the fastidious taste of a cultured and leisured class, which was the just description of our periodical literature at large not so very long ago.  The number of our imaginative writers—­poets and romancers, but especially the latter—­has been out of all proportion great.  We give the place of honour, as is their due, to the singers rather than to the story-tellers, the more readily since the popular taste, it cannot be denied, chooses its favourites in inverse order as a rule.

[Illustration:  Robert Browning. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.]

When Her Majesty ascended the throne, one brilliant poetical constellation was setting slowly, star by star.  Keats and Shelley and Byron, none of them much older than the century, had perished in their early prime between 1820 and 1824; Scott had sunk under the storms of fortune in 1832; the fitful glimmer of Coleridge’s genius vanished in 1834, and a year later “the gentle Elia” too was gone.  Southey, who still held the laureate-ship in 1837, had faded out of life in 1843, and was succeeded in his once-despised office by William Wordsworth, who, with Rogers and Leigh Hunt and Moore, lived far into the new reign, uniting the Georgian and the Victorian school of writers.  Thomas Hood, the poet of the poor and oppressed, whose too short life ended in 1845, gives in his serious verse such thrilling expression to the impassioned, indignant philanthropy, which has actuated many workers and writers of our own period, that it is not easy to reckon him with the older group.  His song rings like that of Charles Kingsley, poet, novelist, preacher, and “Christian socialist,” who did not publish his “Saint’s Tragedy” till three years after Hood was dead.

There has, indeed, been no break in the continuity of our great literary history; while one splendid group was setting, another as illustrious was rising.  Tennyson, who on Wordsworth’s death in 1850 received at Queen Victoria’s hand the “laurel greener from the brows of him that uttered nothing base,” had published his earliest two volumes of poems some years before Her Majesty’s accession; and of that rare poetic pair, the Brownings, each had already given evidence of the great powers they possessed, Robert Browning’s tragedy of “Strafford” being produced on the stage in 1837, while his future wife’s translation of the “Prometheus Bound” saw the light four years earlier.  The Victorian period can boast no greater poetic names than these, each of which is held in highest reverence by its own special admirers.  The patriotic fervour with which Lord Tennyson has done almost all his laureate work, the lucid splendour of his style, the perfect music of his rhythm, and the stinging sharpness with which he has sometimes chastised contemporary sins, have all combined to win for him a far wider popularity than even that accorded to the fine lyrical passion of Mrs. Browning, or to the deep-thoughted and splendid, but often perplexing and ruggedly phrased, dramatic