DE QUINCEY (1785-1859) Thomas De Quincey was born at Manchester in 1785. He was a precocious boy, and when in 1803 he went up to Oxford University he took with him not only the ability to converse with ease in Greek and Latin, but a considerable experience with modern life as well,-experience gained during a runaway sojourn in Wales and a year's existence in the slums of London. He left Oxford in 1808 to begin the study of law; in 1809, however, he leased Wordsworth's old home at Grasmere, and began his career as a man of letters. Here he remained till 1820, when he went up to London to write for the London Magazine, to which during 1821 he contributed the Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In 1828 he moved again, this time to Edinburgh, where he wrote for Blackwood's and the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. He died in Edinburgh towards the close of 1859, after half a century of arduous and persistent journalistic work.

De Quincey's fame would be greater had he done less discursive and trivial work; the Confessions, however, have placed him among the masters of English prose. This, his most characteristic production, is in part a record of his experiences with opium, and in part a chronicle of his early years. He first tasted opium during his residence at Oxford; by 1819 he was in complete bondage to the drug. The Suspiria de Profundis, in which the eloquent prose of the Confessions becomes even richer and more exotic in its splendor, is also associated with opium, for it is here that De Quincey pictures with poetic magnificence the phantasmagoric creations of his dreams. It is in large part this stylistic richness that makes De Quincey's work memorable; his is thoroughly romantic prose; prose that could have been written only during the early years of the nineteenth century, or, with some differences of language, in the seventeenth. To the writers of Elizabethan England De Quincey undoubtedly owed much; the rarest qualities of his style, however, he imitated from nobody.

De Quincey's chief works are accessible in many editions; an excellent collected edition is that by David Masson (A. and C. Black). Lord Morley's Life (E. M. L.) is a good biography.

LANDOR (1775-1864)

Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick, in January, 1775. After studying at Rugby he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1793, only to leave one year later under discipline because of the exuberance of his republican principles. His early verses were published in 1795; in 1798 came Gebir, his first work of great importance. His enthusiasm for liberty prompted him in 1808 to raise and equip a regiment in the Spanish army that was fighting Napoleon; his military career, however, was short. In 1811 he published, anonymously, his drama Count Julian. In 1821 he removed to Italy; three years later appeared the first series of Imaginary Conversations. These, with the

Hellenics (1847), are the works on which Landor's fame rests most securely; though his later years were unusually productive, he never wrote more nobly than in these two collections. From 1835 to 1858 he lived in England, somewhat embittered by domestic disturbances; in 1858 he returned to Italy, where he lived until his death in 1864.

To one who reads chiefly the Hellenics and Imaginary Conversations, Landor appears restrained and austere, and very unlike the enthusiastic Romanticists who were his contemporaries. But it is largely because of his lofty dignity and restraint that Landor is significant. These qualities he found in the classical literature from which came his inspiration; no English poet save Milton has done more to bring over into English literature the temper and ideals of the genuine Classicism that had been so misrepresented by the poets of the eighteenth century. That Landor, writing from 1798 to 1840, should have been able to do this, indicates at once how far removed he was from the majority of his contemporaries, and how great were his own powers.

Landor's Complete Works have been edited by C. G. Crump (Dent and Co.); selections from the Conversations are in the Camelot Series; from the poetry, in the Canterbury Poets (Parker P. Simmons). The best Life is by Sir Sidney Colvin, in the E. M. L.

TENNYSON (1809-1892)

The year 1809 was good to England, for it gave her Gladstone, Darwin, Edward Fitzgerald, and Alfred Tennyson. The last was born in the little village of Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where his father was rector. The family was a large one, consisting of eight brothers (of whom Alfred was the fourth) and four sisters, and poetry ran in it, for they nearly all wrote verse, and Charles and Frederick gained some reputation as poets. The Tennysons used to spend their summers at Mablethorpe, where the "league-long rollers" of the North Sea thunder in upon flat beaches; Tennyson's many and varied descriptions of waves are to be traced back to this early acquaintance with the ocean, just as his landscapes frequently recall the rolling wolds of the Lincolnshire country. Charles and Alfred went together to Louth Grammar School, but after 1820 were taught at home by their father.

In 1827 a Louth bookseller printed a little volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers, the authors being Charles and Alfred Tennyson. These juvenilia make a somewhat amusing parade of schoolboy learning, and are pervaded by an assumed melancholy, in which the great contemporary influence of Byron is evident. Alfred was an ardent admirer of Byron. He has told us how he was affected by the news of Byron's death in 1824: "I thought the whole world was at an end; I thought everything was over and finished for everyone that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out alone and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone." In 1828 the two brothers went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where they formed friendships with several men later

well known; in particular, the intimacy of Alfred with Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, was to bear the noblest poetic fruit. He continued writing verse, and in 1829 gained the Chancellor's medal with his poem Timbuctoo, in which now and then we catch the first faint echoes of the sonorous roll and melody of the Tennysonian blank verse. He left Cambridge in February, 1831, without taking a degree, recalled to Somersby by the illness of his father, who died in March. While yet at Cambridge he had published the first volume bearing his own name, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, containing among much that was merely pretty and too sugary some really good things like Mariana and The Poet. Late in 1832 appeared another volume of Poems, wherein the presence of such things as The Lady of Shalott, Oenone, The Palace of Art, and A Dream of Fair Women foreshadowed the coming greatness.

In 1833 Arthur Hallam died in Vienna. The blow fell heavily on Tennyson, and for ten years he published no more poetry. The years were far from wasted, however, for he was busy constantly revising old verse and writing new. The result of this steady labor of self-criticism was seen in the two volumes of Poems of 1842. The more varied interest, the broader human sympathy, and the perfect artistry of this work made Tennyson's fame secure. Many of the poems of 1832 were reprinted in their present form, and Tennyson never wrote finer poetry than in Ulysses and Morte d'Arthur. One result of the public recognition accorded to these volumes was the granting to the poet in 1845 of an annual pension of two hundred pounds. The Princess appeared in 1847, though the lyrics which constitute one of its chief beauties were not added till a third edition. The year 1850 was, as Hallam Tennyson says, the "golden year" of Tennyson's life. He published In Memoriam, upon which he had been working for sixteen years; he married Emily Sellwood, with whom he had been in love for years, but whom he had been unable to marry because of comparative poverty; and on the death of Wordsworth he was made Laureate. Three years later the Tennysons moved to the house in Farringford, in the Isle of Wight, which was their home for the rest of their lives. Maud came out in 1855, and four years later the first four of the Idylls of the King; four more were added in 1869, one in 1871, one in 1872, and the series was completed in 1885. In 1864 were printed Enoch Arden and many of the English idylls. Late in life Tennyson turned to the writing of poetic drama, writing a trilogy on English history, Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1877), and Becket (1884), of which the last was acted with great popular favor by Henry Irving. Two or three other plays also made acting successes. The last years of Tennyson's life were full of travel, of work, and of honor. He was raised to the peerage in 1884, an honor which he accepted as a tribute to literature rather than to himself. He died in 1892, and was buried in Westminster Abbey beside his friend Browning.

Tennyson has been called the representative poet, and In Memoriam the representative poem

of the Victorian era, because it expresses the compromise between religion and science which the era worked out. Tennyson accepts the nebular hypothesis, the theory of evolution, and other teachings of modern science, but succeeds in reconciling them with his faith in a benevolent and loving Power which makes all things work together for good. Along other lines, too, Tennyson best represents the thought of England during his period. He is thoroughly and typically English in his political ideas, standing conservatively for sobriety in freedom against what he considered the tendency to rash excess across the channel. As poet laureate he wrote a good deal of patriotic verse glorifying England and her great men. Although the English idylls contain many pictures and figures from common life, Tennyson was by temper aristocratic, never, for instance, speaking for humanity as do Burns and Wordsworth.

Tennyson is a good, if not a great, story teller, but the idyll is the form he manages most successfully, a form in which he can use ornament freely, and upon which he can bestow his remarkable power of detailed description. The Idylls of the King and The Princess are full of superb descriptive passages, and no poet has been more successful in providing a suitable setting and creating a proper atmosphere for his narrative. In sheer artistry Tennyson is perhaps the first of English poets. In majesty and harmony his blank verse rivals that of Milton, and has a flexibility and variety surpassing Milton's. In lyric verse, too, Tennyson is one of the supreme artists, exhibiting a felicity of phrase and a command of poetic device which at times, as in The Bugle Song, rise to pure magic.

The new Works of Tennyson (Macmillan 1913), with a memoir by the poet's son and Tennyson's own notes, is the best single-volume edition. The authoritative life is the two-volume Memoir by Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson (Macmillan). Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life, by Stopford Brooke (G. P. Putnam's Sons) is a good commentary.

BROWNING (1812-1889)

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, on the outskirts of London, three years after Tennyson. Of formal schooling the boy had not much. A few years in a private school near home, some private tutoring, a few months in the University of London-this sums it up. His real education was gained in the family circle. Robert Browning, Senior, a clerk in the Bank of England, was scholarly and artistic by temperament, a good linguist, and the possessor of a large and curiously varied library. Young Browning was an omnivorous reader, and in his father's library he made the acquaintance of many of the odd, obscure people who figure so largely in his poetry. His mother, moreover, was something of an artist, and a good musician, and the boy inherited her love of art and music. An understanding of Browning's family life, of the manner of his training, and of the nature of his reading, makes

more intelligible the curious character of his knowledge and his subject matter. A fact of first rate importance in Browning's life was his chance introduction to Shelley's poetry. Shelley's influence, to which Memorabilia bears strong witness, is seen in Browning's first published poem, Pauline (1833); this first effort evinces that interest in soul-development and personality which the poet exhibited all through his life. Pauline was followed in 1835 by Paracelsus, a study of the mediæval philosopher; though not widely read, it made for Browning friends in literary circles. It was through the encouragement of one of these friends, Macready the actor-manager, that Browning wrote his first play, Strafford, produced without much success in 1837. A visit to Italy in the next year opened to Browning's eyes the fascination of that country, which from that time on he loved almost as devotedly as he did England. The journey bore fruit in Sordello (1840), a long study of an obscure Italian poet, so difficult in style that it put a blight upon Browning's reputation which took years to remove. From 1841 to 1846 appeared, in cheap pamphlet form, a series of plays and poems called Bells and Pomegranates; in two of the numbers, Dramatic Lyrics (1843) and Dramatic Romances (1845), are some of Browning's finest short poems. Of the plays only A Blot in the 'Scutcheon was performed at the time, and that failed, partly on account of a quarrel between Browning and Macready.

În 1845 Browning became acquainted with Elizabeth Barrett, who had already proved herself to be the most gifted of all English woman poets. In spite of the fact that she had been for years an almost hopeless invalid, and without the consent of her savagely selfish father, Browning persuaded her to marry him in 1846, and the two went at once to Italy, which was their home for the fifteen years of their married life. History has recorded no marriage more ideal, and the perfect union of heart and mind and soul is revealed in several fine poems of Browning's, and with superlative beauty in Mrs. Browning's sequence of Sonnets from the Portuguese. After Mrs. Browning's death in 1861 her husband returned to England. His life thenceforth was uneventful, marked only by annual visits abroad, and the publication of a very large number of volumes. He died in Italy, but his body was brought back to England and laid in Westminster Abbey.

Browning's work falls naturally into three periods, the first ending in 1840 and containing the poems already mentioned. The publication of Pippa Passes in 1841 as the first number of Bells and Pomegranates marks the beginning of his finest work, which includes the two series of dramatic monologues entitled Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Persona (1864), and his masterpiece, The Ring and the Book (1868-69). The work of the last period from 1870 on, large in extent, and showing no diminution in vigor, is mainly philosophical and analytical, is inferior in beauty, and exhibits the poet's eccentricities in their worst form.

Browning's most characteristic contribution to literature is the dramatic monologue, a form

which he practically invented and perfected. It gives him abundant opportunity for the display of his marvellous power of dramatic characterization, and for the use of the grotesque in material and method which distinguishes him from all other poets. At the same time he has won by a large number of fine lyrics a place as one of the great lyric poets of his country. All Browning's work bears the impress of a tremendously virile personality. His very difficulties are stimulating to a thoughtful reader. His robust optimism, based on a profound faith in the power of love, human and divine, and a profound belief in God and immortality, and summed up in the lines

"God's in his heaven,

All's right with the world,"

must always be a tonic force upon his readers.

Useful

The Life by G. K. Chesterton (E. M. L.) is entertaining and suggestive. Longer and more detailed biographies are those by Mrs. Sutherland Orr (new ed., Houghton Mifflin), and W. H. Griffin and H. C. Minchin (Macmillan). aids to study are Mrs. Orr's Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning (Bell) and Berdoe's Browning Cyclopedia (Macmillan). Complete single volume editions are the Globe (new ed. 1915, with some material not readily accessible elsewhere, Macmillan) and the Cambridge (Houghton Mifflin).

FITZGERALD (1809-1883)

Fitzgerald was beyond cavil a genius, and there must have been attraction of personality in a man who could win and keep such friends as Tennyson, Thackeray, and Carlyle. But he drifted through life like a derelict, aimless, irresolute, and obscure. After graduating from Cambridge in 1830 he lived the life of a secluded country gentleman, publishing from time to time books which attracted little attention. The best of his work is translation: Six Dramas of Calderon, the Spanish playwright, and translations from Æschylus and Sophocles. The translation, or rather, paraphrase of Omar Khayyam's Rubáiyát was first printed in 1859; so few of the first edition of two hundred copies were sold that the remainder were marked down to a penny and placed in a second-hand book stall. Here the book was discovered by Rossetti and Swinburne, who spread the knowledge of its beauty through their set. The circle of readers gradually widened, and Fitzgerald made changes through three subsequent editions; it is the fourth edition, of 1879, which is now generally read. There have been other translations of the Rubâiyât more faithful to the letter, but no other has so perfectly rendered the spirit, or has, like this, made a profound impression on English literature. In Fitzgerald old Omar found an ideal interpreter; for his philosophy, epicurean, agnostic, and fatalistic, yet tinged with a wistful longing that will not down, was perfectly attested to the key of the modern poet's temperament.

The definitive edition of Fitzgerald's works is edited by F. Bentham and E. Gosse (7 vols., Mac

millan). His interesting letters are edited by W. A. Wright (Macmillan). The best life is that by A. C. Benson (E. M. L.)

CARLYLE (1795-1881)

Thomas Carlyle was born in the Scottish village of Ecclefechan in 1795. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, where he spent four rather unsatisfactory years, he had some difficulty in getting started in life. The ministry, law, and teaching he rejected one after another; finally he settled down to be a man of letters, and began writing for reviews and encyclopædias. From 1828 to 1834 he lived with his bride, Jane Welsh Carlyle, at Craigenputtoch, where, in a "solitude almost Druidical" Carlyle wrote various critical essays, and his most original work, Sartor Resartus. At Craigenputtoch Carlyle and Emerson first met, and began their life-long and intimate friendship. Sartor appeared in Fraser's Magazine, London, during 1833 and 1834. After 1834 Carlyle was a resident of London. In 1837 he published The French Revolution, and in 1841 Heroes and HeroWorship, a series of essays that had been delivered as lectures before London audiences. came Past and Present, and in 1845 the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, all of them books that won many readers in England, and, thanks to Emerson's services, found even larger audiences across the Atlantic. By 1845, however, Carlyle's health was badly shaken, and his next great work, the History of Friederich II, did not begin to appear till 1858. Carlyle had suffered from dyspepsia during his college course; he was a sick man much of his life. When in 1866 his wife died, the shock, added to his chronic suffering from disease, "broke his life in two." Never again did he do anything which added to his fame; some of his later writings, harsh protests against the times in which he lived, might better have been left unpublished. In 1881 he died.

In 1843

It was Carlyle's fortune to be out of sympathy with his age. He wasted much energy railing against science and democracy, the two most characteristic developments of the nineteenth century. To him science appeared only as the destroyer of wonder and worship; democracy, "government by the worst," was the doom of hero and king. But despite this hostility to the contemporary world, Carlyle accomplished much. His History of the French Revolution, though criticized for its lack of understanding of the French temper, is a brilliant picture of a nation-wide upheaval; the Friederich II is epic in its scope, and of astonishing accuracy. In the Cromwell he painted a fulllength portrait of the Protector, and did much to convince England of his sincerity. And in Heroes, Past and Present, and Sartor, he urged the claims of the spirit and preached the gospels of labor and self-sacrifice with superb eloquence. If in some of his work Carlyle's voice was too strident and his recriminations too general, in these, his noblest utterances, he spoke with all the fervor and solemn passion of a Hebrew prophet.

The best brief biography of Carlyle is by Garnett, in the Great Writers series. Editions of his

better known works are numerous; MacMechan's editions of Sartor and Heroes, in the Athenæum Press series (Ginn), are inexpensive and complete in every desirable feature.

RUSKIN (1819-1900)

John Ruskin, the son of a wealthy London winemerchant, was born in February, 1819. His formal education did not begin till he was fifteen; by that time, however, he had gained for himself a knowledge of literature and art so great as to make the teaching of an English school seem elementary. His university course at Christ's Church, Oxford, was distinguished by his winning the Newdigate Prize for poetry; it was also during his undergraduate days that his boyish love for Turner's landscapes developed into the enthusiasm which prompted Modern Painters (184360). This, the first of Ruskin's great books on art, is ostensibly a defence of Turner against the charge of painting unnaturally; in fact, however, it is a survey of many schools and types for the purpose of determining the bases of artistic effects. In 1849 appeared the Seven Lamps of Architecture; in 1851-53 The Stones of Venice. In these three, his most important books on art, Ruskin propounded and defended his thesis that a nation's art, particularly its architecture, is a sure index of its moral and social condition, and that great art is impossible unless it rests back upon national greatness. Interested in the improvement of art, and considering it the result of social conditions, it was natural for Ruskin to turn his attention away from the result to the cause; after 1860 he was no longer primarily an art critic, but a social reformer. He heralded his appearance in this new field by publishing in 1860 Unto This Last, a collection of papers on political economy; Fors Clavigera (1871), written in the form of letters to working men, indicates how radical were the changes proposed by Ruskin, and how impractical many of his views. Ruskin believed himself to have failed in his attempts to better the condition of the English working classes; certainly his influence in this field was much slighter than it had been in the domain of criticism. He died in 1900, leaving as his last work a delightful volume of reminiscences, Præterita, written at the suggestion of his American friend, Charles Eliot Norton.

To the student of to-day Ruskin is significant chiefly on account of his style. That he did much to establish the criticism of art on a substantial philosophical basis is indisputable, as is the fact that in his sociological writings he was moved by the noblest aspirations and ideals. But it is after all for his magic power over words that Ruskin is remembered, for his brilliant descriptions, his full, rich, and almost lyrical rhythms, and for a power of organization that is not always a concomitant of the romantic temperament.

The great edition of Ruskin is that of Cook and Wedderburn (George Allen & Co.); less expensive editions of such of his works as are out of copyright are numerous. The best biography is W. G. Collingwood's (2 vols., Houghton Mifflin);

Harrison's, in the E. M. L., is briefer, and trustworthy.

MACAULAY (1800-1859)

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay, was born in October, 1800. His precocity as a youth has been the subject of many an anecdote; his memory was of the sort which enabled him to learn by heart, and without undue exertion, all of Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost. In 1818 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he was later elected Fellow. When he was twentyfive years old he began his career as journalistic critic by publishing in the Edinburgh Review his essay on Milton. Immature in judgment, it was nevertheless, startlingly readable, and made its author known and popular at once. Five years later Macaulay found himself virtually destitute, his family fortune exhausted, and his fellowship expiring. At this juncture he was sent to the House of Commons by Lord Lansdowne, who under the old system controlled the seat for Calne. Macaulay found the House perplexed by the problems of Parliamentary reform, and although the passage of the Reform Bill might have deprived him of his seat, he gave himself enthusiastically to the support of the measure, and won a marked success by his speeches. From 1834 to 1838 he was in India as a member of the Supreme Council. On his return to England he once more entered Parliament, and in 1839 was appointed Secretary for War. His tenure of office ended in 1841 with the fall of the ministry; the next year he published the Lays of Ancient Rome, and in 1843 the collected Essays. From this time to the end of his life Macaulay's interests were chiefly in literature. In 1848 he published the first two volumes of his History of England; nine years later his elevation to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley was symbolic of the esteem his literary accomplishment had won him from the nation at large. He died in December, 1859, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The great source of information about Macaulay is Trevelyan's Life and Letters (Harper's); Morison's Life in the E. M. L. is briefer. Numerous editions of his works are accessible; the Albany (Longmans, Green, and Co.), is complete in twelve volumes.

CLOUGH (1819-1861)

The son of a cotton merchant who lived for a time in Charleston, S. C., Clough spent part of his boyhood in this country. He was sent to school at Rugby, where he fell strongly under the influence of Thomas Arnold, Rugby's great headmaster. On going from Rugby to Oxford he passed from an atmosphere of strong religious faith to one of great uncertainty, for in 1836, when Clough entered Balliol, the Tractarian movement was shaking Oxford to its foundations. From the unsettling of his religious views Clough never recovered. He made a good scholarship record at Oxford, and held a fellowship at Oriel from 1842 to 1848. After some desultory tutoring and travelling he came to the United States, settled

at Cambridge, where he made the acquaintance of the Cambridge literary circle, and attempted to gain a living by tutoring and writing. He returned to England in 1853 to take a position in the Education Office, and passed the rest of his life in filling its duties. He died in Florence while travelling in search of health. His memory is preserved in Matthew Arnold's fine elegy Thyrsis.

Clough's life, interesting to Americans because of his friendships with Emerson, Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, was not a happy or a successful one because of his spiritual unrest. His poetry reflects his sceptical, questioning attitude, and is typical of an age when many men did not succeed, as Tennyson did, in keeping a spiritual equilibrium amid the disturbance caused by scientific progress and theory.

Clough's works are published in two volumes, one of poems, one of prose, the latter with a memoir by Mrs. Clough (Macmillan.) There are good essays by Bagehot in Literary Studies and Stopford Brooke in Four Victorian Poets.

ARNOLD (1822-1888)

Matthew Arnold was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby, and the father's intense moral earnestness makes readily intelligible the son's lifelong interest in problems of conduct and culture. From Rugby he went to Oxford, and in 1845 won the distinguished honor of a fellowship in Oriel. After a few months of teaching at Rugby, and a short term of service as secretary to the Liberal leader, Lord Lansdowne, he was in 1851 made an Inspector of Schools, and for thirty-five years faithfully performed the duties of his office to the great profit of popular education.

Most of Arnold's poetry was written in the years between 1849 and 1867. It is small in amount and narrow in scope, largely meditative, tinged by the spiritual unrest of the time with a decided pessimism. This should not, however, be taken to imply any lack of lyrical fervor. Indeed, in the utterance of his melancholy reflections he is genuinely impassioned, as in Dover Beach, that beautiful and sad confession of loss of faith. The bent of Arnold's genius was well suited to the elegy, and he has given to English poetry some of the finest expressions of the elegiac mood, The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis being outstanding examples. In the field of narrative verse Sohrab and Rustum is too well known to need comment; Balder Dead, likewise an epic fragment, and Tristram and Iseult, a picturesque but perhaps over-moralized version of Malory's story, are less successful, though excellent. All Arnold's poetry is marked by its undertone of sadness, a melancholy ground-swell, as well as by a fine restraint which makes impossible anything like sentimentality. The prevailing influences upon it are classical, and in its stoic philosophy, its restraint and lucidity, it is the best modern expression of the classical spirit.

In 1857 Arnold became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and ceased to write poetry to talk about it. During the years of his professorship he issued