history, to realise the existence of a man like Morris, who, in the midst of utilitarianism and money-making, could preserve so high an ideal of art in practical business, and could give his day-dreams so exquisite à form, and with results so real. He belonged actually to the great succession of medieval craftsmen who worked for the sake of their art, and used their science in behalf of beauty. He has left examples of his work all over the land, but none more enduring than his great narratives in verse. The Earthly Paradise is a point at which meet most of the great influences of the nineteenth century, where Keats and Coleridge and Scott join hands with Rossetti and Ruskin, while over all there is the presence of a natural medievalism of thought and manner, the instinct of one born out of due time.

§ 14. Mr. Swinburne is still with us; and the only other important member of the Pre-Raffaellite school who claims mention here is CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI, the younger sister of Dante Gabriel. Her life was even less (3) CHRISTINA ROSeventful than her brother's; like him, she lived in SETTI London, and, for the most part, in Bloomsbury. (1830-1894). Her original poems came out before her brother's, and were illustrated by him-Goblin Market in 1862 and The Prince's Progress in 1866. She wrote rather scantily and published at long intervals, never producing any long or important poem, but confining herself to lyric work, which, in process of time, became more and more religious. Time Flies (1885) and The Face of the Deep (1892) were devotional books, partly in prose partly in verse the second a very remarkable commentary on the Book of Revelation and by far her most bulky work. It will be easily understood that the Tractarian and Pre-Raffaellite elements are mingled very equally in Miss Rossetti's verse; her devotion to the more dogmatic aspect of Christianity and to the Anglican Church was strongly tinged by her brother's mysticism, and, in its turn, relieved that mysticism of its waywardness and lack of point. Her purely lyric gift was greater than her brother's, but she had not his complete mastery of divers kinds of music. Yet the faculty of melodious expression was hers in no small degree, and in this regard she contrasts very favourably with her only competitor as a poetess, Mrs. Browning. She had those purely poetic gifts in which Mrs. Browning was so deficient; she never allowed herself to wander into loose rhythm or false rhyme; the cast of her mind was reserved and restrained, and the good taste which her concrete religious ideas imposed prevented her from slipping into pitfalls which Mrs. Browning never avoided. But, when we have made this distinction, we have said everything. Lovers of poetry from its æsthetic side must necessarily admire Miss Rossetti as much as they shrink from Mrs. Browning; but those to whom poetry is first and foremost the vehicle of ideas and suggestions will find everything they require in Mrs. Browning,

ENG, LIT.

3 E

and in Miss Rossetti very little, if anything. Where Miss Rossetti's great importance lies is in the link she forms between the Pre-Raffaellite movement and religion. Her work connects the purely artistic and the purely spiritual side of imagination as no poet's work had yet done. Herbert, Crashaw, Keble, fell, when their spirits were highest, into artistic error; Miss Rossetti alone gives us religious poetry which is free from occasional want of taste and flaws of construction.

Other poets:

ARTHUR
HUGH
CLOUGH

(1819-1861).

§ 15. With Morris and the Rossettis our list of great poets closes. Of the more prominent minor poets of the period, the most interesting is, perhaps, ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, not merely because he was the subject of Arnold's Thyrsis, but for his genuinely poetic vein, whose produce was, however, rather unsatisfactory. He was born in Liverpool and educated at Rugby. Dr. Arnold was then head-master, and Clough, through all his school life, was the beau idéal of Arnold's conception of a schoolboy. The promise of Rugby was not quite fulfilled at Oxford. He went up with a Balliol scholarship, and took his degree with only a second-class in classics. He had taken a profound interest in the course of the Oxford movement, which had no doubt diverted him, as his friends thought, from his work. This religious preoccupation gave place to doubt, and doubt to a settled scepticism. In 1842 he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel; in 1843 he became a tutor of the college; in 1848, brooding over the sorrows of the outside world, he left Oxford for ever. He found little rest anywhere else. He stayed for short periods in Liverpool and Paris, then settled for a longer time in Rome, returned to England and became head of a London settlement called University Hall. From London he migrated to the American Cambridge; and finally, after a few years' work as examiner to the Education Department, he died at Florence in November, 1861.

Clough's genius was strangely dependent on seasons and circumstances. The moments of his life at which the external and internal conditions were alike favourable were few and brief. One of these followed his departure from Oxford. He then wrote the first in England, the others in Italy-his three most successful long poems, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) (originally Toper-na-Fuosich), Amours de Voyage (1849), and Dipsychus (1850). Another was the journeying time which preceded his death. Mari Magno, his last lines as life was ebbing, belong to this epoch. Yet he is also seen at his best in some of his occasional pieces, as in Qui laborat, orat and A London Idyll. Clough's place among poets is, however, undetermined; and it must be owned that the critics have by this time ceased to think much about it. The power of his strongest work is unmistakable; and Lowell, whose criticisms were often dangerously wide of the mark, may possibly have been right in his notion that, in the middle of the present century, the voice

He

of the nineteenth will speak most truly in his poems. handled the hexameter with fine effect in the Bothie and the Amours de Voyage, although not without blemish. His friend Arnold said of the Bothie that it has " some admirable Homeric qualities-out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity." But, with an undoubted gift for poetry and a real sense of humour, he was prone to error, and his work gives the reader, unless he is peculiarly constituted, a very limited pleasure. And, if Lowell's theory is possible, it is at least equally possible that in future years he will be remembered as Arnold's "Thyrsis" and as little more.

EDWARD

EDWARD ROBERT, EARL OF LYTTON, without any of his father's remarkable versatility, had in no small measure the gift of poetry. His place in history is higher than his father's; imperial concerns divided his energies ROBERT with poetry through well-nigh his whole life. After a EARL OF formal education limited to a short time at Harrow LYTTON (1831-18 and the University of Bonn, he entered the diplomatic service when only eighteen, as an attaché to the embassy at Washington. He succeeded in his profession, and in 1872, after doing his duty in nearly every European capital, was appointed minister at Lisbon. In 1876, while he was here, Disraeli unexpectedly offered him the viceroyalty of India. He accepted, and made the four following years memorable in imperial politics by the resolute thoroughness with which he pursued a line of conduct then bitterly assailed by the Opposition, but now apparently sealed and sanctioned by time. When Disraeli's ministry fell in 1880 he resigned, returned to England, and was created an earl. However, for seven years after, he had no public employment. In 1887 he was sent as Ambassador to Paris, where he died in 1891.

Lytton was a precocious versifier, and began to write with ease and fluency when he was only twelve years old. His first work was written before he went to Washington, but was not published until 1855. In this book, called from its opening poem Clytemnestra, he used the nom de plume of Owen Meredith, to which he adhered for some time afterwards. In 1857 came The Wanderer, a volume of lyrics, which was followed by Lucile (1860), and in 1861 he and his friend Julian Fane, under the pseudonyms of Edward Trevor and Neville Temple, brought out a volume called Tannhaüser, or The Battles of the Bards. In these early poems Lord Lytton showed that he had many of the best characteristics of a born poet, and had command of an unusual lyric gift. But his natural tendency was to imitation. In his first volumes he was obviously under the influence of Browning, while Tannhauser was simply a fair poem in the Tennysonian manner. Lucile was an interesting experiment to show that the story of a French novel could be powerfully told in English anapæsts; but the author lived to regret that he had made it. In spite of his plasticity he wrote

many pieces in which original genius could be seen struggling under its incumbrances; and the critics continued to hope. But two or three of the next volumes were almost avowed imitations-Serbski Pesme (1861), of Servian national songs; Orval, or The Fool of Time (1869), of the Polish writer Krasinski; and Chronicles and Characters (1868), of Victor Hugo's Légende des Siècles. All three, however, contain strong and splendid work. If it was Lytton's fate to be a mocking-bird, his song can at any rate please the most exacting critic. And at last his Fables in Song (1874) justified his friends' hopes; they showed a light and heat unborrowed of any sun, and received an honourable place among original verse. But his next publications, Glenaveril (1885) and After Paradise, or Legends of Exile (1887), showed no further improvement. The first, a kind of novel in metre, although abounding in excellence, did not take with the public; the second, a gathering of metrical legends and parables, is a small affair. A volume, suddenly closed by his death at Paris, appeared posthumously under the name of Marah; in the lyrics that compose it the voice of Heine is clearly to be detected. One more chance remained, even after death. In 1874 he had written, and until his death had not ceased to perfect King Poppy. In December, 1892, this was published, and proved to be the long expected triumph. In design, construction, execution, and aim, this fantastic poem attests the presence of the best powers of an original poet. Criticism has nothing but praise for it.

§ 16. In conclusion, the poetry of the Victorian era is certainly not the least remarkable contribution to English literature. The poets of the first period, Tennyson and Concluding Browning, whose life and work include almost the summary. whole of the nineteenth century, are the immediate successors of the great romantic poets, widening and extending their stream of art and thought. Matthew Arnold, belonging to the middle of the century, mingles romantic traditions with the traditions of classical form, proving that poetry, even within constrained limits, may still be fresh and natural and a living impulse in literature. Then, during the 'sixties and 'seventies, the Pre-Raffaellite school of art and poetry rises to importance, clothing its romantic mysticism and medievalism with a quaint perfection of form, insisting on the beauty of art and avoiding trivial solecisms. The new poetry augmented the flow which sprang from sources so different as Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats; it was the continuation of the great literary revolution of 1798. A hundred years have passed since the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, and the world has not yet seen the end of their influence. Their romanticism has received many additions. It has been chastened by a riper scholarship, a more just appreciation of form; but, without the reviving influence of their spirit we could have felt nothing of these benefits. The fact is that, by the discovery of nature in her dim struggle to escape

from the bondage of artificial thought, Wordsworth and his contemporaries laid the foundation of all succeeding poetry, and the secret of that excellence and variety which are the marks of Victorian verse is to be found in their work.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.