His best known works are: The Christian Year, or Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holidays throughout the year; Lyra Innocentium, or Thoughts in Verse on Children, and his contributions to Tracts for the Times.

Keble appears to have been a man of uncommon talents, and of the most winning disposition. While at Oxford, he was the idol of the University. His subsequent life was mainly one of retirement and parochial duty. His Christian Year is the most valuable contribution to religious poetry made in the present century, and has been received as a household treasure in families of every creed.

Croly.

George Croly, LL.D., 1780-1860, was a clergyman of the Church of England, and had a parish in London, where he attained celebrity as a preacher. His writings are very numerous, and hold a high rank. He succeeded about equally as a poet, as a writer of fiction, as an historian, as a literary editor, and as a religious polemic. In the long list of his works, there is scarcely one that at the time of its publication did not make its mark. His Catiline, in poetry, his Salathiel, in fiction, his George IV. and Edmund Burke, in history, fall but little short of being of the first class in their several kinds.

Ebenezer Elliott.

Ebenezer Elliott, 1781-1849, is familiarly known as "The Corn-Law Rhymer." Elliott was obliged in his youth to work at the forge in an iron foundry in Yorkshire, and had few advantages of education. But an inward prompting led him to the cultivation of letters by means of private study, and in his case, as in that of several others in like circumstances, the inspiration to verse first came from reading Thomson's Seasons.

His first ventures with the public were unsuccessful, being on topics similar to those which he had admired in Thomson. But Elliott was out of his element in subjects like these. Neither his education nor his rugged nature fitted him for gentle themes. The agitation for the repeal of the corn laws, and the light thrown upon the appalling hardships of the operatives, enlisted, however, his warmest sympathies, and furnished him with topics which called out all the resources of his strong and fiery nature. His Corn-Law Rhymes had the ring of the anvil. They received almost immediate recognition, and gave the author an established position as the Poet of the People.

Barham.

Rev. Richard Harris Barham, 1788-1845, a humorous writer, is better known by his assumed name of Thomas Ingoldsby. His chief work, the Ingoldsby Legends, a series of tales in verse and prose, appeared first in Bentley's Miscellany, and was received with general favor. None of these Legends probably had a wider circulation than the thoroughly laughable story of the famous Lord Tomnoddy. Mr. Barham was a friend of Sydney Smith, Theodore Hook, and other wits of the day.

Hood.

Thomas Hood, 1798-1845, was the prince of comic humorists, the most audacious and successful of punsters. Hood was son of a London publisher, and entered a counting-house to learn the mercantile business, but left it for the engraver's tool, and that in turn for the life of a man of letters. He became sub-editor of the London Magazine, and editor of the New Monthly, besides being a regular contributor to Punch.

His most successful humorous publications were Miss Killmansegg and Her Wooden Leg, Whims and Oddities, the Comic Annual, and Hood's Comic Album. The three most famous of his serious poems are the Dream of Eugene Aram, the Song of the Shirt, and the Bridge of Sighs. The two latter, apart from their beauty of sentiment, are probably unsurpassed in English verse in the wonderfully delicate interlacing of their rhymes.

No English writer has equalled Hood in the audacity with which he plays upon words. Still, even in his most fantastic pieces, there is always a deep undercurrent of genuine pathos.

Hook.

Theodore Edward Hook, 1788-1841, another humorist and wit of this period, was second only to Hood. Hook wrote, in all, thirty-eight works and pieces, besides editing the John Bull and the New Monthly, and contributing to other periodicals. "Many and multifarious, however, as are his volumes, he has left behind him no great creation, nothing that can be pointed to as a triumphant index of the extraordinary powers which he undoubtedly possessed.” — D. M. Moir.

James Montgomery.

James Montgomery, 1771-1854, holds a high rank among the poets of England. His devotional poetry especially has made a deep impression on the national heart, hardly inferior to that produced by the poetry of Cowper. He was for more than thirty years editor of the Sheffield Iris, a liberal journal. The last twenty years of his life were passed in retirement.

Montgomery is one among the instances in which Jeffrey made shipwreck in attempting to criticise poetical productions. The slashing reviewer broke the staff over Montgomery's Wanderer in Switzerland, but all in vain. Despite the maledictions and prognostications of the Edinburgh, Montgomery's poems gained steadily in favor, until the poet obtained his just rank by the side of Campbell, Rogers, and Southey.

Of his larger works the most important are the following: The Wanderer in Switzerland; The West Indies, a poem against the slavetrade; The World before the Flood. Besides these, he wrote a large number of short devotional pieces that have been adopted into the hymnals of all Christian denominations. Many lines and passages, such as "There is a land, of every land the pride," have passed into the common stock of the language.

Robert Montgomery.

Robert Montgomery, 1807-1856, is the author of a large number of works, chiefly poetical, on religious subjects. He enjoyed great temporary popularity as a poet, but is at present little read. His principal works, the Omnipresence of the Deity, and Satan, or Intellect without God, were the subjects of a scathing notice by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review.

Bernard Barton.

The Quaker

Bernard Barton, 1784-1849, is commonly known as Poet." He became a banker's clerk at the age of twenty-six, and continued in that position to the end of his life. He published no one extended poem, but a large number of detached pieces, mostly of a meditative character.

Thomas Haynes Bayly.

Thomas Haynes Bayly, 1797-1839, is widely known as a prolific writer of novels, tales, plays, and songs. He produced thirty-six pieces for the stage, and his songs are numbered by the hundred.

II. WRITERS OF NOVELS AND TALES.

Miss Mitford.

Mary Russell Mitford, 1786-1855, is among the best writers of tales descriptive of English country life and character. She evinced early in life a fondness for letters. Poetry was her favorite, but she was forced to turn aside to the every-day but more lucrative path of prose.

Her first important publication was Our Village, a series of delightful sketches of English rural life. It met with a very warm reception, and established the author's reputation. This was followed by American Tales; American Tales for Children; Belford Regis, or Sketches of a Country Town; Country Stories; and Atherton, a tale of Country Life. Upon the whole, Miss Mitford succeeds best as a describer of English country life and character. Her sketches are drawn from nature itself, and have an air of the most charming reality. No books of the kind are more thoroughly enjoyable by old and young. They have outlived nearly all the fashionable novels, their great contemporaries, and entered into the permanent treasure-house of English lit

erature.

Mrs. Opie.

Amelia Opie, 1769-1853, is widely known- almost as widely as Miss Edgeworth - for her popular Tales. She was the wife of the distinguished painter, James Opie. Her principal works are Father and Daughter, Adeline Mowbray, and Madeline. She wrote also a collection of shorter pieces, and a series of stories to illustrate the evil consequences of lying.

Mrs. Opie's fame as a novelist has diminished considerably of late years. In no sense can she be considered a creator of character. Her personages are not marked, the plot of the story is weak, and the moral purpose throughout is too palpable. Her strength lies in her power to dissect morbid conditions and passions of the human heart.

Lady Morgan.

Lady Sydney Morgan, 1789-1859, was in her day one of the leading celebrities of the literary world. She was chiefly known by her novels and her works of travel. The most popular of her novels is the Wild Irish Girl. Woman, or Ida of Athens, is noted as having furnished the occasion for one of Gifford's most ferocious reviews in the London Quarterly. Her two most celebrated works of travel are entitled respectively France and Italy. They are still interesting, and were read

with avidity at the time of their appearance, although Gifford kept up his fulminations against the authoress. Lady Morgan's style is sprightly, and her descriptions successful, but she was wholly incompetent to deal with the graver problems of life, such as she has touched upon in Woman.

Captain Marryat.

Frederick Marryat, 1792-1848, captain in the Royal Navy, and an able officer as well as writer, is universally considered the best English delineator of naval life and adventure. His principal works are The Pacha of Many Tales; Midshipman Easy; Japhet in Search of a Father; Peter Simple; Jacob Faithful.

Besides his strictly nautical novels, Captain Marryat wrote several novels and sketches descriptive of American life in the West. During the latter part of his life Marryat published a number of stories for the young, such as Masterman Ready. As a writer upon American manners, he attained but moderate success. It is only when he moves among scenes and persons thoroughly English that he displays his powers to the best advantage. His descriptions of incident and character are easy and vigorous, and extremely droll. The best of his works is Midshipman Easy.

George Borrow.

George Borrow, 1803 is a popular English writer and adventurer. He had a natural turn for acquiring by the ear a knowledge of living languages, and had in this way acquired, among other languages, a knowledge of that spoken by the Gypsies, and with it a great deal of curious information in regard to that singular people. He seems to have been a sort of Gypsy himself, so far as an irrepressible love of wandering and adventure is concerned; and he was employed, with wonderful success, in circulating the Bible in Spain at a time when no other agency seemed capable of doing the work. His works, partly fictitious, and partly autobiographical, giving an account of his labors in Bible distribution and of his adventures among the Gypsies, are exceedingly entertaining, and have been very popular. The titles of his principal works are: The Bible in Spain; Zincali, an Account of the Gypsies in Spain; Lavengro, the Scholar, the Gypsy, and the Priest.

Charlotte Bronté and her Sisters.

Three sisters, daughters of Rev. Patrick Bronté, rose suddenly to fame about the middle of the present century: CHARLOTTE, 1816

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