of the arts.  More than any other he emphasized beauty, because to him, as shown by his “Grecian Urn,” beauty and truth were one and inseparable.  And he enriched the whole romantic movement by adding to its interest in common life the spirit, rather than the letter, of the classics and of Elizabethan poetry.  For these reasons Keats is, like Spenser, a poet’s poet; his work profoundly influenced Tennyson and, indeed, most of the poets of the present era.

II.  PROSE WRITERS OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Aside from the splendid work of the novel writers—­Walter Scott, whom we have considered, and Jane Austen, to whom we shall presently return—­the early nineteenth century is remarkable for the development of a new and valuable type of critical prose writing.  If we except the isolated work of Dryden and of Addison, it is safe to say that literary criticism, in its modern sense, was hardly known in England until about the year 1825.  Such criticism as existed seems to us now to have been largely the result of personal opinion or prejudice.  Indeed we could hardly expect anything else before some systematic study of our literature as a whole had been attempted.  In one age a poem was called good or bad according as it followed or ran counter to so-called classic rules; in another we have the dogmatism of Dr. Johnson; in a third the personal judgment of Lockhart and the editors of the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly, who so violently abused Keats and the Lake poets in the name of criticism.  Early in the nineteenth century there arose a new school of criticism which was guided by knowledge of literature, on the one hand, and by what one might call the fear of God on the other.  The latter element showed itself in a profound human sympathy,—­the essence of the romantic movement,—­and its importance was summed up by De Quincey when he said, “Not to sympathize is not to understand.”  These new critics, with abundant reverence for past masters, could still lay aside the dogmatism and prejudice which marked Johnson and the magazine editors, and read sympathetically the work of a new author, with the sole idea of finding what he had contributed, or tried to contribute, to the magnificent total of our literature.  Coleridge, Hunt, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey were the leaders in this new and immensely important development; and we must not forget the importance of the new periodicals, like the Londen Magazine, founded in 1820, in which Lamb, De Quincey, and Carlyle found their first real encouragement.

Of Coleridge’s Biographica Literaria and his Lectures on Shakespeare we have already spoken.  Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) wrote continuously for more than thirty years, as editor and essayist; and his chief object seems to have been to make good literature known and appreciated.  William Hazlitt (1778-1830), in a long series of lectures and essays, treated all reading as a kind of romantic journey