seventeenth century, although that perhaps is its nearest kin. It is at the opposite extreme from the clear, polished, and direct style of the eighteenth-century writers. It does not transgress the proper limits of prose, but approaches poetry without ever attempting to ape the methods of poetry. It stands, so to say, on poetic heights and breathes poetic air; but it has climbed to those loftier levels instead of soared. In the first place, De Quincey—in writings where this peculiar style is fully exercised-has a theme full of imagination and charged with emotion. His problem, therefore, was to convey in prose language what is essentially poetic material. The style through which this was accomplished is a marvelous display of all the resources of the rhetorician. It is not only great rhetoric, but it is great oratory as well; for De Quincey knew how to pour forth his heart with all the fervor of a moving eloquence. It is almost poetically imaginative and ornate, and is impassioned at times almost to ecstasy. The discriminating critic will tell us of De Quincey's literary faults — his tedious digressions, his teasing eccentricities, his often strained humor, his incongruous mingling of solemn and grotesque, his whimsical extravagances, his lack of intellectual order and balance. But when all is justly said, we must still recognize a rare intellect, a magnificent imagination, and an almost unmatched splendor of style.

The literary wealth of the age is admirably illustrated by the authors already discussed, but it is by no Lesser Prose means exhausted. In all departments of liter and Poetry ature there were other writers, eminent in their own day and by no means forgotten by posterity. A few of the best known of these may be briefly mentioned by way of example. In the field of literary criticism, William one of the most brilliant critical essayists and Hazlitt most helpful allies of the romartic movement was Wil

liam Hazlitt, best known by his lectures on Shakespeare, on the dramatic literature of the Elizabethan Period, on English poets, and on English comic writers. The name of Robert Southey was in his own day associated on equal terms with the names of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the list of the Lake School of poets. His poetic

Robert
Southey

star has now declined, but no man represents better than he the romantic and individualistic spirit of his age. Perhaps his best and most typical poem is his romantic Curse of Kehama. Although he was poet-laureate for thirty years, Southey was probably better as a prose-writer than as a poet. His Life of Nelson is a classic. Southey's position may be best defined as that of a typical man of letters. Thomas Campbell began

Thomas
Campbell

Thomas

with a poem of the classical type on The Pleas

ures of Hope, but soon caught the newer spirit of poetry. His best work is to be found in such poems as his three splendid war-songs-Hohenlinden, Ye Mariners of England, and the Battle of the Baltic. Campbell was a Scotchman, but the sentiment of his patriotic poetry is rather British than Scotch. Thomas Moore, however, was not only a typical Irishman, but was also Moore the singer of Ireland's woes and departed glories. His Irish Melodies do not reach the highest poetic levels, but it is praise enough to say that at their best they are almost perfect in their kind. Moore represents the spirit of the age, not only by his patriotic enthusiasm, but also by his rather florid Oriental romances, of which the best is Lalla Rookh. The life of Walter Savage Landor was an extremely

Walter Savage Landor

long one, extending from 1775 to 1864; and his literary career affords some interesting illustrations of literary movements. He began as a romantic poet even before the close of the eighteenth century, and by later works illustrated the progress of the romantic

movement. His fine classical culture brought, however, a more finished and restrained quality into much of his poetry and also into the chaste and classic prose which marked his later life. His work, therefore, taken as a whole, unites romantic suggestiveness with classic elegance. While this union and change are in some respects personal to Landor, his tendency was nevertheless in harmony with the tendency of the age. Change of When Romanticism had spent its greatest fer- the Age vor, when Individualism had passed the period of its greatest intensity, there came something of a movement toward that restraint and recognition of literary law which Classicism had formerly represented. It was an old spirit recurring under the stress of very new impulses; and Landor, living far on into the later age, had opportunity to feel the effect of influences which gave a classic finish to the work of Arnold and Tennyson.

BOOK VI

DEMOCRACY AND SCIENCE (1832-1892)

Individualism

racy

THE Individualism which characterized the Age of Burns and the Age of Wordsworth was not Democracy. It was rather the spirit of which democracy is born. and Democ- Democracy is organized government—“of the people, by the people, and for the people." It is individualistic theory and passion crystallized into actual fact. An age of individualism must precede an age of democracy, and sometimes the period of preparation is a very long one. The history of the development of free institutions in England has not, of course, been a history of sudden revolution, but rather a history

Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.

It is therefore difficult to specify the exact points where movements for freedom have begun or have culminated. Nevertheless, we have been able to see in literature the development of the individualistic spirit progressing for something like a hundred years, gradually gathering force and gradually coming to ever clearer and stronger literary expression. At about the close of the first third of the nineteenth century, moreover, it may be fairly said that democracy in England has begun. It began earlier in America; but there it had freer way, and did not have to make that long and severe struggle against established order and prescriptive right which we have seen to be the special characteristic of the ages of Burns and Wordsworth. It was not until the battle for individualism had