The decay

of the

reader's taste never grates on the narrow edge of capacity. Most writers suffer their readers at one or another point to feel a sense of strain, as if the border had been reached-the shelving fringe of shingle dragged down by the disappointed tide. There is nearly always fulness in Scott; his writing, in technical phrase, is seldom or never 'thin'. And these qualities of swing and fulness carry him triumphantly through places where greater writers, from the point of view of style, fall short of the standard which they have set. Scott's confidence does not betray him, whether in tragic or humorous situations. One does not say of him, as of other masters, This is less or more Scott-like than that; the Wordsworthian note may elude Wordsworth, but Scott, except when health failed, never missed his aim in writing. Health is, perhaps, the just word. There is a gay and a radiant wholesomeness in the poems and novels alike which merges the errors of the craftsman in the joy of the inventor. Reading Scott, we return to a world in which sickliness is yet unborn; and, if some of the qualities are wanting with their defects, if love is less than fully impassioned, and contemplation not unfathomably deep, Scott's world is bright and true, and the hearts of living men and women beat beneath the properties of the novelist.

Instead of following the decline of historical romance historical through William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-82) and G. P. R. James (1799-1860), it would not be illogical in this context to pursue the growth of history through

novel.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59). Each was actively engaged in literature during the lifetime of Sir Walter Scott. Carlyle had been at work for ten years, seeking channels of self-expression, and Macaulay, whose essay on Milton appeared in 1825, was attached to The Edinburgh Review. But their influence belongs to a later period, and one observation only is due here to the greatness of Scott in connection with these two pairs of writers, that, while his method in history proved inimitable, his theory of history found historians to develop it. Of the imitators of his method it is to be said that Scott wrote for grown men, Ainsworth and James for schoolboys. This, at least, is the verdict of posterity, now that the early glamour has passed away, and the difference helps us to realize that what is vital and permanent in Scott is not the form which he chose, but the idea that underlay it. To visualize history and to apply to time past common canons of humanity were parts of the liberal aim which informed the method of Scott, but which Ainsworth and James subordinated to the meretricious claims of story and adventure. Rookwood, Jack Sheppard, The Tower of London, Windsor Castle, and Old St. Paul's, and the rest of the nine-and-thirty novels which Ainsworth produced in the intervals of editing Bentley's Miscellany and The New Monthly Magazine, stand high in their own class, but they are novels with a historical background, not history re-incarnated in romance. The same criticism applies with even stronger force to the works in this kind of

James, whose stereotyped opening with a solitary horseman' emerging across a plain hastened the decline of the genus; as Historiographer Royal to William IV, he wrote some creditable memoirs and biographies. But it is on other lines than theirs that Scott's lifework was continued by the prose-writers of the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Before pursuing this theme, we have to take up the thread of poetry which Scott deliberately broke in 1814, when he laid aside verse for prose. What was it that caused this change, in the popular author of Marmion, and of what sort were the writers into whose keeping poetry was transferred?

§ 8. IMAGINATIVE POETRY, II.

i.

HREE poets pre-eminently respond to the question

THREE

at the end of the last section: Byron, Shelley and Keats. The poets of the earlier period, born chiefly in the seventies of the eighteenth century, had been alike in the fortune of long life. Scott died in 1832; Lamb and Coleridge survived him till 1834, Southey till 1843, and Campbell till 1844. Wordsworth died at eighty in 1850, in the same year as Jeffrey, his reviewer; Thomas Moore in 1852; Samuel Rogers at ninety-two in 1855, and Landor at eighty-nine in 1864. They were all men of ripe years. Fate did not grudge them time to fulfil the tasks they undertook.

groups.

They all saw the birth and death of Byron, Shelley Two and Keats. Rogers's ninety-two years were longer than the sum of the lives of these three combined. He was twenty-five when Byron was born, and outlived him thirty-one years. Keats died at twenty-five, and Shelley at just under thirty. All the lifetime of the three fell between 1788 and 1824.

These facts and figures are not cited for the mere interest of the dates. They are important to criticism,

too. Sorting the names into two groups, as of the elder men who died late and of the younger men who died early, it is to be noted at once that Scott, when he resigned poetry, resigned it into the younger men's keeping. In 1812 there were two poets who counted', the author of Marmion in Edinburgh, and the author of Childe Harold in London. In 1814 there was only one Scott had started the Waverley' novels.

Meanwhile, what had become of the older group, and of Wordsworth especially, with his Excursion in 1814? Judged by the test of popularity, his brilliant junior had passed him. It pleased Byron to pour scorn on the older and more placid writers, and, in competition with Byron's wild tales, these were left hopelessly behind. In a sense, they did not bid for the popularity of a season; it was not to no purpose that they had time on their side. Scott himself took the longer road, in preference to disputing with Byron for the first place in the field in which he had been first in time. Another question suggests itself, to which no clear reply can be given. This group of three young poets, who wrote and ceased within the lifetime of the youngest of the older group,-how far is a critic competent to pass judgment on their work? was obviously unfinished. They are, in Shelley's own phrase, heirs of unfulfilled renown. The broken columns appeal to time to reserve judgment for eternity. Yet, plainly, something must be said. What we miss is not so much the poems which they did not write (it has been said that literature could spare all

It