a place in their circle. But there is much more. Side by side with his experiments in Breton ballads and English Miracle Plays are odes, narratives in couplet rhyme, rondels and aubades, sapphics and hendecasyllabics, and even a poem (Laus Veneris) in the Oriental quatrains of the Rubáiyát. He is at once more Greek and more Elizabethan than any modern poet save Landor, and he is half a dozen things besides. The Elizabethan quality comes out strongest in his dramas, such as Chastelard and Mary Stuart. They are closet-dramas purely, wanting in action and comic by-play; but they have the great dramatic virtues,―plot, vivid characterization, and intensity of passion in tragic situations, presented through a perfectly-handled blank verse. Tennyson's best work in this kind is not comparable to them. It is however as a lyric poet that Swinburne, like nearly all the poets of the century, is to be finally judged. Into his lyrics he has put all his own character his intense hatred, like Shelley's or Landor's, of kings and priests, and his passionate love of freedom, of little children, and of the sea. The expression of his republicanism took often so violent a form, that though at Tennyson's death he was the obvious candidate for the Laureateship, his appointment was out of the question. Many of his best poems in celebration of liberty were inscribed to Joseph Mazzini, the Italian patriot, and still others to Victor Hugo, the great republican poet of France. But his republicanism never diminished his patriotism. When a Russian poet addressed some insolent lines to Victoria, the "Empress of India," he responded with several sonnets upon The White Czar in scathing language for which anathema is but a mild word. A similar intemperance was early manifested in his proclamations of a religious faith that seems often candidly and even joyously antichristian. On the other hand, few poets have descended more gracefully from the heights of passionate song to celebrate in simple and musical rhyme the innocent charms of childhood. "No flower-bells that expand and shrink As shine on life's untrodden brink "No rosebuds yet by dawn impearled The sweetest flowers in all the world- love of the sea. But these qualities pale before Swinburne's master passion, his Childhood's laughter itself does not ring for him with the joy of the racing waves in sunlight, nor the wrath of man thunder like the thunder of their breaking in storm. "Green earth has her sons and her daughters, And these have their guerdons; but we Are the winds and the suns and the waters', 99.66 "Breathe back the benediction of thy sea," "And in thy soul the sense of all the sea," "My dreams to the wind everliving, My song to the sea,' With stars and sea-winds in her raiment, Night sinks on the sea,”—thus in ever varying form and tireless succession his stanzas and poems close with this magical word. Nor is it merely a word to conjure with. The lyrics are permeated and saturated, as no other poetry in the language is, with the actual sounds and scents of the ocean. Against these virtues must be set the grave defect of the poet's almost fatal fluency. Matthew Arnold complained of him (though somewhat ungraciously, in view of Swinburne's generous praise of Arnold's verse) that he used a hundred words where one would suffice; and the complaint was just. It is true, the defect springs from his quality; the very exuberance of his genius is one of the great things about him and a cause for admiration. He becomes so enamored of his own cunningly woven beauty and music that nothing can arrest his progress. He must have full scope, at whatever sacrifice of clearness and vigor. The result is that readers with little of his whole-souled delight in these things turn from him in despair. At the same time he remains a splendid example of the poetic temper in its extreme development. Nor can it be forgotten that in the one element of verbal music he attained in his very earliest attempts to a mastery which no one before that would have deemed possible in English, and which is likely to remain long unsurpassed. Walter 1839-1894. The prose writer, Walter Horatio Pater, though not to be regarded as one of the Pre-Raphaelites, was closely allied to them in temper, scarcely differing from them more than they differed from each other. He was not a practitioner of either painting or poetry, but he was a rarely sympathetic student of both, as well as of other arts and of philosophy. He was a student at Oxford at the same time as Swinburne, becoming later a Fellow of Brasenose College, and he passed there, except for a few years spent in London, an unobtrusive, almost unnoticed existence. The attitude of remoteness from the world of men to be seen in the poetry of Keats, Rossetti, and Morris, was his in actuality. One of his earliest pieces of writing was an appreciation of Morris's Defence of Guenevere, in a style whose coloring was not unlike that of the poetry appraised, “intricate and delirious as of scarlet lilies." A certain morbidness of taste is easily to be detected in it, as indeed in the whole of the "Esthetic Movement" which followed at this time, and for which Pater, after the Pre-Raphaelites, was largely responsible. But Pater was never guilty of the excesses and offences into which some later disciples of this movement were led. He pursued his quiet scholarly life, writing slowly and with infinite painstaking, and publishing without thought of notoriety. His Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), is a collection of critical essays upon Leonardo, Botticelli, Michael Angelo, etc. Marius the Epicurean (1885) is a kind of philosophical romance, portraying the spiritual experience of a youth amid the conflicts of philosophy and religion at Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius. Among his later books are Imaginary Portraits (1887), Appreciations (1889), and Greek Studies (1895). His best known separate essay is the autobiographic Child in the House, written in 1878. An extract from this will serve to illustrate the general tenor of his work: "So the child of whom I am writing lived on there quietly; things without thus ministering to him, as he sat daily at the window with the birdcage hanging below it, and his mother taught him to read, wondering at the ease with which he learned, and at the quickness of his memory. The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon them like rain: while time seemed to move ever more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as 'with lead in the rock for ever,' giving form and feature, and as it were assigned houseroom in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise." The two things which give Pater distinction are his philosophy and his style. The former, at least in its earlier expressions, is very clearly a kind of refined Epicureanism, or hedonism, -a doctrine of life for the pleasure of life. But with Pater this is not quite the pagan doctrine of self-indulgence it might seem. For he possessed the best qualities of a humanist, holding that the intensest pleasure of life springs from the quickening of the spirit, and finding for himself the avenues to that quickening mainly in literature and art. This is a substitution for religion of at least nothing worse than æstheticism. His style might be expected to conform to his philosophical ideal; and so it does. It is highly colored and musically modulated, and yet never so highly or musically as Ruskin's. It obtains its effects by less obvious means, avoiding the old or commonplace, preferring whatever is subtle, delicate, and elusive. Sometimes it seems utterly nerveless and effeminate. But its charm, when one has come to feel it, does not pall. It is, moreover, perfectly adjusted to the expression of those things such, for instance, as the coming or going of bodily pain, or, to take a more specific but perfectly typical example, the "particular catch and throb of heavy blossoms beating against a window peevishly in the wind"-which only an abnormal sensibility like Pater's can feel in all their gradations of faintness or intensity. It is, in a sense, the ultimate note of romanticism in nineteenth century prose. Robert Louis Stevenson, a slightly younger contemporary of Pater, was a writer of much wider general appeal. When, in 1870, Rossetti added his volume of poems to those Robert of his disciples, Swinburne and Morris, the PreLouis Raphaelites virtually occupied the centre of the Stevenson, 1850-1894. literary stage. A short time sufficed to set them more clearly in their proper relation to Tennyson and others. But every generation has its idols, and the next reputation to leap into a position that promised permanence was that of Stevenson. The position has indeed been well maintained; but though the death of the author, which was not unanticipated, speedily came to set a seal upon his work, his life and personality and all the conditions under which his talent flowered are still too near us to permit of anything like final judgment. Stevenson, baptized Robert Lewis Balfour, the only child of a distinguished civil engineer, was born at Edinburgh in the middle year of the century. When we consider that Scott and Carlyle were also both born in Scotland, that Ruskin's parents were Scotch, and that Macaulay was Scotch by paternal descent, the share of Scotland in nineteenth century English prose is seen to be almost as great as that of England herself. Stevenson's literary bent was strong from the first, so that his perfunctory education at the University of Edinburgh and his training for the family profession went for nothing, as did also his preparation for the Law and his admission to the Bar. The |