b. 1754. d. 1832.

the position which should be assigned to Thomas Moore. The name of George Crabbe, likewise, has not yet been commemorated. Both of these popular poets stand out prominently enough to claim particular notice: yet it may be questioned whether either of them is entitled to be ranked with those that have already been reviewed. If we are positively to receive them into the first order of their time, they might not only occupy the extremes in date, but exemplify some of the strongest contrasts that the age presented in respect of poetical character. The former was too unreal to be a great poet: the latter failed by attaching himself too closely to what was present and actual. Crabbe, beginning his career among the writers of the eighteenth century, and nearly akin to them in many features, might have begun our series. His Metrical Tales, describing every-day life, are strikingly natural, and sometimes very touching: but they are elevated by nothing of ideality, and warmed by no kindling b. 1780. thoughts. Moore, one of the most popular of our poets, d. 1851. will long be remembered for his Songs, so melodious, so elegant in phrase, and wedding his graceful sentiment so skilfully with glittering pictures. His fund of imagery is inexhaustible: but his analogies are oftener ingenious than poetical. He might be described, if we were to adopt a distinction often made of late, as having fancy rather than imagination. His Eastern Romances in "Lalla Rookh," with all their occasional felicities, are not powerful poetic narratives. Probably he is nowhere so successful as in his Satirical effusions of Comic Rhyme: for in these his fanciful ideas are prompted by a wit so gaily sharp, and expressed with a pointedness and neatness so very unusual, that it is a pity these pieces should be condemned to speedy forgetfulness, as they must be by the temporary interest of their topics.

Over the Minor Poets of that fruitful time, good as some of them are, we have not time to linger. Two or three must be hastily passed over, who might have deserved greater honour.

It would have been pleasant to do justice to the Tragedies of Joanna Baillie. These, with all their faults as plays, are noble additions to our literature, and the closest approach that has been made in recent times to the merit of the old English drama. After these, Coleridge's tragedy having already been named, would come the stately and imposing dramatic poems of Milman; Maturin's impassioned "Bertram ;" and the finely con

ceived "Julian" of Miss Mitford.

Samuel Rogers and William Lisle Bowles have given us much of pleasing and reflective sentiment, accompanied with great refinement of taste. To another and more modern school

belong Bryan Proctor, (better known by his assumed name of Barry Cornwall,) and Leigh Hunt: the former the purer in taste, the latter the more original and inventive; and both the authors of interesting and romantic poems. Walter Savage Landor could not be understood or fairly estimated without much detail. Some of his short lyrical and meditative pieces are very beautiful: his larger poems, both "Gebir," the "Hellenics," and the Dramas, sometimes delight but oftener puzzle us, by their occasional happiness of fancy and expression, their prevalent obscurity of thought, and their extraordinary want of constructive skill. The poems of Mrs. Hemans breathe a singularly attractive tone of romantic and melancholy sweetness; and, themselves owing large obligations to minds of greater originality, they have in their turn become the models, in sentiment, in phraseology, and in rhythm, for an incalculable number of pleasing sentimental verses. The ballads and songs of Hogg and Cunningham, some of which will not soon be forgotten, must merely be alluded to.

Nor can much more notice be bestowed on the Religious Poetry of the time. Except a few pieces which we have received from authors already named, it contains nothing of the very first order. The poems of Kirke White, all but posthumous, are more pleasing than original. There is much sweetness, but no great force, in the "Sabbath" of Grahame. By far the highest in this class is James Montgomery. He, besides some interesting poems of considerable bulk, narrative and descriptive, has written not a few pieces, devotional and meditative, which are among the best religious poems in our language. Pollok's "Course of Time," much over-lauded on its appearance, is the immature work of a man of genius who possessed very imperfect cultivation. It is clumsy in plan, tediously dissertative, and tastelessly magniloquent but it has passages of good and genuine poetry. Mention may also be claimed by the agreeable verses of Bishop Heber, and by the more recent effusions of Keble.

CHAPTER XV.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

SECTION THIRD: THE PROSE OF THE FIRST AGE.

A. D. 1800-A. D. 1830.

1. Novels and Romances-The Waverley Novels-Minor Novelists.-2. Periodical Writing The Edinburgh Review-The Quarterly Review-Blackwood's Magazine. -8. Criticism-The Essays of Francis Jeffrey.-4. Criticism and Miscellanies — Coleridge-Hazlitt-Lamb-Christopher North.-5. Social Science-Jeremy Bentham-Political Economy-History-Minor Historical Writers--Hallam's Historical Works.-6. Theology-Church History-Classical Learning-Scientific TheologyPractical Theology-John Foster-Robert Hall-Thomas Chalmers.-7. Speculative Philosophy (1.) Metaphysics and Psychology-Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. -(2.) Ethical Science-Mackintosh--Jeremy Bentham-(3.) The Theory of the Beautiful-Alison-Jeffrey---Stewart --- Knight- Brown --Symptoms of Further

Change.

1. AFTER the metrical works which adorned so eminently the period we are now studying, the next place belongs to the Novels and Romances in Prose, both for the kindred nature of the sorts of composition, and for the world-wide fame achieved in this field by Sir Walter Scott.

It had undergone, before he trode it, much of that purifying and elevation, of which symptoms were traceable in the last period we surveyed. In "Caleb Williams" and "Saint Leon," the strong but narrow mind of Godwin had sought to make the novel a vehicle for communicating peculiar social doctrines, with views of human life allied to the tragic. Miss Austen's scenes of every-day society had much merit for their cheerful reality, and their freedom from false sensibility. Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs," published before the earliest of Scott's historical romances, had the merit of first entering the ground, but occupied it very feebly. Above all, Miss Edgeworth, in her Irish Tales, showed how novel-readers may be at once interested and instructed, by acute and humorous common-sense, not only unalloyed by tinsel sentimentality, but little warmed by lofty feeling of any kind.

In 1814, Scott published his novel "Waverley ;" and the series, thenceforth carried on with surprising rapidity, attained from the beginning a popularity unexampled as well as fully deserved. The Waverley novels have been excepted, by many very cautious judges, from the sentence which banishes most works

of prose fiction from the libraries of the young. The exemption seems to be justified by two considerations. These are not mere love-stories, but pictures of human life, expressing broad and manly and practical views, and animated by sentiments which are cheerful and correct, if not very elevated or solemn; and, further, most of them exhibit history in a light which is extremely effective in exciting curiosity and interest, without degrading facts or characters to the sentimental level, or falsifying either of them beyond the lawful and necessary stretch of poetical embellishment.

This is no fit occasion for dwelling with close scrutiny on those celebrated works, or for endeavouring to analyze satisfactorily the sources of their power. They may safely be pronounced to be the most extraordinary productions of their class that ever were penned, and to stand, in literary value, as far above all other prose works of fiction, as the novels of Fielding stand above all others in our language except these. Nor need we pause over their usual looseness of plan, and their general carelessness and clumsiness of style, or animadvert on other faults which are perceptible to every reader. One point only may detain us for a moment: their felicitous union of familiar humour in the portraiture of characters, with force and skill in the excitement of all varieties of serious passion short of the intense. It might be hinted, also, that the former of these elements is decidedly the stronger, and that the combination of the two is most successful where that tone is allowed to predominate. This is especially the case with the few earliest of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," and "The Antiquary," vigorous and easy portraits of society and manners in Scotland during the eighteenth century. "Ivanhoe," on the other hand, coming nearest of all to being a reproduction of one of the versified romances, and admirably spirited in its pictures of chivalry and warfare, is feeble in those comic scenes where the writer's strength naturally lay. When he put on again his knightly armour, its weight impeded the freedom of his movements.

Among the friends of Scott who followed him into the wilderness of fiction, was his son-in-law and biographer Lockhart, whose novels are very strong in their representations of tragic passion. Such was also the variously-gifted Wilson, in whose "Lights and Shadows," the visionary loveliness of his poems shines out again with even an increase of pathos, but still without free scope for those powers of sarcasm and humour, which, as we are not forbidden to believe, he has elsewhere proved. A very few other writers of the class must be hastily dismissed, and many altogether neglected. Extremes in the tone of thought and feeling are exhibited by the despondent imagination of Mrs. Shelley, and

the coarse and shrewd humour of Galt. The faculty of close observation possessed by the author of "Marriage," forms, in like manner, a contrast to the union of reflectiveness with pathos which gave so much interest to Hope's "Anastasius." To that time, also, rather than to the more recent, belong the delightful scenes which Miss Mitford has constructed by elaborately embellishing the facts of rural English life.

2. In beginning to look further around us on the prose literature which adorned the early part of our century, we are arrested by a class of works which embraces, in one way or another, all its departments.

No fact is more curious or important in the literary history of the age, than the prominence which was acquired in it by the leading Reviews, and by those periodicals which, bearing the name of Magazines, and thus opening their pages to poetry and to prose fiction, yet were successful also in dissertations like those which were the only contents of the others. None but those who know accurately what Reviews and Magazines were, fifty years ago, can judge how vast is the rise in literary merit; how wonderfully the compass of matter has been extended; and how incomparably the little-heeded dicta of the older writers are exceeded in influence by the papers that appear in the modern periodicals, furnishing topics of talk or rules of thinking to the whole instructed community.

The high literary position of the periodicals was speedily secured, their combination of pure literature with political and social discussions settled, and their power founded beyond the possibility of overturn, by the earliest of the series, The Edinburgh Review. Commenced in 1802, it was placed, almost immediately, under the editorship of Francis Jeffrey, who conducted it till

1829.

In that earlier part of its history which is here in question, there were not very many distinguished men of letters in the empire that did not furnish something to its contents. At first it received aid from Sir Walter Scott, as well as from other famous persons who, like him, held Tory principles. But, becoming more and more decidedly the organ of the opposite party, and sometimes using very little reserve in its denunciations of those whom its conductors held to be in the wrong, it came at length to be supported chiefly, though never quite exclusively, by writers who, while most of them were linked by private friendships, concurred likewise in political opinion. Among these were several eminent statesmen of the Whig party: such as Lord Brougham, so energetic both in speech and writing, and so various in his