1. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence. 2. The Poems of Thomas Gray. 3. William Collins. Odes. 4. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878. 5. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878. 6. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe. 7. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones. 8. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker. 9. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy. 10. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village. 11. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin. (Globe Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1879. 12. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. (Globe Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1884.
FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.
The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth and the first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets, like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no _Hamlet_ and no _Paradise Lost_; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter, accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not only the most important, but the most representative of the various tendencies of their time.
[Illustration: Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats.]
The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the _Times_ and the _Morning Post_, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern reviews, the _Edinburgh_, was established in 1802, as the organ of the Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the London _Quarterly_, in 1808, and by _Blackwood's Magazine_, in 1817, both in the Tory interest. The first editor of the _Edinburgh_ was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and lord chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty sayings are still current. The first editor of the _Quarterly_ was William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the _Baviad_ and _Mæviad_ ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an excellent _Life of Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under the pen-name of "Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series of brilliant imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the day, entitled _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, because they were supposed to take place at Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys. These reviews and magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, became the _nuclei_ about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered. Political controversy under the Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no longer so largely by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like Swift's _Public Spirit of the Allies_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_, and Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics by any means usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science, the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review. _Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies published stories, poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.