gamut of human emotion and caprice; now he is almost Johnsonian in the expression of humour, in his mock-heroic vein; in the next paragraph he has become almost purely Saxon and lyrical in his pathos. In his essays on The South Sea House, New Year's Eve, and A Quaker's Meeting, for example, he delights in testing the variety of the English tongue, and proving the versatility of its composite character; he approaches to lyrical rhythm and diction in some of the passages that stir memory or the sublimer feelings; but he neighbours them with passages almost as Latinised as philosophical prose.

5. And it is in Lamb that we see the high-water mark of the style that deals in reminiscence of former English literature. Every sentence of his Elia has some flavour of the older periods. It would need one who knew the whole range of English poetry and prose from 1650 down to 1820 to home his phraseology. He does not so often quote or rather pretend to quote as take a phrase, a metaphor, a word, an old usage, from the older authors or from his contemporaries. His mind is so saturated with the best English literature that he has often hedged in quotation points what is a mere adaptation or rough mosaic from an author whilst he constantly leaves unmarked scraps that belong to his favourites. And his chief favourites are Shakespeare, Milton, and the Authorised Version; the other Elizabethan dramatists, the great prose contemporaries of our epic poet, the essay-writers and play-wrights of the Queen Anne period attract him only in a secondary degree. But how thoroughly the diction of the earlier half of our century was dyed with the great past of English literature and especially with Elizabethanism, nothing would show better than a good commentary on Elia. Out of the new middle class Lamb came and for it he wrote; and we see they delighted in the old words and old usages, the quaint idioms that lingered on in the provincial circles, in the sect of the Quakers, and in the speech of New England. His archaisms had no artificial sound to most of the new audience, the readers of such periodicals as The London Magazine, in which the essays appeared. They still used in daily conversation the idioms and words and meanings that

had become antiquated in the London literature of the eighteenth century. For the old ballads, the Authorised Version of the Bible, Milton, and Bunyan had left them green and still threw a halo of imagination around them. Lamb was only stirring the deepest feelings of the more national audience when he ventured on giving such a quaint flavour to his diction.

6. And in the poetry of the time it was not Wordsworth's crusade against Pope's conventions that originated this return to the older and more popular sources of the language. The crusade was only a symptom of the renaissance of the people in literature. Out of the people came the fresh impulse to a great poetry, and to the people it had to address itself. It was the popular tongue that it had to adopt and refine, that tongue which had been so ennobled by perpetual study of the English Bible. The natural affinity of poetry to the linguistic past led it at once when it was bent again towards nature to seek its new language in the traditional literature of the people—the ballads, the Bible, Milton, and Bunyan; there the best phraseology of the Elizabethan era had become consecrated by long use amongst the people in their highest moods and there the popular language had been elevated and refined by constant intercourse with lofty thought and passion. This older literature of the people gave the only possible medium of communication between the new authors and the new audience. The imaginative literature of a nation must address the national mind and not a narrow cultured circle, if it is to be permanent. And when its audience broadens from the court or capital to the people it is the people's language and not the language of learning or culture that it must adopt. And through the long generations of submergence the English people had been ennobling their language and raising it into fitness for a great literature in continual study of the English Bible and of the books that were based on it, books like Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress. It is the Biblical tinge that was the striking feature of the new diction, when the people emerged again and formed the new patrons of literature. In the eighteenth century it had been the price

LIBRARY

OF THE

UNIVERSITY
OF

of the book that made it lucrative to the writer, and rich and influential patrons were all that was needed. Now it was the numbers of a book sold that made it pay; and the larger audience freed the author from the tyranny of a small and immediate circle. But if a book was to succeed it had to be in the literary language of the people. And hence the large influence that the English Bible now seemed to have over the diction of prose as well as poetry.

7. But culture and scholarship, following in the lines that the popular movement took, had discovered another noble source of inspiration and influence in Shakespeare's plays. By the second half of the era of expansion a large portion of the new audience had lost the keen edge of their traditional puritanism and were to some extent secularised in tastes. They no longer objected to all plays as wicked, and, reading the Elizabethan dramatists and especially Shakespeare, they found little that was impure and much that chose the very highest plane of thought and feeling. Shakespeare thus came to be added to the old literature of the people, his works became a household book in a large section of the middle and artisan classes during the earlier half of the nineteenth century. And hence it is that so many of the poets Shakespearianised and that there was so deep a tinge of Shakespearianism in the best prose diction. From Wordsworth to Tennyson the poetry adopted his phraseology and echoed his rhythms and felt no shame; from Lamb to Kingsley and Ruskin prose counted it one of its highest prerogatives to weave in Shakespearian suggestion.

8. And from all kinds and periods of English literature the style took new life and found new material and cues. For the learned societies, the reprints, the scholarship and research brought even the oldest prose and poetry within reach of every writer and reader. The movement towards simplicity and variety in style and diction found no difficulty in models and expression. For every age contributed its vocabulary and forms. In poetry especially we have an inundation of archaisms; the beautiful old words and phrases that had been forgotten by the highly cultured age of Queen Anne were resumed in numbers; Wordsworth, Keats,

Browning, Tennyson had no hesitation in reviving idioms and words that had dropped out of the literary language, provided they were dipped in emotion, expressive, and melodious. So the old poetry was studied for its effects. There was no attempt as there had been in the age of Dryden and Pope to modernise Chaucer. But his quaint picturesqueness and humour reappear in prose as well as in poetry. Washington Irving shows his influence in the one, Hood and Hunt in the other. But it was the Elizabethan era that gave the best models and next to it the seventeenth century with its Milton in poetry and Sir Thomas Browne, Fuller, and Taylor in prose. So wide-spread was the influence of these that nothing short of the analysis of the whole of the imaginative literature would reveal it in full. In drama and lyric it is perhaps most apparent. For Lamb, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Browning, Tennyson were all led to the dramatic and lyric form by the Elizabethan and Miltonic example. As the drama of Shakespeare was now better studied than acted, the dramatic poems now written addressed themselves to a student audience rather than a theatrical. And all the old lyrical metres and themes and even the phrases were revived. No poetry could find its way so quickly to the hearts of the people as the lyric. And the recognition of the ancient ballads and songs by literature opened again the fountain of song even to the most cultured writers. No quality is more striking in the new poetry than its lyricism. This at once reveals an essential similarity between the first half of the nineteenth century and the Elizabethan age. The secret is that the literary audience was again national. And the simpler forms, that appeal directly to the human heart without need of much education, were certain to be successful again. Out of no other age except the Elizabethan could so many beautiful lyrics be gathered. Every poet tried the form and often succeeded in it. Satire, drama, epic, ode, sonnet needed a medium of culture. A good song, like good wine, "needed no bush ;" it commended itself at once to every ear and heart and fixed itself for ever in the national consciousness. We have, therefore, the same phenomenon in the period as appeared in the reign of Elizabeth; the literary poets were also the popular poets; however

philosophical or didactic, sublime or satirical they might be in their more elaborate efforts, they could be at times as simple in emotion, language, and melody as the writers of the old ballads and songs.

Section 7.

I. What made this lyrical movement easy was the development and spread of music. Singing was not merely cultivated as a fine art by great vocalists like Malibran and Mario and Grisi; but in every town and village choirs sprang up and every sweet voice was trained. Originality was not confined to the great composers in oratorio and opera, like Beethoven, Bellini, and Mendelssohn; as in the Elizabcthan age there were many native composers who could touch the heart with the simpler forms of melody and imitate the pathos of the old English music. Instrumentation spread with the piano into every household during the period and confirmed or revived musical taste. Few poets but had the old tunes sing in the ear of their boyhood and youth; melody entered as a natural element into every imaginative mind and this the melody of the lyric. Hence the outburst of lyricism in the period. Some poets like Moore and Tannahill devoted most of their talents to the writing of songs. Others like Scott and Shelley and Mrs. Browning introduced the lyrical spirit into every poem they wrote. Nor did the prose escape this tunefulness. The sentence became much more rhythmical; phrases touched the ear as well as the mind; the old alliteration reappeared in prose, but in a more artistic and concealed form. Without the monotony of the Johnsonian period, the sentence attained all its balance and completeness. Moreover there came into the best prose a sense of larger harmony that took in the paragraph and in some cases long passages. In Carlyle, in spite of his often rugged phraseology, there is at times a musical unity in whole chapters. So is it with De Quincey and Ruskin. And Macaulay never fails to keep the ear as well as the mind in expectance through the paragraph. Prose became distinctly conscious of the great effects that music had attained by contrast and an intricate harmony.