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recent melancholy death cut short a life full of the highest promise. The quaint humour and wonderful facility of rhythm shown in his published verses have only quite recently been displayed to the world in the two little collections entitled respectively Lapsus Calami and Quo Musa tendis? but his remarkable gifts in this direction had long been known to the school and college friends who remember eagerly scanning each new number of the Etonian. a short-lived school publication, then edited, if we recollect right, by Mr. G. N. Curzon, recently Under-Secretary of State for India, for some gem of comic verse from his pen. Mr. Stephen had done some good journalistic work for the St. James's Gazette and other papers, and it was his intention, had he lived, to devote himself to serious prose writing. An additionally melancholy association attaches to his name from the fact that he had been tutor to the late Duke of Clarence, whose death preceded his by a few weeks only.

The well-known critic, Mr. H. D. Traill, has, in an article very recently published, congratulated (and scared) the readers of the day by the alarming information that at least fifty minor poets, and these of no mediocre kind, live and sing among us, each with a name and following, notwithstanding the continual self-attributed censure that ours is a prosaic age. A prosaic age no doubt it is, in

which poetry has a less recognised place than when Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were its representatives among us; but perhaps this is partly caused by the very extension of the faculty of verse, and the transmutation of many who were the poet's chosen audience into his imitators or rivals or rivals feeble imitators, hopeless rivals, yet sufficiently in the stream to be drawn away from that noble part of the appreciative listener, without whom Shakespeare himself might speak in vain. There is no doubt, for instance, that in the division of the poetical world which is occupied by women there are twenty at least whose inspiration is stronger, and their composition at least as refined, as that which gave to Mrs. Hemans and Miss Landon a position and fame which is never aspired to by those gentler singers of to-day. The names of Christina Rossetti and Jean Ingelow, for example, would have been placed much higher among their contemporaries had their work been produced in the beginning of the century. Having acknowledged, as has been done in a previous chapter, that no woman has yet come to the highest honour in this divine art, it may be added that these ladies are neither of them the mere feminine voices, small and sweet, with which a previous age was content, but have a good right to be called poets, and have written much which the general reader may well accept

with pleasure and gratitude. These are no idle singers of an empty day, but true and gentle minstrels, illustrating in many a subdued yet musical measure the story of human life, and more wise than some of their greater brethren, contenting themselves with that, without flying to remote antiquity to repeat over and over an oft-told tale. The same may be said of Dora Greenwell, Mrs. Craik, Mrs. Knox, Mrs. Pfeiffer, and others, in respect to lyrical poems. Mrs. Webster, Mrs. Hamilton King, and Miss Harwood have struck a bolder string in the form of the poetical drama— with no inconsiderable success.

Mr. Robert Bridges, whose modesty or indifference to fame has kept him hitherto much out of the knowledge of the crowd, ought on his intrinsic merits to have more space in this record than it is possible to accord to him. We can only allude here to a little collection of Shorter Poems recently published, extracted from his larger works, in which some exquisite little lyrics will be found. Mr. W. E. Henley has cultivated melody less than force, and may be said to be on the Browning side of our poetical bands, and full of energy and power.

At the end of all comes a graceful and lively band, the troubadours of modern time, the singers of the drawing-room and studio, touching with light lays the popular humorous affectations and

VOL. II

M

follies as they fly. The chief of these social poets is Mr. Frederick Locker, who in our time may be said to have set the fashion of those seductive criticisms of life which are so airy and brilliant, and which carry home an occasional sarcasm and reproof in amusing and animated verses which even the culprit cannot but enjoy. Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Alfred Austin and Mr. Andrew Lang are the chief members of this bright band, and are all, we record with pleasure, in full exercise of their faculty, and likely in their varying ways to give us, we hope, much more.

The other singers who still have their laurels to earn are too numerous to name. Mr. William Watson, striking at once a graver and a stronger note, may be instanced as an example of them. And mention may also be made here of two sad spirits, soon cut off, Constance Naden, whose poems were of great promise, if of too metaphysical a tone, and Amy Levy, a young Jewess, in whom there is a glimpse of a more subtle inspiration—too soon quenched, however, to enable us to do more than sadly guess that it might have come to a more than ordinary power had it ever been permitted to reach the regions of the maturer soul.

CHAPTER V

THE YOUNGER NOVELISTS

THERE is perhaps no name so influential and important in the imaginative literature of the half-century as that of George Eliot, 1819-80 (Marian Evans, Mrs. Lewes, Mrs. Cross, however the reader chooses to call her). Notwithstanding the pre-eminence of Dickens and Thackeray in the history of fiction, the new and anonymous writer who in 1857 stepped suddenly into fame and a resplendent place in contemporary literature, remains even more remarkable than they in the perspective of the time. Her art is not in the least like theirs; it is in one sense deeper, free of the vulgarities and commonplaces of the one, and of the limitation imposed upon himself by the other. Both of these greatest novelists of our time were Londoners, and devoted to the elucidation, one of the lower, and the other of the upper region of the human society which gathers there

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