THE ENGLISH POETS AND DRAMATISTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE.

If we may be permitted to draw so bold a parallel, we should be tempted to compare the Victorian Age of English literature to some one, who, by a freak of fortune, finds himself the heir to a noble inheritance and an illustrious name, and who is painfully conscious, that he must spare no efforts, and shirk no labour, to prove himself worthy of such a succession. The marvellous events of the preceding half-century the French Revolution, the dazzling, meteoric career of Napoleon, and all the strange episodes with which these were associated had stirred up the dullest minds, and awakened slumbering genius throughout Europe. In England, the spirit of the age embodied itself, and found a vent, not only in the enthusiastic earlier poetry of Southey, Shelley, and Wordsworth, but more or less in the leading prose-writers of the day. One great theme absorbed the universal interest-the wonderful present, with its inscrutable but inevitable influence on the future destinies of the human race. Such were the times that witnessed the amazing outburst of genius which forms the chief glory of the reigns of George III. and George IV., and was not quite exhausted till towards the close of the short reign of William IV. a period which we shall hereafter distinguish by the simple general designation of "the Georgian Age."

The Victorian Age, on the other hand, opens with eleven years of profound peace. These, it is true, were years of great commercial activity, and till then unexampled industrial progress, but they were no less

distinguished by a remarkable dearth of stirring public events. Even when, in 1848, nearly the whole of the European continent was convulsed by revolutionary movements, England remained a passive and impassionate, though not an indifferent spectator; and the same remark applies to the Italian war of 1859, the political changes in Germany in the year 1866, and to the French campaign of 1870-1871. In the long interval of forty-five years, between 1837 and 1882, only two public events of immediate national importance to England can be recorded: the Crimean war and the Indian Mutiny; and strongly as both of these affected contemporary English literature, their influence, like the events themselves, was of brief duration.

In the literary aspect of the period now under consideration, we shall consequently find no traces of any influence from without, irresistibly stimulating unconscious talent to preternatural fertility and precocious ripeness. The age is not given to enthusiasm, and is rather one of sober, toilsome, and tranquil research. Hence it is, that the Victorian poets, abandoning the older models, have mostly followed in the path marked out for them by Wordsworth in his later style of poetry, seeking their subjects mainly within themselves, and uniting them with just so much action, and so much of external life, as they considered necessary to illustrate their meaning and secure the reader's attention. This leaning towards philosophical poetry will hardly surprise us when we recollect, that at the accession of Queen Victoria, in 1837, Wordsworth was the only great living poet, who still continued to write. John Keats had died in 1821, Shelley in 1822, Bloomfield and Wolfe in 1823, Byron in 1824, Bishop Heber in 1826, Crabbe in 1832, Sotheby in 1833, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834, Mrs. Hemans and Hogg in 1835. Southey, it is true, lived till 1843, but the latter years of his life were clouded by hopeless idiocy. Campbell survived till 1844, and Moore till 1852, but for a long time before their death, the chief labours of both had been biographical, critical,

or historical. Rogers lived till 1855, but he produced nothing of importance after 1822; and among the few other poets, whose life was prolonged into the Victorian Age, there was not one whose intellectual caliber equalled that of Wordsworth.

The three pre-eminent dramatists of the Victorian Age are Knowles, Talfourd, and Lord Lytton. In the two former we discover a decided tendency to return. to the great masters of the English and the Greek stage; while Lord Lytton seems more ambitious of emulating the flowing and musical diction of Byron's dramas. Mr. Knowles, it is true, produced a great deal previous to 1837, but as he lived for twenty-five years after the accession of Queen Victoria, and during this time his pieces, in which for several years he continued to perform himself, attained the acme of their popularity, we have not hesitated to assign him a place among the Victorian dramatists.

If it be asked: what is the great characteristic of the Victorian literature in general? we shall reply: its infinite variety, and its wideness of range. It cannot, indeed, boast of a dramatist like Shakespeare, a poet like Milton, or a philosopher like Bacon, but it has left no department of learning untouched, no sort of elegant writing unattempted. With rare exceptions, too, the literature of the period respires a genial, humanizing spirit which in the older literature we should seek in vain. Even the satire of the Victorian Age, when most pungent, will compare most favourably with the scathing sarcasm of Swift, or the acrimonious venom of Churchill.

We now proceed to our task of enumerating the English Poets and Dramatists of the Victorian Age, who can justly lay claim to literary distinction. We shall begin with the small band, who, like setting stars sparkling in the dawn, form a connecting link between the Victorian and the Georgian era, and then pass on, to reach gradually, and without abrupt transition, the writers who have shed on this age the full and continuous lustre of their genius.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon [1802-1838], born at Hans Place, Chelsea, published her earliest poetical compositions in the Literary Gazette with the signature L. E. L. Her most important work was the Improvisatrice. In 1838 she married Mr. George Maclean, governor of Cape Coast Castle, and accompanied her husband to Africa, but about four months later was found dead in her room, in consequence, it was believed, of taking an overdose of prussic acid. Her last verses, addressed to the Pole-star, which she had watched on her voyage till it sunk below the horizon, cannot fail to awaken a tender and melancholy interest in the bosom of every reader:

THE POLE-STAR.

A star has left the kindling sky
A lovely northern light;
How many planets are on high,
But that has left the night.

I miss its bright familiar face,
It was a friend to me;
Associate with my native place,
And friends beyond the sea.

It rose upon our English sky.
Shone o'er our English land,
And brought back many a loving eye,
And many a gentle hand.

It seemed to answer to my thought,
It called the past to mind,

And with its welcome presence brought
All I had left behind.

The voyage it lights no longer, ends
Soon on a foreign shore;

How can I but recall the friends

That I may see no more?

Meet with a deeper, dearer love,
For absence shows the worth
Of all from which we then remove,
Friends, home and native earth.

Thou lovely polar star, mine eyes
Still turned the first on thee,
Till I have felt a sad surprise

That none looked up with me.

But thou hast sunk upon the wave,
Thy radiant place unknown;

I seem to stand beside a grave,
And stand by it alone.

Farewell! ah, would to me were given
A power upon thy light!
What words upon our English heaven
Thy loving rays should write!

Kind messages of love and hope
Upon thy rays should be;
Thy shining orbit should have scope
Scarcely enough for me.

Oh, fancy vain as it is fond,

And little needed too;

My friends! I need not look beyond
My heart to look for you.

T. H. Bayly.

The most successful of modern song-writers, if we except Thomas Moore, was Thomas Haynes Bayly, a native of Bath, who was born in 1797, and died in 1839, at the comparatively early age of forty-two. His songs, I'd be a Butterfly; Oh, no, we never mention her; Isle of Beauty; the Soldier's Tear; We met 'twas in a crowd; She wore a wreath of Roses, long maintained, and some of them still maintain, their popularity. Though educated for the church. Mr. Bayly adopted literature as a profession, and the last years of his life were years of constant care and struggle.