the post of housekeeper for over half a century. He has immortalised the old deserted place' in the essay entitled Blakesmoor, in H-shire.' Within two years after leaving school Lamb obtained a post of some kind in the South Sea House, and shortly afterwards a clerkship in the accountant's office of the East India Company. Here Lamb stayed till he was pensioned off. Till 1795 he lived with his father and mother in the Temple. In that year the family moved to humble lodgings in Holborn, and there, in the following year, the event took place which had so profound an influence on all Lamb's after-life. His sister, Mary Lamb, in a paroxysm of mania, killed her own mother and wounded her father. He was able to arrange for her release from confinement-her case being clearly one of intermittent mania-and devoted his life to taking care of her. He never married. While the two were living together in small London lodgings he made his first important literary venture with 'A tale of Rosamund Gray and old blind Margaret.' This was in 1798; in the previous year he had published a volume of poems in conjunction with S. T. Coleridge and Charles Lloyd. The little story is redolent,' says Mr. Ainger, of Lamb's native sweetness of heart, delicacy of feeling, and undefinable charm of style.'

In 1802 he published the drama of 'John Woodvil,' an ambitious effort chiefly remarkable for the closeness with which it reproduces the style and versification of Beaumont and Fletcher. Already, and indeed years before this period, Lamb's mind was steeped in the Elizabethan drama. In 1803 he wrote the lovely lines on Hester,' which, together with the mournful stanzas beginning, 'Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?' and perhaps the sonnet on the name of 'Edith,' constitute the only verses of Lamb that have become really popular. In 1806 his 'Mr. H- -,' a curious trivial farce, was produced at Drury Lane, and damned unmercifully. Luckily he got on to much safer ground later in the same year with the 'Tales from Shakespeare,' at which brother and sister worked together. These were published in 1807. Next year followed the 'Specimens of English Dramatic Poets,' on which Lamb's fame as a critic chiefly rests. The new criticism, which, divesting itself of all theories about what a work of art should be in the abstract, seeks mainly to penetrate, interpret, and suggest,-to quicken the reader's sense of beauty and clear his spiritual vision, was here inaugurated. A modern poet, addressing one of the Elizabethans, says:

'Thy honey

Takes subtler sweetness from the lips of Lamb.'

1

Even those who know the Elizabethans well will learn to know them better under this modest, yet consummate guidance. But the full importance of Lamb's works can only be gauged by those who realise the general indifference to his subject eighty years ago, and the impulse it communicated to the nascent reaction against the classical literature of the eighteenth century. The next important work of Lamb was that by which he will be longest remembered. The Essays of Elia' were originally contributed to the London Magazine, where the first of them appeared in 1820, and were collected and published in 1823. The volume contained the famous 'Dissertation on Roast Pig,' the paper on 'Imperfect Sympathies,' and the account of 'Mrs. Battle's opinions on whist;' all occur in this first volume of essays. They would not probably be quite what they are if there had been no 'Spectator,' but it is hardly possible to overrate their kindly humour, the keenness of observation they display, and the elaborate, yet easy perfection of the style, when at its best. The second series of Essays of Elia,' published ten years later, in 1833, shows no sign of falling off. In 1825 he retired from the India House on a pension amounting to two-thirds of his salary, and lived the rest of his life at Enfield and at Edmonton, without producing any more literary work of mark.

1 Extract Book, art. 185.

CHAPTER VII.

NINETEENTH CENTURY CONTINUED.

1. It has been thought advisable to add to this work notes on English poets and novelists from 1850 to the present day, and others on some earlier names not included in the last chapter, together with special notices of a few writers whose reputation was obtained in other fields. More than this did not seem to be practicable, regard being had to the wide sweep which literary activity has taken in the last forty years.

Alfred Tennyson (now Lord Tennyson), the son of a Lincolnshire clergyman, of Trinity College, Cambridge, published a small volume of poems with his brother Charles in 1827. Others appeared in 1833, and again in 1842; In Memoriam belongs to the year 1850, and Idylls of the King to 1859. The works of the Laureate are now arranged (collected Poems, 1881) under sixteen heads. The second and third heads (The Lady of Shalott' and 'English Idylls') contain most of those poems on which the force of the writer's genius seems to have been specially concentrated, and in which his exquisite and unrivalled melody is most entrancing. Among these are Enone,' You ask me why, though ill at ease,' 'Morte d'Arthur,' The Talking Oak,'Ulysses,' The Day Dream,' 'Locksley Hall,' 'The Lotos-Eaters,' and 'St. Agnes' Eve.'

6

'The Talking Oak' is a wonderful poem. Starting from a first imaginary change, a first impersonation, and endowment with human thoughts and wishes, of that which we usually think of as senseless and emotionless, the poet pursues the strange argument with subtle logic through the various consequences of the original conception. In the frenzy of inspiration, the dull coarse wood comes to be endowed, not only with sense and feeling, but with the insight into hidden relations and resemblances which is peculiar to genius. It notes and numbers the sunbeams that fall on the lovely form of the sleeping girl; and each conveys to it some distinct import, flashes back some dazzling thought or image, unlocks and

irradiates some new chamber in that mansion of dormant or suspended intelligence. The solidity, richness, and complexity of thought of which this composition is the fruit would furnish the stock-in-trade of a dozen ordinary poets; nor does Tennyson himself seem to have been unconscious of the magnitude of the intellectual effort, or of the perfection of the result. He, too, sings his 'Exegi monumentum' :

And I will work in prose and rhyme,
And praise thee more in both
Than bard has honour'd beech or lime,-
Or that Thessalian growth,

In which the swarthy ringdove sat,
And mystic sentence spoke ;

And more than England honours that,
Thy famous brother-oak,

Wherein the younger Charles abode
Till all the paths were dim,

And far below the Roundhead rode,

And humm'd a surly hymn.

'Ulysses' is enveloped in antique heroic dignity as with a halo. The chief motif' is the thought expressed in those lines. of Goethe in the Wilhelm Meister (Carlyle's translation),

To give space for wandering is it
That the world was made so wide.

A few stately lines contain a perfect estimate of the less glorious work and less heroic energy of the respectable Telemachus. 'He works his work, I mine.'

In Memoriam, an elegiac poem dedicated to the memory of the poet's Cambridge friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, forms a separate division among the collected works. It is monochordic, but not monotonous; the resigned sadness that pervades it becomes the rich ground of subtle, tender, and inexhaustible meditations.

The Princess, a Medley, a kind of prolonged and developed echo of Love's Labour's Lost, imagines the creation of a great female university.

2. Robert Browning, born in 1812, first made himself known by writing Paracelsus (1836), and Sordello. These poems, remarkable as they were in many ways, announced a writer in whom great discursiveness of thought, fertility of imagination, and copiousness of expression, not being adequately controlled by any canons of poetic art, were likely to be much marred by excess, and blurred by defects of workmanship. If Mr.

Browning has never cleared himself of these faults, nevertheless his dialectical power, his moral fervour, and his command over the instrument which he wields, have with advancing age been continually on the increase. Any one may be convinced of this who will read Bishop Blougram's Apology,' or the 'Epistle' of Karshish the Arab physician on the raising of Lazarus, or, most of all, The Ring and the Book (1868), which is the story told from different sides and with different prepossessions, of the murder of his wife and her parents by an Italian count. Admirable is the skill of psychical analysis displayed in this poem. A few lines taken from it will illustrate much of what we have to say of Browning. A wife's infidelity is the matter in hand :

Sir, what's the good of law
In a case o' the kind? None, as she all but says.
Call in law when a neighbour breaks your fence,
Cribs from your field, tampers with rent or lease,
Touches the purse or pocket,-but wooes your wife?
No: take the old way trod when men were men.

In Any Wife to any Husband,' the noble dying wife (on whom see below, § 17) talks to her husband from her deathbed. Much is clear and fine and touching; but, as with Hamlet, the something too much' must be predicated of the communication. The language, too, is often very harsh. The statue is left in the rough, the chippings of the chisel visible everywhere;-the Hercules is in the stone perhaps, but a new Phidias is needed to clear the pure form from the manifold blurs and imperfections which are left clinging to it.

Among Browning's other compositions are, the beautiful and vigorous ballad of The Pied Piper of Hamelin,' Pippa Passes, a drama written in 1841 and dedicated to Talfourd, Fifine at the Fair (1872), a poem in alexandrines,-Balaustion's Adventure, a recast of the Alcestis of Euripides,-The Inn Album (1875), and the tragedies of 'Luria,' 'The Return of the Druses,' and 'Strafford.'

3. Matthew Arnold,1 eldest son of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, published The Strayed Reveller without his name in 1848. Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems followed in 1853, and Merope, a tragedy modelled on ancient Greek forms, in 1858. A volume of poems first appeared with his name in 1854.

1 It will not be expected that, in speaking of my brother, I shall assume any other function than that of the chronicler. Those who wish to see his poems critically discussed are referred to A. C. Swinburne's paper in the Fortnightly, vol. viii. (since reprinted in his collected essays), and Andrew Lang's in the Century.