they have agreed to observe, and are almost as critical as they are productive. But Scott and Byron and Moore, in spite of the cordial friendship subsisting between them, are perfectly isolated as regards authorship; each produces his works without receiving or desiring any suggestion or advice whatever from his brother authors. Even in the very exceptional case when one is influenced by another—as Byron, for instance, occasionally is by Wordsworth, and still more perceptibly by Shelley—the thing happens, as it were, secretly, quite insensibly, so that it is not alluded to, or at any rate not acknowledged as influence by the recipient. An American author has aptly described this characteristic of the race in the words: "Each of these islanders is himself an island."

We have already spoken of intelligent interest in politics. Just as there is not one among these authors who is a scientist, so there is hardly one among them who is not a politician. This interest in politics is a direct product of the national practicality. The opinions held by the different authors may be very dissimilar, but they are all party men; Scott is a Tory, Wordsworth a Monarchist, Southey and Coleridge are first supporters, then antagonists, of the democratic ideas of the day; Moore is on the side of the Irishmen; Landor, Campbell, Byron, and Shelley, as Radicals, side with all the oppressed nations. In excepting such an author as Keats, who may almost be said to have been devoted to art for art's sake, we must not forget that he died at the age of twenty-five.

The intense interest taken in practical matters explains why purely literary questions (such as that of the respective merits of Classicism and Romanticism), in their utter disconnectedness with life, never became of such exaggerated importance in English as they did at this period in German, Danish, and even French literature. It is, however, amusing to observe how our authors combine the Englishman's impulse towards practical action with the fantastic proclivities of the poet. Scott carried his antagonism to the Revolution to a perfectly Quixotic length. He arranged with one of his friends, a duke, that, if the French landed in England, they two would take to the woods and live the life of Robin Hood and his followers. And it was about the same time that Southey and Coleridge, in the first Jacobinical ardour of their youth, informed their acquaintances that it was their intention to emigrate to a scantily populated part of America; the banks of the Susquehanna were chosen because the name of this river struck the young men as being peculiarly beautiful and melodious; they proposed to found a community there, a pantisocrasy, with community of goods and equality of all the members under natural conditions. Landor, who, as a soldier in Spain, proved that he was prepared to risk his life for his opinions, as a youth cherished the idea of reviving, at home in Warwickshire, the Arcadian idyllic age; he is the literary counterpart of Owen, the Socialist. Shelley, as politician, showed such keenness of perception that, studying him as such, we are constantly reminded of the characterisation in Julian and Maddalo:

"Me, who am as a nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth."

He foresaw many a political revolution that actually came to pass. But the same Shelley who, half a century before the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, published an accurate draft of it in a political pamphlet, and who in his drama, Hellas, prophesied the success of the revolt of the Greeks at a time when their cause seemed hopeless, is an utter fantast as soon as he begins to enlarge on the coming Golden Age of humanity. Read his description of it in a youthful work, Queen Mab. The Polar icebergs melt, the deserts are cultivated, the basilisk licks the infant's feet, the hurricane blasts become melodious, the fruits of the earth are always ripe and its flowers always in bloom, no animal is killed and eaten by man, the birds no longer fly from him, fear no longer exists. We cannot but be reminded of some of the wildest dreams of the French Socialists of the same period. The spread of the Phalansteries devised by Fourier was expected to bring about such a change in the whole economy of the world that at last even natural conditions would be entirely altered; an immense aurora borealis, perpetually suspended above the North Pole, would make Siberia as warm as Andalusia; man would deprive the sea of its salt and give it in return a flavour of lemonade; and the monsters of the deep would allow themselves to be harnessed, like sea-horses, to our ships. The invention of the steam-engine fortunately rendered this species of traction superfluous. Even Byron, who is decidedly the most practical of these poets, is often the poet in his politics. It hardly admits of doubt that he had the crown of Greece before his eyes as the recompense of his exertions in the cause of that country.

There was plenty of fantasticalness in practical matters in the English poets, too; but there undoubtedly is more practicality in their morality and their view of life than in those of the poets of other nations. There are a few more grains of sound sense in their works. They are, one and all, distinguished by a strong desire for justice. Wordsworth inherits it from Milton; Campbell, Byron, and Shelley feel it intuitively, and are ready in the strength of the feeling to defy the world. It plays no part, this feeling, in the life of Byron's great German predecessor, Goethe, or of his richly gifted French successor, De Musset. Neither of these ever summoned monarchs and governments before the tribunal of justice. But what is peculiarly English is, that this justice of which the Englishmen dream is not, like that which Schiller, for instance, worships, a cherished, preconceived idea, but a child of utility. To prove this let us take a poet as ethereally idealistic as Shelley, and we shall see that even his morality is as distinctly utilitarian as Bentham's and John Stuart Mill's. Here is a striking passage taken from the second chapter of his Speculations on Morals:—"If a man persists to inquire why he ought to promote the happiness of mankind, he demands a mathematical or metaphysical reason for a moral action. The absurdity of this scepticism is less apparent, but not less real than the exacting a moral reason for a mathematical or physical fact." In the maxim, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," and in the profound, practical desire for justice, which is its psychological basis, we have the real point of departure of the Radicalism of English poetry during the period of the great European reaction.

III

THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND

The English being at once the most persevering and the most enterprising people, the nation which is most attached to home and fondest of travel, the slowest to make changes and yet, in matters political, the most broad-minded, the thinking men of the country naturally fall into two great political groups, the one