Byron's scathing satire upon it. His immense narrative poems (they can scarcely be called epics), on which he staked his poetic reputation-Madoc, Thalaba the Destroyer, Roderick, The Curse of Kehama-though greatly admired at the time by men like Scott, Landor, and Shelley, must now be regarded as monuments rather of their author's learning and industry than of real poetic inspiration. Yet their historical importance is considerable. They show the tendency of the romantic movement to carry the poet further and further afield in quest of fresh, striking, and picturesque subjects, and two of them mark an extreme reaction in form against the regularity of eighteenth century versification. Thalaba is in unrimed verses of varying length and metrical structure. Kehama preserves the metrical irregularity, though with the addition of rime. The verse of Thalaba was Shelley's model in Queen Mab.

LANDOR wrote poetry all through his long life, his first volume appearing in 1795, his last in 1863; but while he gained an “audience fit though few," he never became popular. He may be described as a classic writing in a romantic age, but his classicism was of the genuine Greek kind, and had nothing in common with the pseudoclassicism of the eighteenth century. Whether he deals with classic themes, as in his Hellenics, or with romantic, as in Gebir, he writes in the same restrained, severe, and sculpturesque manner. As Sir Henry Taylor said of him, he I lived in a past world of heroic thought, unaltered by the events of common life; he passed nearly through the most eventful century of the world without learning from experience, and almost without adding to his ideas. CAMPBELL'S case was different. His early work shows little sign of rupture with the Augustan tradition in thought or form. His Pleasures of Hope (1799)—a much

better thing than Rogers's Pleasures of Memory—belongs in matter and style to the outgoing school, and, like Theodoric many years later, is written in the closed couplet. But beneath the conventional surface of its diction there is a good deal of revolutionary feeling. Later, Campbell reflected the new poetical influences of his time, and in Gertrude of Wyoming (in which the Spenserian stanza is used) he is almost romantic. Some of his shorter poems-Lochiel, Lord Ullin's Daughter, and The Last Man, among them—are really striking; but he is chiefly known to-day for his vigorous war lyrics-Ye Mariners of England, Hohenlinden, The Battle of the Baltic-which rank among the best things of the kind in the language.

Of all the writers named in this section it is probable that MOORE is now most attractive to the general reader. It is true that his once famous Lalla Rookh-an oriental tale in the style for which his friend Byron had prepared the public taste is sadly faded. But it is not to this ambitious work that we should turn if we want to know what Moore can do at his best. It is rather to his Irish Melodies. He has been called the last of our minstrels, and the description is not inapt. He had a genuine lyric gift, and if his verse often lacks depth of feeling and is pervaded by a sentimentalism which has not worn well, there is enough that is really living in it to ensure him a permanent place among the poets whom we classify as singers.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH (Continued).

The Younger Poets.

93. The Later Revolutionary Age. The close of the French Revolution did not mean the end of the revolutionary movement, even in the field of politics. The peoples of Europe had been aroused, and were not now to be crushed or pacified. Hence repeated disturbances in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and much dangerous discontent in England. But meanwhile, as we have seen, a strong conservative reaction had set in; many of the older generation abandoned their early faith, and for a time the principles of progress and popular government suffered eclipse. The complacency of toryism, however, was impossible to many of the more fiery spirits among the younger men. Growing into manhood just in time to realise the full meaning of what seemed to be the failure of the democratic cause, they found themselves in a world which had emerged from the long strain of revolutionary excitement, exhausted but not satisfied. The old enthusiasms and hope had gone, and their collapse was followed here by apathy and indifference, there by the cynicism which often results from exploded idealism, and there again by the mood of bitter disappointment and aimless unrest. Such were the conditions which naturally weighed heavily upon the English

poets who were born into the later revolutionary age. Yet every man will respond to the influences of his time in accordance with the peculiarities of his own genius and character; and, though the three chief poets of our younger revolutionary group, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, breathed the same atmosphere, and saw the same forces at work about them, nothing could well be more striking than the contrast between each and each in the quality and temper of their poetry.

94. Byron. The eldest of the three, GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, is in the largest sense also the most thoroughly representative, because more than any other English writer he expressed that spirit of rebellion, at once comprehensive, passionate, and impotent, which was one of the salient features of his age. His own temperament and stormy life helped him to become its mouthpiece. Born in 1788, he sprang from a wild unruly stock, and from his father and mother inherited that irritable and volcanic character which repeatedly brought him into conflict with men and things. Hardly more than a boy, he published a little volume of verse, Hours of Idleness, which was ferociously attacked by the Edinburgh Review. To this attack he replied in a vigorous satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. A tour on the Continent in 1809-11 furnished the materials for the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in which descriptions of the places he had visited were combined with historic memories and much melancholy meditation upon the instability of human grandeur and power. Published in 1812, these two cantos scored an immense success. "I woke up one morning," said Byron, "and found myself famous." Then for a time he was the idol of the brilliant and dissipated society of the Regency, and amazed and delighted his thousands of readers with

the fierce emotion and highly coloured scenery of his romances in verse-The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Siege of Corinth, The Corsair. In 1815 he married; a year after, he and his wife separated; scandal broke out; he was execrated and denounced as a monster of iniquity by the very public which had lately loaded him with extravagant adulation; and he left England an embittered man. The remainder of his life was spent on the Continent, and it was during these years of exile that he produced his greatest work-Manfred, Cain, the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, and the unfinished Don Juan. In the end, weary of everything— of fame, of poetry, even of himself he threw himself into the cause of Greece then struggling for freedom against the Turks, took the field, and died in 1824 of a fever at Missolonghi, before he had completed his thirty-seventh year.

Byron wrote with almost incredible facility, and his work is not only very voluminous, but also—including as it does lyrics, satires, narrative poems serious and seriocomic, regular tragedies and dramatic poems-apparently very varied. But the variety is only apparent; for Byron was a supreme egotist, and, no matter what the form adopted, rarely travelled outside himself, the result being that the final impression left by his poetry is an impression not of variety but of monotony. As a critic and theorist, he proclaimed himself an adherent of the Augustan school; admired Pope; cared little for Wordsworth or Coleridge; and compared the poetry of the eighteenth century with a Greek temple, and that of his own time with a barbarous Turkish mosque. Yet, as he himself admitted, no one had done more than himself to substitute the mosque for the temple; for, whatever his principles, the entire weight of his practical influence