POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: COLERIDGE AND KEATS.

IN a passage of his 'Life of Byron,' interesting as giving a poet's estimate of the inspiring forces of his age, Moore describes the effects of the drama of the French Revolution on contemporary imagination.

'There are those,' says he, 'who trace, in the peculiar character of Lord Byron's genius, strong features of relationship to the times in which he lived; who think that the great events which marked the close of the last century, by giving a new impulse to men's minds, by habituating them to the daring and the free, and allowing full vent to the "flash and outbreak of fiery spirits,” had naturally led to the production of such a poet as Byron; and that he was in short as much the child and representative of the Revolution, in poesy, as another great man of the age, Napoleon, was in statesmanship and warfare. Without going the full length of this notion, it will, at least, be conceded, that the free loose which had been given to all the passions and

energies of the human mind, in the great struggle of that period, together with the constant spectacle of such astounding vicissitudes as were passing, almost daily, on the theatre of the world, had created, in all minds, and in every walk of intellect, a taste for strong excitement, which the stimulants supplied from ordinary sources were insufficient to gratify;—that a tame deference to established authorities had fallen into disrepute, no less in literature than in politics, and that the poet who should breathe into his songs the fierce and passionate spirit of the age, and assert, untrammelled and unawed, the high dominion of genius, would be most sure of an audience toned in sympathy with his strains.'

Dull, indeed, must the spirit have been which failed to catch some inspiring fervour from the atmosphere of those extraordinary times. The ages of knight errantry seemed to have revived. While historic dynasties were overthrown in a single night, while every common soldier felt that he might carry his marshal's bâton in his knapsack, while obscure adventurers seated themselves on the most ancient thrones of Europe, it would have been strange if imagination had been anything but romantic. Byron may be the best poetical representative of the Revolutionary forces of the period, but he is by

no means the only one. Their influence is equally visible in the fire and flow of Shelley's verse. The romantic spirit, indeed, makes itself felt in the work of those whose temper is most opposed to the Revolutionary movement. Campbell, who in another age would probably have had to rest content with such reputation as he might have acquired from the Pleasures of Hope,' is inspired with The Battle of the Baltic' and 'Hohenlinden ;' while if Byron may be claimed as the special child of Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism can at least boast of having informed the better part of the genius of Scott.

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But while the French Revolution quickened the spirit of romantic action in poetry, it also gave birth to the more enduring movement of romance in philosophical thought. The outburst of Liberty and the expansion of genius, coinciding as they did with the advance of democracy, encouraged the spread of the Optimism cherished by all the philosophers who derived their descent from Rousseau. A belief in the unlimited progress of the human race took possession of most reflecting minds. The vast development of

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physical science, and the revolution which this entailed in man's circumstances, were supposed to be accompanied by a corresponding enlargement of his virtue, his wisdom, and of his corporal powers. Condorcet assured his disciples that they might hope for the unlimited prolongation of life. Shelley, treading in the steps of his French masters, insisted that, if we could only get rid of the debasing superstitions of Christianity, we might expect to become perfectly good and happy. Others, to heighten the charms of the smiling prospect, indulged the idea that, as man was destined in this life to develop moral and physical capacities far in advance of anything he could at present conceive, so he might look forward to the conquest and possession of untold treasures of art, latent in a new world of imagination.

Prominent among these sanguine prophets was Wordsworth. Like many other enthusiastic young men of talent he had hailed the beginning of the French Revolution, and had excused as natural its bloody excesses. Even when its true nature dawned on his mind, and he saw