(Go to your mother, child, and wipe your nose!)
Balmy, and breathing music like the south,
(He really brings my heart into my mouth!)
Fresh as the morn and brilliant as its star,
(I wish that window had an iron bar!)
Bold as the hawk, yet gentle as the dove,
(I'll tell you what, my love,

I cannot write, unless he's sent above!)

And in short, simple sentimental verse, Hood has produced some classical pieces; take, for instance, The Death-Bed, which touches the very heart :

We watch'd her breathing thro' the night, Our very hopes belied our fears,

Her breathing soft and low,

As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.

So silently we seem'd to speak,

So slowly moved about,

As we had lent her half our powers

To eke her living out.

Our fears our hopes belied-
We thought her dying when she slept
And sleeping when she died.

For when the morn came dim and sad,
And chill with early showers,
Her quiet eyelids closed, she had
Another morn than ours.i

We must here mention, not as a social poet, but as a humorous imitator of Hood, the author of the very jocose Ingoldsby Legends (1840-47), RICHARD BARHAM (1788-1848), who, as "Thomas Ingoldsby," wrote a series of witty legends in a modern dress. But in comparison with the golden humour of Hood, they are rather insipid; at the present day they have lost their popularity. They contain more verbal witticisms than real humour.

Modern England is not rich in political poets; the peaceful development of English political life has preserved the country, by timely reforms, from precipitate revolutions. France and Germany have furnished more materials for political poetry, a symptom of unrest, and one hardly favourable to artistic expansion. England's political verse finds its outlet in the pages of Punch; there is of course no need of political poems on the general wants of the day, in a country where the government is just what the people desire and deserve.

However, once in this century the English people came near obtaining for themselves, by force of arms, that which a covetous and short-sighted caste withheld from them; the right of selling their labour for bread, unhindered by Customs officers and landowning speculators in corn. This was in the thirties, when, incited by the example of the French revolutionists of July, the demand for political reform waxed louder and louder, till at last, in 1832, the Reform Bill put an end to the most crying need in the representation of the people. But the large landowners, who had had to put up with the extension of the franchise and the abolition of the "Rotten Boroughs," clung

so much the more closely to their remaining privileges, the almost exclusive possession of the land under the protection of an execrable legislation; the right of fixing the price at which the working-classes must buy their corn; that is, by the imposition of a prohibitive duty on foreign wheat.

In his poem The Wisdom of Satan, Ebenezer Elliott, the corn-law rhymer, sang as follows:

:

If Hell itself were Britain,

Could worse than this be said?
If Devils were lords in England,
They could but tax our bread.

To Robert Peel, once the stout defender of the famine artificially protected by the State, there has been erected in London a statue, the inscription on which expresses the gratitude of the nation to him alone for free-trade legislation. If justice were done in public life, we should see on the finest site in London the statues of the two men who, by their speeches and their writings, introduced that important revolution in English domestic economy long before Peel, carried it out in spite of Peel, and only left the minister the honour of signing his name to the best law that any English Parliament ever passed. These two men were RICHARD COBDEN (1804-65) and EBENEZER ELLIOTT (1781–1849), the former a man of knowledge, an orator, an agitator; the latter a simple "hand," a worker in iron, without any higher education than he was able to obtain for himself with difficulty in his few hours of leisure, but a poet! His remarkable eloquence atones for his lack of artistic finish, and under the spell of his fervent indignation we forget to ask if the right word is always used in the right place. In his Corn-Law Rhymes (1832) Ebenezer Elliott has boldly attacked the great question, how to fill the stomachs of the people, and has answered it plainly. The Corn Laws were a measure taken by the rich few against the famishing multitude. Since 1815, since the victory of the Tories under Wellington, the conqueror of Napoleon Bonaparte, the rich alone had had their say: now at last one of the famishing multitude spoke, and so loudly, that the whole nation heard his words, and the privileged blood-suckers of England grew pale with terror at such a poem, for instance, as the following:

A PROLETARIATE FAMILY IN ENGLAND

They sold the chairs, they took the bed, and went;
A fiend's look after them the husband sent;
His thin wife held him faintly, but in vain ;
She saw the alehouse in his scowl of pain-
Hurrah, for bread-tax'd England!

Upon her pregnant womb her hand she laid,

Then stabb'd her living child! and shriek'd, dismay'd-
"Oh, why had I a mother?" wildly said

That saddest mother, gazing on the dead-
Hurrah for bread-tax'd England!

But that boy had a sister-where is she?
Dying, where none a cherub fall'n may see :-
"Mother! O come!" she sobs with stifled groan,
In that blest isle, where pity turns to stone-
Hurrah for bread-tax'd England!

Before the judge, the childless stood amazed,
With none to say, "My lord, the wretch is crazed."
Crowds saw her perish, but all eyes were dry;
Drunk, in the crowd, her husband saw her die !
Hurrah for bread-tax'd England!

O Wholesale Dealers in waste, want, and war!
Would that your deeds were written !-and they are!
Written and graved, on minds and hearts oppress'd;
Stamp'd deep, and blood-burnt-in, o'er realms unbless'd!
Hurrah for bread-tax'd England!

This may sound like passionate exaggeration, but in England, betwen 1815 and 1840, the corn duty or the bread tax was always accompanied by a kind of hunger-typhus, as often as a wet summer caused the potatoes to rot and the price of corn to rise exorbitantly. What endears these two poets, Hood and Elliott, to us of the present generation is that, unlike the contemplative, self-satisfied poets of the Lake School, they have a heart for the present and the future of their nation. To find a deeply sympathetic heart and a warm, patriotic spirit embodied in verse, we must read the poems of these two men.

Elliott experienced numerous persecutions. He shrugged his shoulders at the name of "The Beggars' Poet": what else could he have wished to be? The rich had poets enough to charm their ears with oriental and other elegances. And with regard to the charge of violent language, it is true that Elliott writes in big letters on political and poetical subjects; but when was moderation expected from a political writer? Was Aristophanes moderate in his language, or Juvenal, or Luther, or Hutten? Elliott has expressed this tersely in his trenchant manner : "Milk-andwater phrases never yet cauterised or extirpated a national cancer." Elliott was originally of a gentle nature, but his passionate sense of the people's distress had made him hard and bitter :

My heart once soft as woman's tear, is gnarled,
With gloating on the ills I cannot cure.

BARRY CORNWALL (1790-1874), whose real name was Bryan Walter Procter, was the father of the poetess Adelaide Procter. Like Walter Savage Landor, he belongs to two periods. He was a schoolfellow of Byron's at Harrow, and survived Dickens and Thackeray. Perhaps

the fact of his being so well known was the cause of his not devoting himself entirely to literature; he was an eminent lawyer, and his poems were only the amusement of his leisure hours.

Two things distinguish him as a poet: his fine ear for melody, for a tone which must touch the heart, and his deep sense of the miseries of life. As a writer of songs, he takes an honourable place by the side of Tennyson and Moore. His collection of poems entitled English Songs (1832) contains much that is very tuneful and fresh. We give here two short specimens of the style of his songs :

THE SEA

The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
Without a mark, without a bound.

It runneth the earth's wide regions round;
It plays with the clouds; it mocks the skies.
Or like a cradled creature lies.

I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more,
And backwards flew to her billowy breast,
Like a bird that seeketh its mother's nest ;
And a mother she was and is to me;
For I was born on the open sea!

From the other point of view of his poetic genius, Barry Cornwall stands shoulder to shoulder with Thomas Hood and Ebenezer Elliott. He looks fearlessly down into the dark abyss of modern humanity; and the groans arising from it awake an echo in him. Songs like The Convicts' Farewell (on their way to a penal colony), Il Penseroso and L'Allegro (night and morning of a man condemned to death), The Poor-house, and many others, will ensure him the name of a poet and a warm-hearted philanthropist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HOOD.-Complete edition in eleven volumes (1884). Poetical Works, with Introduction, by W. M. Rossetti, illustrations by G. Doré. Memorials of Tom Hood, by his daughter (1880); J. Ashton, Hood's Poetical Works, with memoir. BARHAM.-Numerous editions of the Ingoldsby Legends, one with drawings by Cruikshank.

ELLIOTT.-Poems, with Letters and Life, by Watkins; Searle, Life of E. Elliott. BARRY CORNWALL-Life, by Charles Lamb.

T

CHAPTER VI

THE ROMANTICISTS

1. ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-92)

HE tremendous revolution in the various nations was brought to an end by the fall of Napoleon; that in poetry by the early death of Byron and Shelley. The world had become weary of the frightful convulsions of the period between 1789 and 1815, and required above all things peace, rest and sleep. The Lake School offered the English world those three agreeable things. There was not much poetry in Wordsworth, but enough to satisfy the modest demands of weary minds. Then came ALFRED TENNYSON, the poet, who added to these gentle and peaceful strains of his predecessors heart-stirring and melodious lines. To Englishmen he made amends for the un-English Byron and Shelley, and at the same time his poetic genius far exceeded that of the Lake School.

He was the special poet of the Victorian portion of this century. Of his life there is but little to say. He was the son of a country clergyman, had no struggles, internal or external, to contend against, soon attained a position of affluence and reputation, and spent the long years of mature and old age in pleasant retirement in the Isle of Wight. In 1850 he became poet laureate, in succession to Wordsworth; and in 1884 he was made Lord Tennyson.

The question which must be asked concerning every poet who is accounted "great" by his countrymen is this: What has he told the world, or only his own country, that is new? And in Tennyson's case it may be answered much as follows: "He has helped to create modern English romance and has given many new forms to lyric poetry." By the romance of Tennyson and his successors, we understand a kind of revival of the tradition of King Arthur (compare p. 46). Now that this romance has quite died out, it can only be described as a fine idea, founded on a well-known poetic subject; but the poetry does not come from the heart; it is not genuine poetry. Even Tennyson's masterly skill failed to breathe life into the characters of Arthur,