TO A.D 1886.] GEORGE ELIOT." JOHN RUSKIN.

1081

Beginning with the warning to painters that they should show truly the forms of clouds, and trees, and mountain ranges, he enlarged his teaching from the first by application of it to sincerity of life. The second volume of Modern Painters was followed in 1849 by The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and the three volumes of The Stones of Venice were published in 1851-1853. The stress laid by Ruskin in his Modern Painters upon fidelity of expression and purity of colour, of both of which he found illustrations in the painters before Raffaelle, influenced many young artists, who followed the counsel given and formed what was known as the Preraphaelite School, which Ruskin justified and interpreted, in 1851, with a pamphlet on Preraphaelitism. In 1857 John Ruskin published The Political Economy of Art, with a plan for discovering and fertilising all seeds of artistic power in the country. The Two Paths, in 1858, contrasted the barren results of an art based on mechanical principles with the fruitfulness of an art based on living observation. Unto this Last, in 1862, enforced need of the development of the individual in the state. In these and other writings the antagonism to sound doctrines of political economy comes of antipathy to every word or deed that seems to treat masses of men as parts of a human machine. The main consideration that must never be left out of sight, can only be true life in each of us. What error there may be in Ruskin's teaching comes of deep perception of the main truth, with a prophet-like insistance upon that alone as the one truth to be enforced directly upon men. In 1865 appeared Ethics of the Dust, ten lectures on the Elements of Civilisation; in the same year Sesame and Lilies, two lectures on the Reading of Books. In 1866 followed The Crown of Wild Olives, three lectures on Work, Traffic, and War. In 1867 John Ruskin obtained the honorary degree of LL.D. from the University of Cambridge, and he was elected at Oxford Slade Professor of Fine Art. The Queen of the Air, in 1869, was a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm. On the 1st of January, 1871, he dated the first of a series of occasional letters entitled Fors Clavigera, of which the last was dated Christmas, 1884. The series forms eight volumes, through which there has been a continuous setting forth in his own way of his own ideas as a Reformer. A sketch of his own life, published in short sections, and called Præterita, followed in 1885 86.

There was a like sense of life in Mrs. Browning's Cry of the Children. The first book of poems to which that true poetess set her name, The Seraphim, represented voices of the angels as they looked at Him who yet hung dying on the cross at Calvary. Out of the depths of Christianity came her pica Her call for union of the thinker for the higher life of man. with the worker, the idealist with the man eager to provide for each day's bitter need, gave to her poem of Aurora Leigh, published in 1857, a tone blending with the thoughtful music of her husband. Robert Browning, in his Paracelsus, showed the failure of one who desired at a bound to reach the far ideal; in Sordello showed the poet before Dante, seeking his true place in life, and finding it only when he became leader of men in the If there be no full real battle of life, and poet all the more. civilisation to be won on earth by those who shall come after us in distant years, yet we must labour on, not dreaming, but doing. And to the poet we must go for utterances of the soul of action; for no true poet is "an idle singer," and no day "an empty day."

Let us not wrest unduly from their sense these words of Mr. William Morris, in the prelude to his Earthly Paradise. Mr. William Morris's poems have their own great charm, but have not yet the greatest. Mr. William Morris was three years old at the beginning of the reign, and he has yet to set the crown to his career among the poets. Nor let us leave unnamed the witty novels of George Meredith, which have the true ring of Literature in them all, and will not die; the womanly novels of Mrs. Craik, the pleasant songs of William Allingham, and the verse music of Jean Ingelow, who were all children in 1837.

Thomas Hughes, aged fourteen at the beginning of the reign, was a boy under Dr. Arnold at Rugby, and has since helped to quicken a new generation with the spirit of his teacher, in the most popular of his books, Tom Brown's School-days, first published in 1856. It was followed, in 1861, by Tom Brown at Oxford.

59. Alfred Tennyson (ch. xiii., § 27), in December, 1883, was raised to the peerage as Baron Tennyson of Aldworth, Sussex, and of Freshwater, Isle of Wight. He published in 1885 Tiresias and other Poems; in 1886, Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After; in 1889, Demeter and other Poems, with the old life strong at the close of an active career of sixty years, dating from

TO A.D. 1890.]

WILLIAM MORRIS.

1083 the volume of Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson, first published in 1830. Tennyson's verse has shown the way from death to life through the sustained song of immortality, his In Memoriam; has once more spiritualised our national romance hero, and associated tales of Arthur with the Conscience, the King within the human breast. Among poets of the reign of Victoria, he, too, has worn his laurel as a "blameless king."

William Morris, born in 1834, the son of a rich merchant, after education at Marlborough and at Exeter College, studied painting, turned to poetry, and published in 1858 some short Arthurian pieces, The Defence of Guenevere, with "King Arthur's Tomb," "Sir Galahad," "The Chapel in Lyonesse," and other poems. In 1863 he applied his genius as an artist to the founding of an establishment for the supply of refined household decorations. In 1867 he published a long poem on The Life and Death of Jason; and from 1868 to 1870 the series of tales in verse, drawn chiefly from the old legends of Greece and Scandinavia, supposed to be told by "certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway, who, having considered all that they had heard of The Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and after many troubles and the lapse of many years came, old men, to some Western land, of which they had never before heard : there they died, when they had dwelt there certain years, much honoured of the strange people." This book, in four volumes, the delight of painters, established William Morris's high reputation as a poet. It passed through five editions before the end of the year in which its last volume appeared. Love is Enough; or, the Freeing of Pharamond, followed in 1873; then in 1876 The Eneid of Virgil in English Verse. William Morris then drew freely from the stores of the old Scandinavian literature, which is second only to the ancient Greek in freshness and vigour of life. He joined Mr. Eirikr Magnusson in giving English form to the tales of Grettir the Strong, 1869; the Story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs, 1870; Three Northern Love Stories, 1875; and produced in 1877 a poem on The Story of Sigurd, the Volsung, and the Fall of the Niblungs. In 1882 William Morris published five Lectures, which had been delivered in 1878-81, on Hopes and Fears for Art; and in 1884 a little book on Art and Socialism, turning with deep sincerity from poetry that he had been treating, perhaps, too much as an ornament apart from the real work of life, to verse

and prose applied directly in aid of the socialist view of its chief problems, as The Dream of John Ball, in 1890. A

Lewis Morris, born in Carmarthen, educated at Sherborne School and at Jesus College, Oxford, took his M.A. in 1858, was called to the bar in 1861, and was in practice as a conveyancing barrister when his Songs of Two Worlds appeared, in 1871, followed by two more volumes under the same title in 1874 and 1875. In 1876 and 1877 his reputation was confirmed and extended by the Epic of Hades, which applied the wisdom of old classical mythology to those higher interests of life that are to-day as they have ever been. In December, 1878, Lewis Morris published Gwen, a drama in Monologue; in 1880, The Ode of Life; in 1883, Songs Unsung; in 1886, Gycia, a Tragedy; in 1887, Songs of Britain. In 1890 his Works, which had passed separately through many editions, were collected into a single volume.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose verse is alive with music, was born in 1837, son of an admiral by the daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. He was for a time at Balliol College, Oxford, but left without graduation and went abroad, attaching himself in Italy to Walter Savage Landor, and coming, in France, under the influence of Victor Hugo. After publishing in 1861 two plays, The Queen Mother and Rosamond, and in 1865 the tragedy of Chastelard, Mr. Swinburne leapt to fame in the same year, 1865, by the great success of his play written in the form of a Greek tragedy, Atalanta in Calydon. His next book, Poems and Ballads, in 1866, was subjected to an immoderate attack on what were considered to be moral grounds. A Song of Italy followed in 1867; William Blake, a Critical Essay, in 1868; Songs before Sunrise, in 1871; Bothwell, a Tragedy, in 1874; Songs of Two Nations, and also Essays and Studies and George Chapman, a Critical Essay, in 1875; Erechtheus, a Tragedy, in 1876; A Note on Charlotte Brontë, in 1877; a second series of Poems and Ballads, in 1878; A Study of Shakespeare, in 1880, and in the same year, Studies in Song, Songs of the Springtides, and Specimens of Modern Poets, the Heptalogia, or Seven against Sense. In 1881 Mr. Swinburne published Mary Stuart, a Tragedy; in 1882, Tristram of Lyonesse; in 1883, A Century of Roundells; in 1884, A Midsummer Holiday, and Poems; in 1885, Marino Faliero, a Tragedy; in 1886, Miscellanies; in 1889, a third series of Poems ant Ballads, and a Study of Ben Jonson.

1896

TO A.D. 1890.]

POETS AND NOVELISTS.

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George Meredith, born in 1828, left law for literature and began his career with a volume of poems in 1851, followed in 1855 by The Shaving of Shagpat, a burlesque prose poem; and in 1857 by Farina, a Legend of Cologne. In 1859 he began his career as a thoughtful novelist who weighs his words and packs good wit into his sentences, with The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. This was followed by Evan Harrington, in 1861; Modern Love, and Poems of the English Roadside, in 1862; Emilia in England (1864), Rhoda Fleming (1865), Vittoria (1867), Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), Beauchamp's Career (1876), The Egoist, a Comedy in Narrative (1879), The Tragic Comedians (1880), Poems and Lyrics, or the Joy of Earth (1883), Diana of the Crossway (1885), Sandra Belloni (1886).

William Allingham, born in 1828, at Ballyshannon, died in 1889. He published his first volume of poems in 1850; Day and Night Songs, and the Music Master, in 1854; Fifty Modern Poems, in 1865; Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, a Modern Poem in Twelve Chapters, republished from Fraser's Magazine in 1869. His Rambles by Patricius Walker were published in 1873. In 1877 William Allingham collected his best work into a volume of Songs, Poems, and Ballads. In 1883 this volume was followed by Evil May Day, and a play called Ashby Manor.

Jean Ingelow, born at Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1820, published her first volume of Poems in 1863, a second and a third series appeared between that date and 1885, also A Story of Doom in 1867; Stories Told to a Child and Mopsa the Fairy, in 1869, followed by several prose novels.

60. Mrs. Henry Wood, born also in 1820, in Worcestershire, obtained her first success as a novelist with East Lynne in 1861, followed by many other stories until her death in February, 1887.

Dinah Maria Mulock, born in 1826, at Stoke-uponTrent, published her first novel, The Ogilvies, in 1849, followed by Olive in 1850, The Head of the Family in 1851, Agatha's Husband in 1852, and her most successful novel, John Halifax, Gentleman, in 1857. Many more works followed. In 1864 Miss Mulock received a small pension from the Civil List. In 1865 she was married to Mr. George Lillie Craik, and as Mrs. Craik she continued actively her wholesome contributions to the literature of the day. She died in October, 1887.

Mrs. Eliza Lynn Linton, daughter of the Vicar of Crosthwaite, in Cumberland, was born in 1822, and, as Miss