III. THE LESSER WRITERS OF THE PERIOD

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Division. The secondary literary product of this period, that is, the work other than the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and other than the novels of Jane Austen and Scott, may be divided into the work of journalists, poets, historians, essayists, and minor novelists. Some of it may be dealt with in a very summary way, not because it was unimportant, but because it does not need such ample attention in an age so crowded with better literary matter.

Journalism. This was the era of the founding of the great journals, the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's Magazine, 1802, 1809, 1817, respectively. The most important editor of the first was the critic, Francis Jeffrey; of the second was the biographer of Burns and of Sir Walter Scott, John G. Lockhart; and of the third was the Edinburgh professor, John Wilson, who usually wrote under the pen-name of "Christopher North." Thomas De Quincey was a distinguished contributor to these magazines. When we come to the essayists, we shall find him more than a mere journalist. The influential editors and encyclopedists, William and Robert Chambers and Charles Knight, also did their work within this period.

The lesser poetry. Of the lesser poets, Southey is to-day better known because of his association with Coleridge and because of his prose Life of Nelson, than for any of his verse, excepting for the very popular, but not very poetic, How the Water Comes Down at Lodore, which has been delightfully parodied by a more minor poet, Pennell, in How the Daughters Come Down to Dunoon. Southey attempted a grand epic, entitled Roderick, the Last of the Goths. It is a highly pictorial poem, but with not enough of shifting of scene and of variety

of incident, not enough even of probability or of general" human interest," to be a satisfactory epic.

Another minor poet was Samuel Rogers, who had printed his Pleasures of Memory as early as 1792. His Italy was first published in 1822. The Italy in the edition of 1830 was illustrated by J. M. W. Turner, the world's greatest landscape painter, and is perhaps better known for his illustrations than for the verses of Rogers. Leigh Hunt was both poet and essayist. His Abou Ben Adhem is recited everywhere; but his drama, The Story of Rimini, founded upon the story of Paola and Francesca as told by Dante, is the most finished work he produced. Mrs. Felicia Hemans belongs to this era. "The boy stood on the burning deck" and "The breaking waves dashed high" are lines beginning two of her poems very familiar to both English and American children. An even much more popular poetess, probably because she was even more romantic, was "L. E. L." or Letitia E. Landon. The Golden Violet is representative of her work. The leader of the school of wits and punsters in verse was Thomas Hood. No man was more clever at giving" the sinister wink with the dexter eye" than Hood. He was the author of some sentimental verse that, despite its sentimentality, has been useful in helping others to express right emotions; for example, such poems as The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirt. Thomas Campbell continued his "classical " poetic style begun in Pleasures of Hope, 1799, by writing Gertrude of Wyoming, published in 1809. But he will be known. forever for the poems which he wrote after he had surrendered to the more stirring elements of the romantic movement. few of those poems are Lord Ullin's Daughter, Ye Mariners of England, Battle of the Baltic, Lochiel, and Hohenlinden.

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Tom Moore's Lalla Rookh was printed in 1817. It is a ro

mance with an oriental setting, and has been popular for nearly the century which has passed since its publication. Moore is sometimes said to have done for Ireland in his songs what Burns did for Scotland; but the difficulty that stands in the way of accepting that statement is that Moore's Irish Melodies are lacking in "Irishism." They are excellent poems, in many instances; and as " poetry which does not get beyond the sound of the parish steeple " is not very good poetry, so the converse is also true, that poetry which has a universal appeal, and not a national one only, is good poetry; and since Moore is so widely read, one may conclude that Moore is all the better poet for not being merely national. Oft in the Stilly Night is one of his successes. He is worth much study as one of the foremost lyric poets among the minor writers of verse.

Walter Savage Landor was not and is not a popular poet, but scholars and poets themselves have delighted in him. Shelley loved to recite Landor's Gebir, a fantastic oriental tale, published in 1798. Of one of Landor's dramas, Count Julian, published in 1812, Southey made the extravagant statement, "No drama to which it can be compared has ever yet been written, and none ever will be, except it be by the same hand." The story of this drama suggests Shakespeare's Coriolanus.

History. Of the historians who lived in this early nineteenth-century period, the foremost were Henry Hallam, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Henry Hart Milman. Sir Charles Lyell might be mentioned as a historian of the earth's surface. His Principles of Geology, 1833, has done more than any one other book to further the study of geology, and it is written with the fineness of order and attractiveness of statement that make it a book which no student will fail to recognize as literature. The philosophic thought which Lyell put into his Principles has had a noteworthy effect upon the writing of

human history, too, for it has helped to teach men to be less impatient in their following of long processes and slow movements in history.

Although Macaulay was born in the year 1800, his historical works, excepting an occasional historical essay, were not in print until after 1837, and hence they will be reserved for discussion under the Victorian Era. Until our own day two works by Henry Hallam were found in the historical sections of every library, great or small, and were read as authoritative. They were filled with clear and cool thinking based upon immense knowledge. They have not been so much read since the coming into prominence of the “scientific school" of historians, during the last years of Hallam's century. His two great books were View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages and The Constitutional History of England. Henry Hart Milman, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, was a poet at the beginning of his career; but his best work was done in prose history. There is probably no book upon its subject so popular as Milman's History of the Jews, a work of very liberal scholarship. His six volumes of History of Latin Christianity are not only rich in details but authoritative. Milman also prepared an edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with notes which did what notes rarely succeed in doing, they made the book of more interest, even to the general reader.

The essay. Lamb. Charles Lamb is the famous name which begins the brief list of notable essayists of this short period. Lamb was ten years older than De Quincey, the latter being born in 1785. Neither Lamb nor De Quincey found an outlet for the best work which he could do until Lamb was forty-five years of age and De Quincey thirty-five. In that year, 1820, the London Magazine was founded, and much more freedom for critical writers in the expression of their original

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and personal ideas became possible than in the older and more staid magazines of Edinburgh. Lamb now wrote the Essays of Elia (pronounced by their author El-lia). Such essays as these are known as familiar essays," for they have the intimate tone of an easy-chair conversation carried on between the writer and a sympathetic friend. They are not written as dialogues, but they read almost like conversation with one side suppressed. They are whimsical and merry, brilliant and yet genuinely truthful, filled with that indefinable thing which is called charm; in fact, a sort of "divine chit-chat." Lamb was not acquainted with any language but the English. He was, for this reason, and for others such as temperament and as training in other things than languages, peculiarly English. But he was a city-Englishman. He loved London, not quite with the passion with which Johnson had regarded the great metropolis, but with all the deep glow of affection with which Wordsworth loved the country.

The first work to attract considerable attention to Lamb was the Tales from Shakespeare, in which he told the stories of the tragedies, and his sister, Mary Lamb, told the stories of the comedies of Shakespeare, in a manner most delightful, and remarkably true to the feeling of the plays. His two volumes of collected Letters have by no means the perfect construction of sentence or the unity of form of his essays, yet they are past describing in their wit, information, and sincerity, and even strength.

Lamb has been called a "belated Elizabethan." He was intensely interested in the literature, especially the drama, of the Elizabethan age, and was as independent and free in his own thought as the Shakespeareans were. Yet he was no worshiper of that time as if it were the only Golden Age, any more than he was of his own time. "Hang the age," he said, "I'll write for