This is constructive criticism of the highest creative kind, and it blows-like a wind from the sea-through the clustering perversities of men too civil to be true.

iv.

More fortunate in his circumstances than some of Landor. the writers already discussed, though not uniformly fortunate in moulding them, and partly by the grace of his eighty-nine years-more deliberate in his literary methods, Walter Savage Landor succeeded in associating the reform of English prose with writings more composite than De Quincey's and more co-ordinate than Lamb's. The charm of Lamb resides in the occasional character of his essays, and in the skill with which he imparts an effect of improvization to the most delicate works of art. De Quincey and, to a large extent, Coleridge, as a critic and prose-writer, permitted themselves a wide expatiation. De Quincey especially, in the Confessions, helped to establish in England a form of egoistic literature, more recently differentiated as introspective, of which the Apologia pro vita Sua (1864) of John Henry Newman, cardinal, is the most eminent Victorian example, though closer analogues are found in Richard Jefferies's Story of my Heart (1883) and in some of the essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. Hazlitt's Table-talk and Wilson's Noctes are to be classed in the same kind, at the period of its loosest manipulation, and it is a striking tendency

to Landor's finer sense of form that he poured the resources of his scholarship into vessels of fixed capacity. With no less eloquence than his contemporaries, he resisted their tendency to overflow by composing his material to the conditions of his style. If Elia is identified with the release of English prose from the pomp and ritual of the Latinizers, and if the Opium-Eater decorated prose with Gothic ornaments and imagery, Landor's Imaginary Conversations add weight, order, and authority to the new liberties to be enjoyed.

Landor's biography is full of tales of his ungovernable temper and obstinate errors of judgment. Trinity, Oxford, sent him down in 1794, as University College sent down Shelley in 1811. He bought an estate in Wales, and left it under a cloud of public odium. He settled at Como for three years, and lampooned its dignitaries so rudely that he had to migrate in 1818. He wandered from Pisa to Florence, and bought a villa at Fiesole. Later, having quarrelled with his wife, he settled again in England, and lived at Bath for twenty years. In 1858 he returned to Italy, the magnet of many English poets, from Keats and Shelley in Landor's youth to Robert Browning in his old age. Browning's care was extended to him in that period, and he died at Florence in 1864. Something of the defects of his private character, which are otherwise irrelevant to his writing, may be discerned in his style. He is impatient, opinionated, and entêté in much that he says, while the very severity of his taste repels

many of his readers. Thus, at the present day, it is, perhaps, rather for his example as a master of English prose than for the intrinsic interest of his work that Landor is chiefly to be remembered. But these Conversations, at the same time, with the immense field of topics which they cover-political, artistic, literary, historical-, display a wealth of knowledge, sometimes misapplied, but never misprized, and preserve, throughout their dramatic variety, the best classical traditions of diction, rhythm and arrangement. They may be left unread in an age of less robust scholarship, but the formal beauty of their writing adds honour to English prose. And a brief reference is due to Landor's verses. He had not the self-abandonment of a great poet, but his sense of order and design assisted him to achieve a few masterpieces of poetic style; among these-and with feeling superadded-' Rose Aylmer', a lyric in eight lines, remains as an abiding possession.

There were minor writers in this class: the Radical Other Writers. journalist, William Cobbett (1762-1835), who started The Weekly Register; John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), of The Quarterly Review, politician and essayist, and editor of Boswell's Johnson; Isaac D'Israeli (17661848), another Quarterly reviewer, and a diligent scholar in trifles, best known by his Curiosities of Literature, and as the father of Lord Beaconsfield, and others enough to supply in abundance the needs of the growing number of newspapers and reviews. It is less unjust to pass these over in favour of their greater contemporaries than to omit to mention Henry

Hallam (1777-1859), whose Constitutional History of England has only recently been superseded, and whose Introduction to the Literature of Europe still has weight as an authority. In the same class of talent without genius-unlit talent, as it were-are to be counted William Mitford (1744-1827), historian of Greece, Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), historian of Rome, and George Finlay (1799-1875), the historian of Greece in her decadence. Contemporary with these was George Grote (1794-1871), a banker by trade and a radical in politics, who represented for a time the City of London in Parliament. His History of Greece, despite its many shortcomings in the light of recent research, is still a most valuable study, from the democratic point of view, of the rule of the Athenian Empire. Moreover, it is a popular history, and to this quality, perhaps, it owes its continuing renown.

Meanwhile, the historians proper were passed by another kind of writers, who, alike in poetry and prose, sought to revive the past, not in its actual happenings, but in its human possibilities. History itself, in its order as it happened, was not vivid enough for the ardent curiosity of the age; and, against the backgrounds emerging by the patient labour of historians, historical novelists and romanticists began to arrange their crowded scenes.

§7. SIR WALTER SCOTT.

To study original authorities, to weigh evidence, to The

romance

reject improbabilities, and to present the con- of clusions in a sober and painstaking narrative, did not history. comprise, accordingly, the whole duty of the historian. A condition precedent of his craft was the large view and the wide interest in human affairs as a whole. The historical sense was to be aroused from its long sleep in the eighteenth century, which Gibbon alone had interrupted, towards the close of the period, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), and which Edmund Burke, statesman and pamphleteer, had rebelled against in his published thoughts and reflections. The problem was not so much how history should be written-the conflict of schools came later, when the historians were at work-; the preliminary problem was to render the past attractive, to turn contemplation backwards, and to extend to the happenings of former times the sympathy and the active curiosity which were the mark of contemporary thought.

The impulse to escape from fixed conditions of a known and a limited horizon, which had driven Mrs. Radcliffe to old castles, Cowper and Wordsworth to the countryside, Wordsworth and Coleridge to the mysteries