has proved an almost perfect instrument for an age of journalism. Macaulay is thus the true perpetuator of the traditionary "middle style," the transmitter to the nineteenth century, and so on to the twentieth, of that clear, formal, dignified, and practical prose of which Cowley and Dryden first set the manner in the seventeenth. He, of all the writers of the age in which we have considered him, is the best link between the past and the present; and, as a matter of fact, long before his death and De Quincey's and Landor's, the Victorian age, with its several groups of writers scarcely less diverse and brilliant than those who went just before, had been ushered in.

It is not difficult to distinguish the large movements in national life and thought which determined the character of the nineteenth century. They are, first, the spread of democracy, a humanitarian movement, and second, the growth of the scientific spirit. The first is political and social, the second intellectual and social. The conservative reaction, the check to the spread of republican principles which followed the failure of the French Revolution, was not of long continuance. Shortly after the close of the Napoleonic Wars with the victory of Waterloo in 1815, the forward movement began to be felt again. In England, progress took the shape of cautious reform instead of violent revolution. In 1829 the Whigs succeeded in securing the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament and other high offices. In 1832 the Reform Bill considerably extended

the voting privilege among the middle class. In 1833 slavery in the colonies was suppressed. In 1846 the repeal of the corn laws established free trade. In 1867 a still more sweeping reform bill was enacted into law. The only disturbances of importance abroad were the war in the Crimea, through which England again entered continental politics, and the Indian Mutiny, which resulted in destroying the power of the East India Company. Both of these took place in the sixth decade. Meanwhile national expansion continued, especially through the attention paid to colonial development in Canada and Australia. In education and science, progress was equally marked. A system of national education was introduced in 1834; free libraries were established in 1850; and in the following year a great world's exposition was held at the Crystal Palace. The Liverpool and Manchester Railroad was opened in 1830; the electric telegraph came into use in 1837; and there was a concurrent development of commerce by steam navigation. Within the Church a counter-tendency toward ritualism was for a while apparent, in the so-called Tractarian, or Oxford Movement, which strongly affected the Universities; but that too was only such a quickening of the conscience as naturally accompanied the quickening that was going on in every direction. Nearly all these things touched literature, and are mirrored in one way or another in the poems of Tennyson, the novels of Dickens and Kingsley, and the essays of Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, and Arnold.

The year 1832, the date of the death of Scott, is ordinarily given as marking the end of the first literary period of the century. But dates are seldom altogether satisfactory dividing lines in literature: in this case, looking at poetry alone, we find that before 1832 there was a brief interregnum, not incomparable to that which took place more than a century earlier between the death of Dryden and the appearance of Pope. For Scott wrote no poetry in his later life; and when Byron died in 1824 Keats and Shelley were both gone, Coleridge's poetic faculties

were in abeyance, and Wordsworth, though destined to many years of life and labor, had quite accomplished his significant work. For six years there were but the voices of such minor lyrists as Hood and Keble. Then, in 1830, when the queen whose name we give to the succeeding era was but eleven years old and still seven years from her accession, appeared a little volume entitled Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson. With this date, therefore, we may regard the new era as begun, though a full dozen years were yet to elapse before this second poetic renaissance should gather momentum.

Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892.

The lives of the Victorian men of letters have been mostly long and outwardly peaceful, in contrast to the often stormy careers of their immediate predecessors. Tennyson was born in that memorable birth-year, 1809, which brought into the world a company of the very greatest men of the century, including Darwin, Gladstone, Lincoln, Poe, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. He was the fourth of seven sons in a family of twelve children; the Tennyson household, indeed, seems to have comprised about one fourth of the inhabitants of the little village of Somersby, where his father was Rector. The village is situated in the comparatively flat "fen-country" of Lincolnshire, not far from the eastern coast. The poet has given us many a charming picture of the region-now of

now of the

"The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father's door;"

"gray twilight pour'd

On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep;"

and now of the waste enormous marshes that "stretched wide and wild" away to the "heaped hills that mound the sea.' Past the rectory flowed a brook, in all probability the brook that came "from haunts of coot and hern . . To bicker down a valley." And it was here that in 1824, Tennyson, evidently

already a poet, took so to heart the death of Byron. Even before that date, he tells us, he had composed "an epic of six thousand lines à la Walter Scott;" and it was only three years after, in 1827, that a local bookseller published the extremely juvenile Poems by Two Brothers (Charles and Alfred)-an event which the boys celebrated by hiring a carriage and driving off to the seashore, no doubt to recite the verses to the music of the waves. The poems of Thomson, it should be recorded, were among the distinct formative influences of this period. Scott was speedily outgrown, and Byron also, save for an occasional likeness traceable later in Tennyson's more impassioned poems, such as Maud.

Before the date of his juvenile venture, Alfred had spent several years at a neighboring Grammar School, but his best early training was received at home. In 1828, in company with Charles, he joined their elder brother Frederick at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Macaulay had been but four years before, and Byron but twenty, and where he might see upon the walls the portraits of such eminent predecessors as Bacon, Cowley, Dryden, and Newton. There he made a number of valuable friends, Milnes, for instance, the biographer of Keats, and particularly Arthur Henry Hallam, son of the historian, whom he was so soon to lose and so deathlessly to mourn. He won the Chancellor's medal with a poem, Timbuctoo, which, like the earlier poems, has not been included in his collected works. But an important publication followed in 1830—the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (now the "Juvenilia"), containing among them such evidences of genius as Mariana, Recollections of the Arabian Nights, The Poet, and the Ode to Memory. In the summer of the same year, he and Hallam, in apparent imitation of Landor and Byron, joined the Spanish insurgents in the Pyrenees. Two years later, after the death of his father and his withdrawal from Cambridge, he published another volume, which contained, among other notable poems, The Lady of Shalott, The Two Voices, Enone, The Palace of Art, The May