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master, who had such enormous effect on the religion of the next generation, wrote, in 1832, "The Church as it now stands no human power can save." In his pamphlet, "The Principles of Church Reform," Dr. Arnold proposed to make the Church once more identical with the State, by admitting all

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denominations to its fold without requiring them to surrender any of their distinctive doctrines. So strangely unpractical were some of the schemes then suggested. The danger, like other terrors, passed away, and left religion and the Church stronger rather than weaker for the crisis. The strength came in no small measure from the party which was springing up, chiefly in Oxford.

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The

Oxford

Of Oxford, in 1830, Mark Pattison writes, "The true Movement. revolutionary spirit was already there, though it had not yet taken the precise direction which it afterwards did." He is speaking briefly of Oriel, and the tutors, J. H. Newman, R. I. Wilberforce, and R. H. Froude. "They were, however," he adds, "young men; Newman, the oldest of the three, was thirty, and little known. Neither my father nor his adviser could have any knowledge of the stimulating power which was latent in the Oriel tutors of 1830." The influence had

H. D.
TRAILL.

already spread outside Oxford. John Keble had published, in 1827, "The Christian Year." William Palmer, a graduate of Dublin who had come to study in Oxford, published, in 1832, his "Origines Liturgica." In 1829 Isaac Williams went to the curacy of Windrush, a little parish on the borders of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. In 1832-33 Newman was travelling in Italy, and unconsciously preparing for the great work he was to do. Pusey was quietly studying and teaching at Christ Church. Poetry, the study of ancient sources, humble ministerial work, earnest aspiration and profound learning, all these were to be represented in the movement which was to form the parallel in the nineteenth century to the Wesleyan movement of the eighteenth.

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Photo: Walker & Cockerell.
DR. THOMAS ARNOLD, BY
WILLIAM BEHNES.
(National Portrait Gallery.)

THE decade which followed upon the Battle of Waterloo was Literature crowded with splendid achievements in English poetry. Some,, it is true, of the great singers who have made the age famous had fallen silent, or had sung their best. Coleridge's "Christabel," that germ of the new romance poetry, which had already done its fertilising work in manuscript, had still to

1 "Memoirs," p. 28.

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make its published appearance in the second year of the period, and to be succeeded on the part of its author by a long interval of silence, broken only in the poet's later years by utterances of for the most part far inferior power. The greatest efforts of Wordsworth's long poetic life had been made several years before. Scott closed the series of his romantic poems with "The Lord of the Isles" in 1815, having published the first of the immortal Waverley Novels in the previous year. But between 1815 and 1823 all the best works of Shelley and Byron and the entire and too slender body of Keats's poetry were given to the world. A decade which covers the publication of "The Revolt of Islam" (1817), the "Prometheus Unbound" (1819), the “Hellas" and the "Adonais” (1821); of the Third (1816) and Fourth (1818) Cantos of "Childe Harold," the whole of the Byronic drama (1817-22), and “Don Juan" (1819-23) of the Endymion" (1818), of the "Hyperion" (1819), and of those two incomparable odes, "To a Nightingale" and "On a Grecian Urn," is not to be matched in any period of our own or perhaps of the world's history.

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1788-1824.

But the three poets whose masterpieces appeared in such Byron, quick succession during these seven or eight years had little but their productive fertility in common, and-though two of them are among the glories of English literature, while the third shares with Scott the honour of having given that literature its widest European vogue and influence-differed as strikingly in gift as in circumstances and career. Byron, whose fame came to him in a day and deserted him within a few years of his death for more than a generation, ranks far below Keats and still further below Shelley in the order of purely poetic merit. (There are even some who have denied him the title of poet altogether; and, indeed, at the height of the reaction, which followed upon the Byronic enthusiasm of the early century, it is not improbable that a majority of otherwise competent English critics would have concurred in that denial. Nor from one point of view is this surprising. The defects both of the matter and manner of Byron's poetry are not only patent but obtrusive. His workmanship is often rough and careless to the point of slovenliness; his imagination, though powerful, and his passion, though intense, are both of strictly limited range; he has nothing of Shelley's tremulous sensibility to beauty

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either in art or nature, nor any trace of Wordsworth's profound insight into the mystery of the external world. His command over the reader, where and when it is exercised, is a pure triumph of force and fire; his influence is akin to that of the

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orator rather than of the poet. It sweeps tempestuously over the emotions like one of the "white squalls" of his beloved Mediterranean over its waters, agitating them vehemently enough on their surface, but never stirring them to their depths. And it is perhaps to his mastery of these simple emotional effects that he owes his attraction for the foreign reader, who is naturally less sensible to those subtler poetic beauties which are

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in a great measure hidden from him under the unappreciated shades of meaning and the unfelt associations of a comparatively unfamiliar language.

Meanwhile, however, the progress of the years

"which

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bring the philosophic mind" or should bring it-to the critic as much as to the individual poet has to some extent rescued Byron from the neglect to which for well-nigh half a century he was consigned. In an age which has been rendered fastidious by familiarity with a hitherto unapproached excellence of artistic form in poetry, it is unlikely that he will ever regain his former popularity; but a generation of critics more catholic

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