified the acclamations which greeted him. If Mr. Swinburne has not developed quite commensurately, it is not because he was chilled, like Keats, by want of welcome. There was no frost in his May. Even the wayward drift and over-frankness in treatment of many pieces among his "Poems and Ballads" were condoned far more handsomely than he should

have hoped. If some of us felt a first fine shade of disappointment creep over us with "Chastelard," which deepened with "Bothwell" and "Mary Stuart," it was not that what was done was not well done-for it was all wondrously well done-but it was that a writer so splendidly endowed should not have cared to treat something nobler, to do something still better worth his doing. Had not the world had already a little too much of the frivolity, intrigue, levity, moral squalor, cruelty, and crime of Mary Stuart and her Court? We grieved that one who might have been among the most picturesque of teachers, as the "Songs before Sunrise" testified, should tend towards subsidence into a raker of dead rose-leaves from the bowers of light ladies, a chronicler of their frailties, and of their sufferings at the hands of paramours whose deeds and natures were even more unsavory than their own. Such feelings were not relieved by the appearance of "Tristram and Iseult." It was now too clear that Mr. Swinburne had become by habitual preference a treater of such themes, and that the world must make up its mind to suffer by his choice. One exception we are bound to admit: "Marino Faliero” is a great subject grandly handled. Since those days he has done little more than disport himself with his powers. He has tossed metre about as a Japanese juggler spins plates or keeps sham butterflies upon the wing. He has loved to elaborate an idea through a score of complicated stanzas very much as an over-ingenious musical composer tortures a theme through endless variations. And all these things he does with an exuberance and a faultless dexterity which bewilder and charm us for the moment, but upon which he must pardon us if we reflect with a genuine regret. He has suffered, like most great people, much from epithets. He has been called

cometlike, erratic, meteoric; but these hardly supply a befitting image. He does not strike us as lawless, or out of the way, except in having been very brilliant. He is rather represented, to our thinking, by a star that floats suddenly into the astronomer's ken, shows for a while as of the first magnitude, arousing a wild surmise, a hope, a prophecy, but slowly dies back to a moderate though still considerable splendor, and leaves the disappointed observer saddened as well as silent, like Keats' sailors upon their peak in Darien,

man.

With Mr. Swinburne the roll of the masters is closed. But there are many names, early and late, which deserve record. There is Bishop Heber, whose "Bluebeard" is, with the exception of "The Ingoldsby Legends," the best comic poem ever written by a clergyThere is Bailey, of whose death at a ripe age we have lately heard, and in whose "Festus" and "The Age" the display of his own literary ambition is perhaps, after all, in spite of their momentary acceptance, the chief effect. Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam's "Rubáiyát," must not be forgotten, though his original work may have passed out of remembrance. There is, too, the late T. E. Brown, the Manxman, a great scholar and tutor, whom a long generation of Clifton schoolboys remember with affection and reverence, and whom a grateful group of readers still thank for his "Fo'c's'le Yarns," "Manx Witch," and "The Doctor"; genuine pictures, all, of the homely island life and scenery amid which he was born and nurtured. There is Sir Alfred Lyall, whose masculine "Verses written in India," make us wish that there were more of them. There is Professor Courthope, whose "Paradise of Birds" might well have been followed by something simile aut secundum. Sir Lewis Morris has been a voluminous writer, and a careful and

conscientious worker. He is, perhaps, the most fruitful and successful of the Tennysonians. His "Epic of Hades," which introduced him, and his "Gwen," a very charming poem, have won him a title to respectful mention among Victorian poets. Prominent among all such in gentle grace of idyllic work is Mr. Robert Bridges. His shorter poems seem to us far his best. In spite of the superiority of his "Return of Ulysses" to another much-praised poem on the same subject, the verdict upon him must be that he falls back beaten from effort upon a large scale. But if any. body who does not yet know him should wish to try the flavor of his smaller fruits, let him take the first taste of them in the delightful, but unnamed, poem which begins

There is a hill beside the silver Thames.

We shall be surprised if he does not devour the basketful.

Lord De Tabley's half-dozen volumes are, unfortunately for the many, known only to the few. He had not those qualities which provoke general acceptance. One is tempted to associate him with Arnold, though it is not difficult to differentiate the two. De Tabley could not have written "Thyrsis," perhaps, nor "Empedocles on Etna," though neither subject would have been alien to his genius; but Arnold, on the other hand, would have been incapable of "Orestes," and still more certainly so of "Jaël," that strangest and most original of monologues. Seldom has a sequel to a long-accepted myth been so completely justified. We feel that the lonely woman who in a momentary flush of resistless patriotism dared to slay the sleeping Sisera, whom she had for pity entertained, must have repented of her deed; and seldom has there been a nobler study of passion than De Tabley's of the remorse with which he has dowered her.

His volumes are full of fine things, and we could only wish, not so much for his fame's sake, as for that of the general spread of enjoyment, that the number of those qualified to judge of them were larger than it is.

Three men have been conspicuous during the nineteenth century as writers of "sacred" poetry-Cardinal Newman, Father Faber, and Mr. Keble. There would be an obvious risk in an attempt to judge them by what is after all bound to be a secular standard. They are all eminently sectarian. Let those who prefer either of them to George Herbert do so. For ourselves, we are content with the elder poet. Their piety is their enticement, and Herbert's has an element of universality which theirs lacks. Once we recollect catching in Mr. Keble the true lyric ring. It is in the opening stanzas of the lines written for one of the later Sundays after Trinity, and which begin

Red o'er the forest peers the setting

sun.

But even these are but a sweet echo, which would hardly have taken shape but for Gray's "Elegy."

A word or two must be said for those whose mission has been to relax the strung bow for us, who have had no lesson to teach beyond the pleasant one that life need not be all labor, and who in teaching this have laughed with us out of working hours. James and Horace Smith were poets. "A Tale of Drury Lane," that epic of the Fire Hose, is as much a poem outside "Marmion" as Pope's "Iliad" is one apart from that of Homer. Aytoun and Theodore Martin created a new Campeador in Don Fernando Gomersalez, and added a startling sequel to the deeds of St. George in the exploit of Mr. Philip Slingsby. Those who have simmered over the neatness and classic smartness of Calverley have owed a like

and not inferior pleasure to Seaman, Graves, and Godley. And as we and our fathers enjoyed in company the extravaganzas of Planché, so have we sat and laughed with our sons over the libretti of Gilbert wedded to the music of Sullivan. In this, as in other matters, we of the nineteenth century have had much to be thankful for.

Two or three stand out among the younger group of living poets whom we have deliberately forborne to estimate. Let us now name them-Mr. Watson, Mr. Phillips, and Mr. Kipling. Their genius is undoubted, and each will take the rank found due to him, as time develops his powers and accumulates his productions. That we do not attempt to appraise them comes not of failure to appreciate or reluctance to acknowledge. But we think that they more properly belong to the twentieth century, and we hope and believe that when the chronicler of the new epoch makes up his treasures their names will each have an honored place upon the roll.

And now, what is the sum of the matter? Is it not that at the dawn of the last century, after a brief period of slightness and estrangement from high purpose, Poetry did rouse herself, The Edinburgh Review.

shake her plumes, remember her mission, and set herself anew to the serious problems of life; to this end, touching the lips, and not in vain, of Crabbe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning? Have not all these great men caught fire from their epoch, illuminating it in turn with the coruscations of their own uncommunicated genius? And has there not been beside them a long and still brilliant company of lesser lights, grouped in easy gradation of achievement, from the high level of Swinburne, Arnold, and Patmore, down to that of some of those who are at work to-day? Mankind may hereafter shake their heads when they read some of the more unmeasured of contemporary eulogies, but it will always be conceded to the nineteenth century that, while it was an age in which eternal questions and issues had become more complex and more difficult than they had been or seemed to be during its predecessors, it produced poets able and zealous to attack them, and who, while they laid bare their own doubts and self-conflicts, were still fit to register every pulse and stereotype every phase of the moral, social, and intellectual movement that surged around them.

There are various streets in London each of which is known to its frequenters as "The Lane." Mincing Lane is an example. What the portly merchant may call it a humble scribe dares not speculate; but his light-hearted clerk would stare at you in amazement if you referred to that place of tea otherwise than as "The Lane." So, too, Petticoat Lane is known to its votaries as "The Lane." There is little fear

Petticoat Lane

of misunderstanding. would be as grossly insulted by being confused with Mincing Lane as would Mincing Lane by being confused with Petticoat Lane. "The Lane" in each case keeps itself to itself, and regards a rival claimant to the title with haughty disfavor. In the heart of London is another "The Lane," not to be identified with either of the other lanes -a lane with a long and varied history

behind it; famous as the starting-point

of the Great Plague; famous because Mr. Charles Booth has singled out some of its tributary streets for detailed description, house by house and room by room, that posterity may know to what depths London descended in the closing years of the nineteenth century; famous in the pages of Dickens, thrice famous in the annals of the stage. In "The Lane" is a large club where we pass our nights at play.

You

The club is not bow-windowed. do not ride past it on the roof of an omnibus and look enviously upon redleathered arm-chairs or small tables suggestively covered with snowy linen. No stalwart porter in uniform whistles for hansoms to bear its habitués homeward. The latest gossip and the latest story do not fleet round its whisperinggalleries. Two narrow houses tucked closely side by side shut out the sky as you walk past; a dusty inscription informs you that this is an institute and working-men's club; and the noise from within makes you aware that it is in working order. Over the door flares a lamp like those which hang outside public-houses, and its light shines upon a notice-board setting forth the manifold attractions of the place. Doubtless they are many and compelling; but the inscription is somewhat faded, and it seemed better, when first we saw it, to step inside and inquire than to puzzle out the writing in the chill evening wind outside. At the worst the casual visitor could but be requested to retire

Clearly we had entered a coffee-bar. A long counter, loaded with steaming urns, thick mugs, plates, glasses, shut off the body of the room from shelves covered with good things. A brisk trade was being carried on-this coffeebar seemed to do well. On the wall were numbers of notice-boards. "Dramatic Society," "Harriers," "Lecture and Debate," "Football Club," "Feder

ation Competitions"-such were the headings that caught our eyes and showed that the inscription outside was not calculated to deceive. From an adjoining room came the click of billiard-balls and a babel of talk. In front was a doorway leading-whither? The door had a ground-glass plate, across which mysterious shadows were flitting. Curiosity dragged us to and through that door. It led into a hall where boxing was in progress. A ring was roped off, two lads were pounding each other scientifically and effectually, the instructor watching them critically, other lads sitting round in perfect silence, while the timekeeper kept one eye on his watch and the other on the boxers. "Time!" he called sharply. Instantly the two ran to their corners, fell into chairs, stretched out their legs, and flung their arms restfully over the ropes of the ring. Then the seconds took them in hand. The well-punched faces were dabbed with wet sponges, and cooled and dried by towels used as punkahs. "Time!" was called again, the seconds scrambled out of the ring, the boxers shook hands (this being their last round) and commenced sparring once more. We seized the opportunity to look round. The ring was surrounded by working men and lads, some of whom, to judge by their appearance, had been boxing earlier. The instructor was a tall and, slender man with long, wiry arms, and dark eyes that gleamed and blazed as he watched the sport. A dangerous man to offend, we decided. A stoutly built man in his shirt-sleeves was talking in low tones to the timekeeper, addressing him as "Mr. President." The door opened, and a young clergyman came in and whispered something to one of the bystanders, who nodded and went out. the clerical eye fell interrogatively upon us. An explanation on our part was clearly desirable, and we thought it best to throw ourselves on the mercy

Then