and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than either.  For he had a style—­a “natural magic”—­which only needed the chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in modern English poetry, and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a comparison.  His tombstone, not far from Shelley’s, bears the inscription of his own choosing:  “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”  But it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in large characters on most of our contemporary poetry.  “Wordsworth,” says Lowell, “has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms.”  And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite quality of his technique.

* * * * *

1.  Mrs. Oliphant’s Literary History of England, 18th-19th Centuries.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1883.

2.  Wordsworth’s Poems.  Chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold.  London, 1879.

3.  Poetry of Byron.  Chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold.  London, 1881.

4.  Shelley.  Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Lyrical Pieces.

5.  Landor.  Pericles and Aspasia.

6.  Coleridge.  Table-Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing Year, Kubla Khan, Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, Youth and Age, Frost at Midnight.

7.  De Quincey.  Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Flight of a Tartar Tribe, Biographical Sketches.

8.  Scott.  Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy, Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake.

9.  Keats.  Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces.  Boston:  J.R.  Osgood, 1871.

[Illustration:  Southey, Scott, Coleridge, Macaulay.]

CHAPTER VIII.

FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME.

1832-1893.

The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to enable the critic to pronounce a final judgment, or the literary historian to get a true perspective.  Many of the principal writers of the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few years.  This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of fashion and taste, to remain representatives of their generation.  As regards form, the most striking fact in the history of the period under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature of prose fiction, of the novel of real life.  The novel has become to the solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences of Elizabeth’s reign, or the periodical essay, like the Tatler and Spectator, to the