ENGLISH LITERATURE. 114 ENGLISH LITERATURE. to that which had been so potent in the Eliza- days, but which the calm, cosmopolitan culture of the eighteenth century had rather lulled to sleep. It is represented by the stirring war-songs of Thomas Campbell, a convert from classicism to romanticism; by the poetry as well as bv the novels of Scott; and by the Irish lyrics of Thomas Moore, far more genuine and worthy of preservation than the artificial decorativeness of his Oriental tales. Butthemost significant changewhich tookplace at the outset of the nineteenth century was the linkiiii age to the forgotten inheritance of England's past. The eighteenth century^had been practical, self-centred, self-sufficient; if it sought an example at all outside of itself, its ere turned toward Greece and Koine. The Middli ere to it a period of barbarism, unworthy the attention of serious men. Thus Addison went to Rimini, and, though he knew that the Malatesta had been lords there of old, while be notes a Roman inscription "still legible, though wrongly transcribed by Gruter," and dis- the learned Frabetti's ingenious conjec- ture on Trajan's pillar, had not a word to say . i the story oi Franceses,, which to modern minds is the chief interest of the place. The reversion to a realizing sense of continuity in English his- nd letters i< the' work mainly of two men — Scotl in life and Charles Lamb in literature. The work of the former becomes of great signifi cance under this aspect; it was be who, by his ring mediaeval life and "the spacious times of great Elizabeth" vivid and actual, made it possible for Carlyle and Ruskin to analy. em life by the method of contrast ; it is not too much to say thai he paved the way for that im- portant and far-reaching movement by which the Oxford Tractarians changed the religious atti- tude of England and turned men's fare- toward Catholic antiquity. His other great achievement is triumphant master} of a kind of litera- ture which bad "' n unsuccessfully attempted for two thousand years the historical novel. Lamb's as the revival of the older English litera- ture, neglected since the Restoration. Tl tti tude which made it possible for Pepys to call the Midsummer fight's Dream "the most insipid. ridiculous plai thai ever 1 saw in my life," which allowed Dryden to win applause by a frigid re casting of pest, and which culminated hi mi t decla rat ion of ' leorge III. that he found most of Shakespeare "verj poor stuff ," was ! rn ing en1 fmsiasm for the oi Elizabethan literature, which came upon In n.ration with all the freshness of a ry. In t his work he "a< ably assisted by lla/litt and Leigh Hunt, of whom the former icultj even surer and wider, if not more delicate, than Lamb's own. The in- ■ on ' he prose I ■ le of t heir in the direction of flexibility and grace, bl enson espe cialh i greal debt to frankly acknow ledges with his "though we are mightrj Bne fellow nowadays, i itt." her kind of pn I] nt in il ! way, t ime by De Quincey ami I .andoT. II had I con - quence t hough in a style which, at i's best, lacked only tl rbidden by the miiii I hia other int. it in the very highest place. This was the ornate and highly colored prose which in the earlier English we as ate with Jeremy Taylor Sir Thomas Browne — full of "purple patches' and sonorous Latinisms, and with a majesty and a melody that make the organ its nearest type in music. Living all through the heyday of the romantic triumph, Landor remained tin his poetry, at times of rare excellence, even more obviously than in his prose) calmly classical. "striving with none, for none was worth his strife," handing down a tradition which was worthily continued by Matthew Arnold, and bon ored in his old age by a singer in many ways so far from the classical temper as Swinburne. The great, reviews and magazines which came into existence early in the nineteenth century had an important effect upon its literary progress. The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802 to uphold the principles of the Whig Party, by Sydney Smith, Brougham, and Jeffrey, and the last-named soon became its editor. Its unspar- ing personal criticisms of contemporary- authors caused an immense sensation, and evoked Byron's 3C ithing retort entitled English Hards and Scotch Reviewers. The Quarterly Rerieu: was estab- lished in 1S09 as the Tory organ: the truculent Gifford was its first editor, and Southey, Scott, and Lamb among its contributors. Somewhat, later came Blackwood's Magazine, for which Wil- son wrote his Noctes Ambrosianir and Lockhart his trenchant criticisms. There was also the don Magazine, to which Lamb contributed his Essays of Elia and De Quihcey his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and for which Carlyle. Hazlitt. and Leigh Hunt also wrote. All these great periodicals exerted a powerful influence upon literature, especially in the development of the art of criticism, which has become almost an independent branch of letters. The first force of the philanthropic outburst, the realization of the brotherhood of man, which Wordsworth ami Shelley in their different ways had expressed, had partly spent itself, as Europe settled down after the revolutionary period of Sturm und Drang to a reaction in favor of orderly and settled life, comparable to that which was noted above as following the violent strug- gles of the Reformation and the Rebellion. One author of the second quarter of the century typi- fies hotter than any other the mood of placid self-satisfaction with tilings as they were — Ma- caulay. His spirit of cheerful optimism, his calm assurance that the existing British Consti- tution was the most wonderful product of the human intellect, and everything for the best in an admirably ordered world, represents fully the characteristic temper of the England of his younger days. Out of this complacency (lie na- tion had to he roused by a rude shock. The voice as of one crying in the wilderness, the trumpet tones which startled this easy-going England, weir those of Thomas Carlyle. it is difficult to realize how electrical was the shock of his sud- den onslaught, how the impetuous torrent of this rough eloquence carried away .ill the thoughtful youngei men of the day. s Byron a generation earlier had made a picturesque melancholy the fashion, SO Carlyle set his contemporaries to studying social questions, insisting that, they should realize the crying need for many and ion" reform in the slate of society which thej had fancied »o perfect. With the acceptance
