mental refinement and classical taste and intellectual energy which mark all the writings of our author.' 140. Other Prose Writers.-Among the writers of prose whose works are more or less of a miscellaneous character, and do not fall easily into any of the foregoing classes, the name of the famous English Opium-Eater' stands pre-eminent, both for the value and variety of his works, and the beauty and fastidious finish of his style. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was born near Manchester, his father being a merchant there; and he was educated at Oxford, where he led a singularly reserved and uncommunicative life, absorbing himself wholly in the study of French, Latin, and Greek literature. Towards the close of his academical career, he made the acquaintance of Wordsworth, his visit to whom at Grasmere (see p. 165, s. 108) is minutely described in Chapter V. of his Autobiographic Sketches. In 1808-9 he moved into Wordsworth's cottage, which the latter had vacated for his house at Allan Bank; and here, in the midst of the lake-country, he lived for nearly twenty years. It was at this time that the habit to which we owe his famous Confessions began to gain ground, and he became a confirmed opium-eater, reaching at last the appalling dose of 8,000 drops a day. His experiences of, and ultimate victory * over, this enthralling drug, are contained in the papers published in 1821, in the London Magazine, which form his first literary production. Henceforth he became a frequent contributor, and a littérateur of established reputation. The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in a separate form in 1822, were followed by a crowd of brilliant works, which in the edition of 1862-3 occupy sixteen octavo volumes. The bulk of his productions were contributed to Tait's Magazine and Blackwood. Among them may be particularised the Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy, 1824; Logic of Political Economy, 1844; Suspiria de Profundis, 1845; the Vision of Sudden Death, 1849; and the personal recollections comprised in the two volumes of Autobiographic Sketches and Recollections of the Lakes, forming xiv. and ii. of Messrs. Black's complete edition of his works above referred to. Of individual pieces the famous Essay on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts, published in Blackwood in 1827, and the historical sketch of the Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars, may be particularised. De Quincey died on December 8, 1859, at The word 'victory' is used advisedly. Mr. Minto (Handbook of English Prose Literature, 1872, p. 41) points out that he never wholly relinquished the use of opium, although he ceased to be its slave. See 'H. A. Page's' Life, ed. 1881, ii. 309-339, for a medical view of his case. Prof. Masson has also written a Life. Edinburgh, where, for the latter years of his life, he had chiefly resided. The extract from his article in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Shakespeare, at pp. 65, 66, gives but a faint idea of De Quincey's supreme excellence, his nervous, copious, and elastic style of writing, in which he can scarcely be said to be approached by any modern, Macaulay alone excepted. For a lengthy analysis of its elements and qualities, the reader is referred to Mr. Minto's Handbook of English Prose Literature, where are adequately treated the compositions of this great writer, whose eloquent productions have been rightly termed a combination which centuries may never reproduce, but which every generation should study as one of the marvels of English literature.' * Mrs. Anna Jameson (1794-1860) also requires to be mentioned among the prose writers of this epoch. Mrs. Jameson was a delicate and discriminating art-critic. Her chief works are Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and near London, 1842; Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters, 1845; Legends of the Monastic Orders, 1850; Legends of the Madonna, 1852, &c. We cannot do better than devote some of the last lines of our account of the prose writers to one who has but recently gone from us, and whose strenuous exertions to promote a sound and cheap form of literature (the story of which he has told at length in his Passages from a Working Life), were unflagging and unfeigned. The name of Charles Knight (1791-1873) is familiar in many a household, where, at the commencement of the century, letters, if represented at all, were represented by the Book of Dreams, or the Lives of Illustrious Highwaymen. To the Quarterly Magazine, in which his contributors were Macaulay, Praed, Henry and Derwent Coleridge, Moultrie, and others, we have already referred (see p. 208, s. 135). But the works with which his name will remain more permanently associated are the Penny Magazine, first issued in 1832; and the Penny Cyclopædia, commenced in the following year, and finished in 1844. In his Struggles of a Book against Excessive Taxation, the author gives an interesting account of these two publications, which, however excellent, embarrassed him pecuniarily for years. Of his other magazines, periodicals, and miscellaneous works, we can only mention William Shakespere, a Biography, 1842, written to accompany his Pictorial Edition of that dramatist's works, and the excellent Quarterly Review, July, 1861, 35 (cx.) Popular History of England, a book which may be held to have fairly attained its author's object, as tracing out and exhibiting all the movements that have gone to form the characters of the people. With many of Charles Knight's enterprises (the Penny Cyclopædia especially) was connected a writer to whom our obligations during the course of this work have been considerable. Frequent reference has been made in the notes to the valuable History of the English Language and Literature of George L. Craik (1798–1866), Professor of English Literature at Queen's College, Belfast. One of his earliest works was the Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, 1831; begun at the suggestion of Lord Brougham. Mr. Craik was also the author of The English of Shakespeare; the Romance of the Peerage, 1848-50; and other books characterised by sound reasoning and conscientious accuracy. 141. The Dramatic Writers.-The closing words of the last chapter might fitly serve as a prelude to this too brief section of our modern literature. Jerrold, Bulwer, and T. W. Robertson are the three most prominent names among the deceased dramatists of this chapter. The first, Douglas Jerrold (1803–57), was one of the most prompt and pungent of modern English wits. Originally a midshipman in the Royal Navy, he made his début as a dramatist in 1829, with the nautical and domestic drama' of Black-Eyed Susan; or, All in the Downs, produced at the Surrey Theatre, with T. P. Cooke, the actor, in the principal part of William. The piece grew in popularity, and ran for three hundred nights. 'All London went over the water, and Cooke became a personage in society, as Garrick had been in the days of Goodman's Fields. Covent Garden borrowed the play, and engaged the actor for an after-piece . . . . Actors and managers throughout the country reaped a golden harvest.' So did not, however, the author, whose profits by what enriched so many, were but small. His first successful effort was followed by the Rent Day, produced in 1832, and based upon Wilkie's picture; Bubbles of the Day, 1842, which Charles Kemble said had wit enough for three comedies; Time Works Wonders, 1845; and numerous other plays. Jerrold was also one of the pillars of Punch, and author of several novels and humorous pieces, such as St. Giles and St. James, 1851; A Man Made of Money, 1849; Chronicles of Clovernook, 1846; the inimitable Caudle Lectures, 1846; and the pathetic Story of a Feather, 1844. Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold, by Blanchard Jerrold, 1859, 85. The chief dramatic works of Lord Lytton are the Lady of Lyons, 1838; Richelieu, 1838; and the comedy of Money, 1840; all still popular on the stage (see p. 199, s. 135). Lord Lytton also published, in 1869, a rhymed comedy entitled Walpole; or, Every Man has his Price; and, in aid of the funds for the establishment of the Guild of Literature and Art, he wrote Not so Bad as we Seem, 1851, of which Punch wittily remarked that it was 'Not so Good as we Expected.' It did not obtain a permanent place upon the stage. A generation younger than Jerrold and Lytton, T. W. Robertson (1829-71) inaugurated a new school of realistic comedy by a series of six plays, which for some years rendered the Prince of Wales' Theatre one of the most fashionable resorts in London. In 1865 the Saturday Review remarked that 'some noise has been made by the production of a comedy called Society'; in 1865. Ours was 'the pet novelty of the day.' Caste, the greatest of the series, followed in 1867, and the Caste company,' the dramatist's biographer declares, soon 'constituted a regular school for young actors-a kind of little Comédie Française.' Play appeared in 1868, School in 1869, and M.P., when health was failing, in 1870. 'Robertson,' says an American critic, was a disciple of Thackeray. . . . His plays employ by means of action precisely the expedients that Thackeray employed by means of narrative-namely, contrast and suggestion. . . In Caste, which is the best of his plays and the epitome of his observation and thought, the echoes of Pendennis and Vanity Fair are clearly audible. The piece is not imitative. Its originality ... would never be questioned; but there can be no doubt as to its school.' The Principal Dramatic Works of T. W. R. 2 vols. 1889. Edited, with a memoir, by his son. CHAPTER IX. THE MODERN AGE (continued), [DECEASED AUTHORS.] 1875-1896. 142. SUMMARY OF THE PERIOD.-143. TENNYSON AND BROWNING.-144. OTHER POETS: MATTHEW ARNOLD, DANTE GABRIEL AND CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, SIR HENRY TAYLOR, WILLIAM MORRIS, ETC.-145. THE NOVELISTS: DISRAELI, GEORGE ELIOT, R. L. STEVENSON, KINGSLEY, TROLLOPE, CHARLES READE, ETC.-146. THE HISTORIANS: CARLYLE, FROUDE, GREEN, FREEMAN, ETC.— 147. THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THEOLOGIANS: CARLYLE, NEWMAN, PUSEY, LIGHTFOOT, COLENSO, ETC.-148. THE SCIENTIFIC WRITERS: DARWIN, LYELL, HUXLEY, TYNDALL, ETC.-149. OTHER PROSE WRITERS: JOHN FORSTER, JAMES SPEDDING, SIR A. HELPS, ETC.-150. THE DRAMATIC WRITERS. 142. Summary. Since the foregoing chapter was penned the century has drawn more than twenty years nearer to its close, and thegreat majority' to which allusion was then made has therefore been augmented by many a name which the plan of this work did not at that time allow us to include, but which must now be reckoned among those of our 'deceased anthors.' Tennyson, whom Wordsworth fifty years ago described as 'decidedly the first of living poets,' and who so nobly maintained his pre-eminence to the last, has now 'crossed the bar,' and 'that which drew from out the boundless deep' has turned again home. Three years earlier, in the loved Italy of which he had written 'Open my heart and you will see Robert Browning, a poet of widely-divergent genius, had marched breast forward' into the unseen; and both poets now rest at the feet of Chaucer in the Abbey. At Laleham, where he was born, the grass grows green round the grave of Matthew Arnold. At quiet little Birchington rests Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whom they laid by the pleasant shore, and in the hearing of the wave;' his sister Christina, who takes high rank among our female poets, lies |