Earl of Lytton—Humorous Verse-Writers—Poetesses 253
CHAPTER VII
THE NOVEL SINCE 1850
Changes in the Novel—Miss Brontë—George Eliot—Charles Kingsley—The Trollopes—Reade—Minor Novelists—Stevenson 317
CHAPTER VIII
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
Limits of this and following Chapters—Bentham—Mackintosh—The Mills—Hamilton and the Hamiltonians—Mansel—Other Philosophers—Jurisprudents: Austin, Maine, Stephen—Political Economists and Malthus—The Oxford Movement—Pusey—Keble—Newman—The Scottish Disruption—Chalmers—Irving—Other Divines—Maurice—Robertson 342
CHAPTER IX
LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND LETTERS
Changes in Periodicals—The Saturday Review—Critics of the middle of the Century—Helps—Matthew Arnold in Prose—Mr. Ruskin—Jefferies—Pater—Symonds—Minto 378
CHAPTER X
SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE
Increasing Difficulty of Selection—Porson—Conington—Munro—Sellar—Robertson Smith—Davy—Mrs. Somerville—Other Scientific Writers—Darwin—Vestiges of Creation—Hugh Miller—Huxley 404
CHAPTER XI
DRAMA
Weakness of this department throughout—O'Keefe—Joanna Baillie—Knowles—Bulwer—Planché 417
CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION
Survey and Analysis of the Period in the several divisions—Revolutions in Style—The present state of Literature 425
INDEX 471
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The period of English literary history which is dealt with in the opening part of the present volume includes, of necessity, among its most illustrious names, not a few whose work will not be the subject of formal discussion here, because the major part of it was done within the scope of the volume which preceded. Thus, to mention only one of these names, the most splendid displays of Burke's power—the efforts in which he at last gave to mankind what had previously been too often devoted to party—date from this time, and even from the later part of it; while Gibbon did not die till 1794, and Horace Walpole not till 1797. Even Johnson, the type and dictator at once of the eighteenth century in literary England, survived the date of 1780 by four years.
Nevertheless the beginning of the ninth decade of the century did actually correspond with a real change, a real line of demarcation. Not only did the old writers drop off one by one, not only did no new writers of utterly distinct idiosyncrasy (Burns and Blake excepted) make their appearance till quite the end of it, but it was also marked by the appearance of men of letters and of literary styles which announced, if not very distinctly, the coming of changes of the most sweeping kind. Hard as it may be to exhibit the exact contrast between, say, Goldsmith and men like Cowper on the one side and Crabbe on the other, that contrast cannot but be felt by every reader who has used himself in the very least to the consideration of literary differences. And as with individuals, so with kinds. No special production of these twenty years may be of the highest value; but there is a certain idiosyncrasy, if only an idiosyncrasy of transition—an unlikeness to anything that comes before, and to anything, unless directly imitated, that comes after—which is equally distinguishable in the curious succession of poetical satires from Peter Pindar to the Anti-Jacobin, in the terror-and-mystery novels of the school of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, in the large, if not from the literary point of view extremely noteworthy, department of politics and economics which in various ways employed the pens of writers so different as Moore, Young, Godwin, Priestley, Horne, Tooke, Cobbett, and Paine.
Giving poetry, as usual, the precedence even in the most unpoetical periods, we shall find in the four names already cited—those of Crabbe, Cowper, Blake, and Burns—examples of which even the most poetical period need not be ashamed. In what may be called the absolute spirit of poetry, the nescio quid which makes the greatest poets, no one has ever surpassed Burns and Blake at their best; though the perfection of Burns is limited in kind, and the perfection of Blake still more limited in duration and sustained force. Cowper would have been a great poet of the second class at any time, and in some times might have attained the first. As for Crabbe, he very seldom has the absolute spirit of poetry just mentioned; but the vigour and the distinction of his verse, as well as his wonderful faculty of observation in rendering scene and character, are undeniable. And it is not perhaps childish to point out that there is something odd and out of the way about the poetical career of all these poets of the transition. Cowper's terrible malady postpones his first efforts in song to an age when most poets are losing their voices; Crabbe, beginning brilliantly and popularly, relapses into a silence of nearly a quarter of a century before breaking out with greater power and skill than ever; Burns runs one of the shortest, if one of the most brilliant, Blake one of the longest, the strangest, the most intermittent, of poetical careers. Nor is it superfluous
