they were overtaken by the common lot of those whose pipe, sweet to contemporary ears, cannot carry its sound beyond themthat in each new generation “many a splendour finds its tomb, many spent fames and fallen mights;" it was the advent of such a radical change in the whole conception of art, as for a time-a long time-doomed some of the glories of English literature not only to neglect but oblivion. For the seventeenth and eighteenth-century poets, those of the sixteenth were blind and barbarous forces, gifted, some of them, with an elemental genius which made its way to greatness by sheer abundance, but lacking in all artistic capacity. That the magnificent craftsmanship which from Marlowe to Milton, through so many workmen and to such varied music, hammered out the instrument of blank verse, should receive no recognition, even from Dryden, is amazing; and not less so is the insensibility to the technical perfection of a host of lyrics unequalled in any language but the Greek. The want of proportion in design and of sobriety in treatment which characterizes most of the Elizabethan writers, and their generally imperfect handling of the heroic couplet in pieces of any length, blinded their successors to the mastery in their art

which they had attained through strenuous and self-conscious effort.

There is no such violent disruption of continuity in the new upheaval of poetry which marked the beginning of the nineteenth century; re-action, inevitable, though longdelayed, carried with it no consequences so grave to art and so unjust to individual artists. Brilliant, flexible and appropriate diction, a new sense of the beauty of what is decorous and controlled, and complete mastery over the vibrant weapon of satire, are the gifts bestowed on English literature by the race of poets over whom Pope was long acknowledged chief; gifts which she has never again suffered to drop from her hands. And the harbingers of a wider poetic vision in their return to the great masters of an early day were not unjust to those of a later; Dryden is caught up with Shakespeare and Milton in the famous ode wherein Gray lifts them from the plane of unimpassioned comment to the firmament of lyric adoration. If in after days Pope paid for his unequalled prestige by a share in the contempt which fell on his followers for doing ill what he did so well, his unpopularity was at least no result of ignorance, but rather of an excessive familiarity that dulled men's ears to the merit

Of these followers

which was its cause. Goldsmith survives through a genius which had a touch of the lyrical; but to the rest-the long inglorious list of Hills and Langhornes and Whiteheads who strove to uphold Pope's standard and govern in his namethe victory of the insurgent forces brought not so much defeat as annihilation; the scattered fire of Collins, Gray, and Chatterton, the gradual mine of Thomson and Cowper, the splendid cavalry charge of Burns, preceded an unopposed march of the great army which, advancing in separate columns under the leadership of Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron, secured the dominion of a new dynasty.

The work of their predecessors and contemporaries was of keen interest to the new poets, as the abundant extracts from their works testify. They, in their turn, are awaiting the verdict of their successors.

In arranging this book I have as far as possible placed the poets in order of time, contemporaries necessarily over-lapping, while the order of the extracts from their works has been determined, not by the date of the poem but of the poet who is the subject of it. There will, no doubt, be differences of

opinion regarding the selection; I have leaned rather to inclusion than to omission. Believing with Mr. Palgrave that "a book planned for popular use half defeats its own object by adherence to unfamiliar modes of spelling," I have modernized all the spelling except that of the first period, from Chaucer to Lydgate, where it cannot be done without affecting the verse. Living poets are excluded, but death has lately removed so many from among us, that the first generation of Victorian poets may be said to have taken their places on the bench with their illustrious precursors. The restrictions imposed on my selections by the operation of the law of copyright have fortunately been few; my thanks are specially due to Messrs. Macmillan for their liberality in giving me complete freedom of choice in those cases in which their interests are affected, viz., in the Poems of Mr. Matthew Arnold and Lord Tennyson. By this courtesy we are enabled to follow the noble procession without interruption from Chaucer to our own day, keeping still abreast of the strong and flowing tide of

"Poesy's unfailing river,

Which through Albion winds for ever,

Lashing with melodious wave

Many a sacred poet's grave."

J. M. S.