counsels a noble discontent, a splendid restlessness, a multiplication, strengthening and development in every direction of the spiritual part of us. The future of the race upon earth does not greatly trouble Browning, he does not care to see to the end, nor is he dazzled by bright visions of a positivist paradise. His imagination wanders through the infinite deeps of the individual soul, his poetry is sacred to individual aspirations prophetic of the spirit's destiny.

The minor poets are of the school of Tennyson, of the subjective school or of the classic school; Browning, the dramatist, the student of the human soul, has but few followers. The narrowing in of the poetic horizon, the dearth of inspiring motives have driven the poets to a fashioning of delicate filigree work, of dainty devices, sometimes in revived, always in quaint and fanciful forms. Like Mr William Morris, the majority feel themselves to be 'idle singers of an empty day.' While Tennyson and the poets of culture bring the era to a close, Browning's subjects and methods, so unique, so independent of contemporary fashions, seem prophetic of a new. If Tennyson sums up the gains to the higher civilisation, Browning must be regarded as one of the renewers of the world's thought, a master builder who quarries his own marbles-somewhat roughly, it must be confessed-fashions and grinds his own tools, and builds on his own plans. He left it to others to preach the virtue of balanced liberalism, of practical, high-minded common sense, of loyalty to all noble memories of his native land, allegiance to a heritage of splendid traditions, sober freedom, equal laws, chivalrous manners; and pushed out into that unexplored and inexhaustible world of man's hidden and eternal nature, all earnest, bold and overbold, as a man and a poet must

be who attempts something widely different from a finished representation of the beautiful and finite a search into the obscure, deeply - hidden, yet omnipresent and everywhere recognisable infinite, whether in man or Nature, a quest which is none other than a quest for 'God's first creature, which is Light.'

APPENDIX.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

From 1770 to 1870.

1770.-Chatterton died. Wordsworth born. Letters of Junius. BurkeThoughts on the Present Discontents. (Goethe's 'Götz von Berlichingen.' Bürger's 'Lenore.')

1771.-Gray died, Scott born.

1772.-Coleridge born. (Lessing's 'Emilia Galotti.')

1773. Ferguson's poems. Goldsmith's 'She Stoops to Conquer.' 1774. -Southey born. (Goethe's 'Werther.') Goldsmith died. Berkeley's 'Siris.'

1775.-Savage Landor born. Lamb born.

1776.-Cowper begins to write.

1777.-Campbell born. Henry Hallam born.

1778. -Hazlitt born. Cowper's Olney Hymns composed.

1779.-Moore born.

Garrick died. Sheridan's 'Critic.'

1780.-Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets.'

1781.-Crabbe's 'Library.' Darwin's 'Botanic Garden.' (Kant's 'Kritik

der Reinen Vernunft.')

1782.-Cowper's first volume of poems.

1783.-Crabbe's 'Village.' Blake's 'Poetical Sketches.'

1784.-Johnson died. Leigh Hunt born.

1785.-De Quincey born. Peacock born. Cowper's 'Task.'

1786.-Burns' first poems.

1787.-Burns' poems; second issue.

1788.-Byron born. The Times newspaper.

1789.-Blake's 'Songs of Innocence.' Bowles' 'Sonnets.' Darwin's 'Loves

of the Plants.'

1790.-(French Revolution.)

1791.-Boswell's 'Life of Johnson.'

1792.-Shelley born. Paine's 'Age of Reason.'

1793.-Wordsworth's 'Descriptive Sketches.' Godwin's 'Political Justice.' Roger's Pleasures of Memory.'

201

1794.-Southey's 'Wat Tyler.' Blake's 'Songs of Experience.' 1795.-Keats born. Carlyle born. Landor's first poems.

1796.-Burns died. Hartley Coleridge born. Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace.'

1797.-Southey's poems. Coleridge's 'Annus Mirabilis.'

1798.-Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Landor's 'Gebir.' 1799.-Hood born. Campbell's 'Pleasures of Hope.'

1800.-Cowper died. Macaulay born. Coleridge's 'Translation of

Schiller.'

1801.-Southey's 'Thalaba.' Moore's 'Anacreon.' Newman born. 1802.-Scott's 'Border Minstrelsy.' Edinburgh Review.

born.)

1803. Mrs Heman's first poems.

1804.-(Bonaparte, Emperor. Kant died.)

(Victor Hugo

1805.-Scott's 'Lay of the Last Minstrel.' Southey's 'Madoc.'

1806.-Coleridge's 'Christabel.' Peacock's 'Palmyra.' (Goethe's 'Faust.') 1807.--Byron's 'Hours of Idleness.' Moore's 'Irish Melodies.' Crabbe's

'Parish Register.'

1808.-Scott's 'Marmion.' Quarterly Review established.

1809.-Alfred Tennyson born. E. B. Browning born. Charles Darwin

born.

1810.-Crabbe's 'Borough.' Southey's 'Curse of Kehama.' Scott's 'Lady of the Lake.'

1811.-Thackeray born. Shelley's 'Necessity of Atheism.' J. Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility.'

1812. -Dickens born. Browning born. Byron's 'Childe Harold,' 1 and 2

cantos.

1813.-Shelley's 'Queen Mab.' Scott's Rokeby.' Hogg's 'Queen's

Wake.'

1814.-Scott's 'Waverley.' Wordsworth's 'Excursion.' Southey's 'Roderick.' Byron's Corsair and Lara.' Cary's 'Translation of Dante.

1815. Scott's 'Lord of the Isles' and 'Guy Mannering.'

'Hebrew Melodies.'

·

Byron's

1816.-Byron left England. Childe Harold,' 3 canto, and 'Prisoner of

Chillon.' Shelley's 'Alastor.'

1817.-Keats' first poems. Moore's 'Lalla Rookh.' Byron's 'Manfred.' 1818.-Keats' 'Endymion.' Shelley's 'Revolt of Islam.'

1819.-John Ruskin born. Charles Kingsley born. George Eliot born. Byron's 'Don Juan.' Crabbe's 'Tales of the Hall.'

1820,- Shelley's 'Prometheus' and 'Cenci.' (Accession of George IV.)

1821. Keats died. Shelley's 'Adonais.'

Southey's 'Vision of Judgment.'

1822.--Shelley died. Matthew Arnold born.

De Quincey's 'Confessions.'

1823.-Lamb's 'Essays of Elia.' Elliott's poems. Moore's 'Loves of the

Angels.'

1824,--Byron died. Landor's 'Imaginary Conversations.' 1825.-Coleridge's 'Aids to Reflection.' T. Huxley born.

1826.-Carlyle's 'Life of Schiller.'

1827.-Blake died.

'Poems by Two Brothers.'

1828.-D. G. Rossetti born. G. Meredith born.

established.

Keble's 'Christian Year.'
Athenæum and Spectator

1829.--Milman's 'History of the Jews.' Mill's 'Analysis of the Human

Mind.'

1830.-Tennyson's first poems.

Hazlitt died. (Accession of William IV.) 1831.-Landor's 'Count Julian.' Lytton's ' Eugene Aram.' Poe's 'Raven.' 1832. Scott died. (Goethe died.) Crabbe died. Leigh Hunt's Poetical

Works.

1833.-Coleridge died. Charles Lamb died. 1834.-A. H. Hallam died. W. Morris born.

1835.- Hogg died. Browning's 'Paracelsus.'

Carlyle's 'Sartor Resartus.'

'Tracts for the Times.'

Alfred Austin born.

1836.-Dickens' 'Pickwick.' Landor's' Pericles and Aspasia.'

1837.-Browning's 'Strafford.' A. C. Swinburne born. (Accession of Victoria.) Carlyle's 'French Revolution.'

1838.-Lecky born. Mrs Browning's 'Seraphim,' and other poems. Carlyle's 'Sartor Resartus.' Dickens' 'Nicholas Nickleby.'

1839. Praed died. Carlyle's 'Chartism.'

1840.-Browning's 'Sordello.' Lever's 'Charles O'Malley.'

1841.-Browning's 'Bells and Pomegranates, 'Pippa Passes.' Carlyle's 'Heroes and Hero Worship.'

1842.-Browning's 'Dramatic Lyrics.'

Rome.'

Macaulay's Lays of Ancient

1843.-Southey died. Wordsworth became Poet Laureate. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.' Carlyle's 'Past and Present.' Ruskin's 'Modern Painters.'

1844.-Campbell died.

1845.-Hogg died. Lewes' 'History of Philosophy.'

1846.-Hookham Frere died. Carlyle's 'Oliver Cromwell.' Poems by

C. E. and A. Brontë.

1847.-Landor's 'Hellenics.' Longfellow's 'Evangeline.' Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair.' L. Hunt's 'Honey from Mt. Hybla.' Tennyson's Princess,'