tion. A later volume, The Song of the Sword and other Verses (1892), confirmed the good impression. Mr Henley has since made considerable reputation as a critic of art and literature, and as Editor in succession of London, The Magazine of Art, and The Scots, afterwards The National, Observer, and is now engaged in editing the New Review.

In the same year 1849 was born Edmund Gosse, who is also well known as a prose critic, and as a capable and industrious scholar of English and other literatures. He began his career as a poet. Of his various volumes, the principal was On Viol and Flute (1873), a later edition of which (1890) contained all his earlier poems.

Want of space alone prevents the notice of many other poets of the period, especially of numerous women writers who have produced a highly respectable body of verse, without, however, in any case rising into the first rank.

CHAPTER VII

Essayists and Reviewers

THE Victorian Essay can scarcely be considered apart from that marvellous expansion of journalism that forms perhaps the most striking literary characteristic of the present reign. It is not marked by any one distinctive feature, but in excellence it is not unworthy of the great traditions of a literature that has given us such essayists as Bacon and Dryden, Addison and Steele, Johnson and Defoe, Hazlitt and Lamb. As in other departments of literature, so in the region of the Belles Lettres, the earlier Victorian period is also the greater. To the first half of the reign belong the names of such writers as Lockhart and Macaulay, Leigh Hunt and Carlyle, and to the excellence of their work in general literature, reference has already been made. But to this period also belong the names of De Quincey and Professor Wilson, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, to say nothing of Sir Arthur Helps, the author of Friends in Council, and such illuminating critics as Walter Bagehot and George Brimley.

Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). An atmosphere

of quaint originality hangs around the great Opium Eater. The interest we take in him is less due to his power of deep and subtle thought, his grand and impressive imagination, and his peculiarly sonorous and organ-like melody of style, all of which have made him an English classic, than to the unique and lovable personality of the man himself. No life of him, however meagre, can fail of interest.

Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. His father, a wealthy merchant in that city, died young, but left his family in comfortable circumstances. To Thomas probably the loss was more serious than to any of the other children. With his peculiarities of temperament, the judicious guidance and sympathy of a father so clever and cultured would have been invaluable. It is evident that an element of Spartanlike austerity was present in his mother's character, and that her children found it easier to admire her many chill graces and accomplishments than to love her. After his father's death, Thomas and his elder brother William received instruction from the Rev. Samuel Hall, a clergyman of Salford, and an intimate friend of their late father. At this time Thomas was a shy, sensitive, dreamy child, predisposed to melancholy, from which the stormy energy of his brother William did much to rouse him. In his twelfth year, Mrs de Quincey broke up her establishment at Greenheys, and removed to Bath. The Grammar School of this town was then under the headmastership of Mr Morgan, an accomplished scholar. Under

the inspiration of his influence young De Quincey made great progress in his classical studies, so that, although one of the younger boys, he was looked upon as the prodigy of the school. But this very success, it is said, was the cause of dissatisfaction to his mother, who disliking that her boy should be made the subject of public commendation, sent him to Wingfield, a private school in Wiltshire. Here he became a general favourite, and made good progress with his Greek studies. On leaving this school a year afterwards, he accompanied his young friend Lord Westport in a tour through Ireland. On concluding a round of visits in which he was thus engaged during the next four or five months, his guardians decided to send him to the Grammar School of Manchester for three years before proceeding to Oxford. This they did chiefly on economical grounds, in the hope that he would secure one of several exhibitions of the value of fifty pounds obtainable for a university course at Manchester. The arrangement was little to De Quincey's liking; he pled hard that he might rather be sent to the Grammar School at Bath. When in 1800 therefore he was actually placed in Manchester, the disappointment seems to have rankled in his mind, and combined with the irksomeness of restraint following upon so much irresponsible liberty, and perhaps also with some measure of ill-health, caused him after eighteen months to run away from the school. The causes for this step, whatever they were, did not seem sufficient to himself afterwards. His masters were

appreciative of his uncommon ability, his companions liked him, and as several of them were boys of quite exceptional talent and information, he had all the stimulus he required. We are left to conjecture that the eccentricity and impatience of restraint that were characteristic of him throughout life had begun to assert themselves. He found his way to Chester, where his mother was then residing. Naturally she had nothing but blame for the step that he had taken. Fortunately, however, for his wishes, his mother's brother, Colonel Thomas Penson, was then staying with her, and taking a less unfavourable view of the situation, recommended that the boy should receive a guinea a week, and be left free to wander where he chose. From July to November 1802, therefore, we find him engaged in a protracted pedestrian tour in North Wales, in which he meets strange people and has many curious adventures. Either growing tired of this vagabond life at last, or freakishly resenting the thin thread of restraint which his guinea a week imposed upon him, he took the curious step of burying himself in London, in the hope of being able to raise £200 on his expectations. He has put a thrilling and pathetic interest into the story of this part of his life. It is scarcely credible that a youth of seventeen, well connected and without vicious habits, should have been thus stranded in London, and completely lost for so many months to all knowledge of his friends. During the delay consequent upon negotiations with the money-lenders, he was reduced almost to starva