thing, it was also becoming more sympathetic, learning to ask, "Is this morally right?"; and that which had been revered because it was old was no longer revered unless it seemed good. Commerce was expanding, and England's ships were ploughing every sea, bringing the wealth of every clime to England's shores. The profits of this commercial activity, percolating through the various channels of domestic employment and exchange, raised the general level of wealth among the people, and increased the numbers of what is called the leisured class, from which, largely, a nation's thinkers, dreamers, writers, and readers are drawn. Religious enthusiasts, like John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and others, took up the spark of human devotion which the Puritan and the Quaker had been trying to keep alive, and blew it into a new glow that pervaded all ranks of society, quickening the conscience of duke and peasant alike; while Robert Raikes, a little later, gathered the children into Sunday Schools, thus preparing the way for the fuller development of two hitherto almost ignored factors in literature, the child and the home. Conditions like these must necessarily produce literature in abundance, and literature of a somewhat different character from any of earlier days. Historical and scientific works appeared in large numbers; but these, by general consent, do not belong to pure literature, in its strictest sense, and they must, therefore, be excluded from a brief sketch like this. Poetry still lived, for poetry is an evergreen, and, even though its life at times be feeble and despairing, it lives wherever man exists to cultivate it and to receive its refining influence. Whatever the cause, the drama was nearing its end; and, since the time of Goldsmith and Sheridan, it has given but two perceptible gasps, Bulwer's Richelieu and Lady of Lyons. Two new types of literature, however, the novel and the essay, were developing into vigor and importance. The types of pure literature, then, that were most cultivated when Macaulay came on the scene were poetry, the novel, and the essay. Brief consideration can be given here to but a very few of the most important writers of each of these classes. POETS William Wordsworth (1770-1850), born at Cockermouth, was the son of a lawyer named John Wordsworth. He attended school at Hawkshead, Lancashire, where he passed his time pleasantly because of his freedom from restraint. He rambled at large, up hill, down dale, through glade, and by the bank of purling stream, developing something of that quiet and deep, but yet very passionate, love of nature that afterward characterized so many of his poems, He went to the University of Cambridge in due time, receiving his degree there in 1791. After graduation he went at once to France, where he espoused the cause of the revolutionists; but, finding the French struggle for freedom tending to the establishment of an empire, he returned to England disappointed, and became, perhaps, more conservative in his ideas than he otherwise would have been. In 1795, a friend and admirer, Raisley Calvert, died, leaving Wordsworth a legacy of £900. This was very welcome, for Wordsworth's father left only about £5000 at his death, and this he left in the hands of an executor who refused to surrender it; and Wordsworth and his co-heirs did not receive the proceeds until 1801. Upon the receipt of Calvert's legacy, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy set up housekeeping in the "Lake District." Coleridge lived in the same neighborhood, and, as he had already learned to appreciate Wordsworth's genius, which he had detected in some poems published in 1792, the two soon became intimate friends. Southey was another neighbor, and these three, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, came to be known as the "Lake School" of poets; though there is no good. reason for classing them together, their work being of very different types. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly published a small volume of Lyrical Ballads, containing among others, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. Though these have now established their position as genuine poetry, they and the other pieces in the little volume were so utterly different in tone from anything before known as poetry in England that their appearance was the signal for an outburst of mingled scorn and ridicule upon the part of the critics. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge cared for the scorn nor for the ridicule of the critics; their ideas were too firmly grounded to be easily shaken, and each continued to write according to his own notions, indifferent whether the critic pronounced the product poetry or trash. Many of his Wordsworth wrote voluminously. poems are short, but some are very long. His fame rests chiefly upon some of each of these classes. The tenderly sentimental weep over We are Seven, or Ruth, or Alice Fell (though Coleridge condemned the last); and the more philosophically and reflectively inclined will prefer the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the Prelude, or the Excursion. The Prelude is professedly autobiographical, and deals with "the growth of a poet's mind." It was begun in 1799, but not completed till 1805, and not published till a few months after the author's death. It was intended as the introduction to a much longer poem, to be entitled the Recluse, in three parts, of which the second part only, the Excursion, was printed (1814) during the author's lifetime. A portion of the first part of the Recluse was published in 1888, but of the third part Mr. Wordsworth left only a plan or outline. As the Prelude contains about 9000 lines, and as the Excursion is considerably longer, it is apparent that the plan of the whole poem must have been very ambitious. Milton needs only 10,565 lines to tell the whole story of Paradise Lost. . Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review (November, 1814), met the Excursion with a savage critique, beginning: "This will never do! . . It is longer, and weaker, and tamer, than any of Mr. Wordsworth's other productions; with less boldness of originality, and less even of that extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavered so prettily, in the Lyrical Ballads, between silliness and pathos." Eleven months later the same reviewer begins his article on the White Doe of Rylstone: "This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume; and though it was scarcely to be expected, we confess, that Mr. Wordsworth, with all his ambition, should so soon have attained to that distinction, the wonder may perhaps be diminished when we state that it seems to us to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is just such a work, in short, as |