his stanza and the cue of the humour of Beppo and Don Juan in Pulci. Already Hookham Frere had taken the Morganti Maggiore as the model of his Monks and Giants. It was the satiric and even cynical genius of Italy that attracted the self-exiled English poet; and it was this that in Leopardi was renewing its literature. Still more did the free if not licentious tone that still clung to Italian society from older times pass with the cynicism into Byron's later work; his Beppo and Don Juan laugh morality to scorn. The genius of Shelley and Keats had no Byronic tinge and was affected by a totally different stratum of Italian life. It was the atmosphere from ancient times, the beauty of the relics of Greek art, that touched the spirit of the dying exile. Whilst it was the sense of the great human struggle towards freedom and light so manifest through all Italy and Italian history that along with the beauty of the atmosphere and the mouldering beauty of the past enamoured the imagination of the great revolutionary idealist; into the three best products of his Italian life, his Lines on the Euganean Hills, his Cenci, and his Prometheus Unbound, there passed respectively the three spirits that draw the imaginative mind to Italy, the contrastive nobleness of her scenery, of her plains and Alps, the strange medley of beauty and tragic conflict that floats down from her mediaeval life, and the footfall of ancient Greece and her incarnation of the eternal strivings of the soul of man against its conditions.

2. Landor, though coeval with these three poets, had his Italian life thrown into the second quarter of the century. He connects the later Italian influence with that of the time of Shelley and Keats. And he lived more amongst the classics of the literature. Boccaccio was his favourite and moulded his later art. The Pentameron and many of his Imaginary Conversations are attempts to revive the brilliant intellectual life of Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In fact the idea of brief prose conversations between two famous characters from the same or different eras seems to have been suggested to him by the older Italian life and literature. For it was Florence with her memories of the Medicean times and their elevation of social and intellectual intercourse into a fine art that

impressed him most deeply. And it was Florence that later drew the Brownings and George Eliot and many lesser English writers to Italy and stirred their imaginations to activity by some phase of her ever-changeful genius. Her struggle for liberty and unity awakened enthusiasm in the hearts of not merely politicians but poets; and Landor, Mrs. Browning, and Swinburne gave fervid expression to the new spirit. Whilst the great shadow of her belated ecclesiasticism with all its memory of power and its atmosphere of art fell upon the minds of timid thinkers in the English Church and drew them in from the overpowering influence of new truths and new problems. Italianism in religion passed through the Oxford movement into English literature and thought either as an attractive or as a repellent force. Ancient and mediaeval Italy became again living powers in English imagination. Only in the latter half of the century did Italians in England, like the Rossettis, give direct impulse to English poetry and English art. The earlier impulse from Italians in England was more patriotic and revolutionary than artistic. Extra-parliamentary English politics was highly charged with Italian democratic fervour by Mazzini and his compatriots in London during the second quarter of the century. And his eloquent

command of our language made his writings as popular with young English thought as with young Italy. There is a combination of philosophy and almost poetic inspiration in his prose that made his lofty idealism and his gospel of republicanism a powerful antidote to Carlyle's ideal of tyranny based on hero-worship. And the heroic life of Garibaldi and the practical statesmanship of Cavour helped him to keep the attention of young and imaginative England fixed upon Italy and her destinies.

Section 4.

I. The same revolutionary sympathy was extended to Greece, Poland, and Spain in their attempts to throw off old tyrannies. But they were all too far from the average English mind to affect literature deeply. In the first half of the period Byron and Shelley were stirred to the heart by Greek struggles for independence; but part of their

sympathy was due to their admiration for ancient Greece, as we can see in Byron's Greek poems and references in Shelley's Hellas. Polish ardour was scattered through all Western Europe and thus left some mark in its patriotic exile upon the love of liberty in English literature. Spain during the Peninsular War drew the attention of literary England to her; but it was rather Spain of the Moorish occupation and Spain of American adventure than Spain contemporary. Lockhart's Spanish Ballads, Southey's Roderick, the Last of the Goths, Landor's Gebir, and Julian, and Washington Irving's Legends of the Conquest of Granada, Tales of the Alhambra, and Life of Columbus show the direction which interest in Spain took early in the century. As far as contemporary interest in Spain went, it was chiefly historical; Byron shows it in portions of Childe Harold, and Borrow in his Lavengro and other books. But Southey's Peninsular War and Napier's still more artistic and interesting history of the same episode in Spanish development are the truest outcome of English interest in contemporary Spain. In the second quarter of the century the reviving spirit of liberty and of literary and artistic taste drew new attention to the long-forgotten genius of the peninsula. And translations of Calderon and Lope de Vega, of Quevedo and Cervantes and of many of the old romances into English pointed out new sources of inspiration in Spain.

2. The North of Europe began in this period to enter on the stage of European literature. Swedenborg had already affected English religious thought by his mystic interpretations of the Bible and the world; and small churches of his disciples had been established in various cities of England before the close of the eighteenth century. But it was in the nineteenth that his influence spread to literature. Coleridge in the first quarter and Emerson in the second quarter of the century reveal in their lectures and essays traces of careful study of his works; he strengthened their idealism and tendency to mysticism without drawing them into his religious and philosophical eccentricities. But the English imagination was turned to a more wholesome fountain of poetry in the old Sagas by

the Frithiofsaga and other poems of the Swedish Tegnèr and the tragedies of the Danish dramatist Oehlenschläger. English literature began to recognise its Scandinavian kinship; the Norse epics and chronicles were translated and the old influence that had moulded Anglo-Saxon literature and language again appeared and quickened the reaction. towards the Teutonic elements of the national character and culture. The astonishing popularity of the novels of Frederika Bremer and of the folk tales of Hans Christian Andersen in England and America amongst the middle classes confirmed the interest in the Teutonic North and brought it to bear as a wholesome literary influence, especially in the new directions of purifying literature for the inclusion of women in its audience, and of enlisting it in the service of children. And this purification was perhaps affected by the wide fame of the Danish Thorwaldsen and his popularisation of sculpture in works that would appeal to the least sensuous and most puritan imagination.

3. Holland had long lost touch with England and the English spirit; nor did she regain it in this period unless we take into account the scholarship in her universities and especially in Leyden and the power that her old painters of low life still had over our realists with the pencil and the pen. Not a few of the English novelists and sketchers of the life of the people during both this century and last, like Fielding and Smollett, Galt and Dickens, Hogarth and Gillray, Cruikshank and Phiz, have manifestly studied the pictures of Teniers and Jan Steen. Russia had only begun to creep within the pale of literary Europe; and there may be perhaps a trace of the fables of Kriloff or the satirical novels of Gogol apparent in the atmosphere of English literature towards the middle of our century. But not till the last two decades of it do the traces of it become unmistakable; for then Ivan Turgenief and Dostoiefsky and Tolstoi were translated into English and were colouring the French influence on English fiction. Bowring's translations from Russian, Servian, Polish, Spanish, Magyar, Bohemian and Dutch poets, between 1821 and 1832, familiarised English writers with foreign work.

Section 5.

I. It was the vast expansion of Anglo-Saxondom in America, the East, and the Southern hemisphere that told most on the literature of the nineteenth century. The British dominions alone meant a lifetime of travel for a man of culture, if he were to make himself acquainted with them all. Books of travel came to be as common as the publication of letters and journals in the previous century. The doings of the English abroad, of the English navy and army and administrators, grew important enough to occupy a large part of the English literary world. The Napoleonic wars had drawn England far afield; and her interests lay in every section of the globe. Now it was an American war, again a new conquest in India ; now an Ashantee war, again the opium war with China; now the abolition of slavery in the West Indies and at the Cape of Good Hope, again the war in Burmah; now the constitutional agitations in Canada, again the growth of settlement in Australia; now the romance of Arctic voyagers, Parry or Franklin, again the achievements of a solitary Englishman like Rajah Brooke in Borneo. Newspapers, magazines, and books were busy with the ever-changing scenes of British energy abroad and the ever-growing labyrinth of British interests. Some of the literary men went out and saw the new Anglo-Saxon world for themselves; Macaulay went as legislator to India, Galt went to Canada. Some like Coleridge and Southey with their pantisocracy scheme on the Susquehanna contemplated settling in one of its distant parts; the economists and political thinkers busied themselves with the relations that should hold between the various kinds of new dominion and the home country; historians prepared to record the development of the empire; orators in parliament like Brougham and Cobden and Bright gained or widened their reputation for eloquence on the new topics; pessimist and imaginative writers like Carlyle, driven to point out practical remedies for the evils they deplored, found them in emigration to the new dominions of the Anglo-Saxon race.

2. The restless, almost feverish, activity that had taken. possession of all spheres of the English-speaking world had already shown itself in literature and thought. It came