The Sixth Reader of the Popular Series

of theoretical critics. Louis the Fourteenth was then on the throne of France, and under him the nation achieved pre-eminence in Europe, not only in politics, but in manners, learning, and taste. The influence of the Stuart kings upon English society led to the acceptance of French standards, which were founded upon classical models. The characteristics of English classical taste at this period are unity of plot, correctness in versification and rhyme, and inversion of epithets and phrases. Its topics usually grow out of the customs and conduct of men; they belong to society rather than to nature. In its highest form, as exemplified by Pope, this school is rigid, concise, measured, and monotonous. Its charm lies in harmonious proportions. This school is not extinct yet. Rogers and Holmes are among its disciples to it belong Campbell, Goldsmith, Gray, Thomson, and Pierpont among the poets, and Addison, Johnson, Macaulay, Everett, and Prescott among the prose writers. Byron is classical in form, but is an anachronism, having the turbulence, prodigality, and passion of the Renaissance, although with that inward view of things and reflection that belong to a later age.

IV. The Romantic School.

While the classical school has continued to the present generation, the songs of Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, Scott, and Southey have introduced, in a third epoch, a new type of art. It is known as the Romantic school, a name derived from the old Troubadour minstrels, who, reciting in a Romance tongue, in feudal courts, gave Europe its earliest forms of modern poetry. This is, properly, the Native school, embodying, as it does, the Gothic genius of our ancestors of the Teuton race. It gives us the poetry of sentiment, and therefore abounds in lyrics, rather than the drama. It seeks freedom for the imagination; it portrays the moods of the human heart under the varying influences of nature. It allows itself license in measure and rhyme,

knowing, as Bryant said of Fitz-Greene Halleck, “that the rivulet is made musical by the obstructions in its channel." The chief writers who have conquered this freedom for versification are Coleridge, Southey, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, Poe, Longfellow, and Lowell. This school reflects the human soul not in its achievements, but in its life; its harmonies are innate rather than external. It delights in legends that excite the imagination, and in scenes that arouse trains of feeling. It tends to revery and reflection. In Scott's songs of the Border and Chivalry, in Southey's gorgeous tales of the Orient, in Burns's simple touches of nature, in Wordsworth's spiritualizing of lowly things, in Poe's mysteriousness, in Emerson's transcendentalism, in Lowell's mysticism, may be seen the wide compass of its powers.

Modifications of the Romantic School.

Two tendencies are at work in this school,-that of philosophy, and that of belles-lettres or polite literature. Reflection makes metaphysical poets: cultivation elaborates and moulds the forms of expression. In the reflective wing are Coleridge, Shelley, Browning, and Bryant; in the literary wing the great masters are Tennyson and Longfellow. In the former division are the philosophical poets, in the latter the artistic. With both of these, classical culture has had influence, not to prescribe rules and ordain models for imitation, but to awaken a taste for perfecting the forms in which the genius native to the race may express itself.

In thus tracing the history of English literature as an art, we have found our examples chiefly among the poets, because prose, adapting itself to the innumerable demands. of social life, does not lend itself readily to classification, and because the rhythm of poetry belongs only to the higher moods of the human spirit, and, therefore, illustrates the perfected art of utterance.

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