revolution, which he believed generally led, through a period of anarchy, to despotism more severe than that which originally drove the oppressed to seek for change. But he had a profound abhorrence of every form of oppression and tyranny, more especially of that which would interfere with national liberties, or allow any one nation or class to domineer over others. He looked on rank and property as held in trust, on the condition that the classes enjoying them should ever be ready to stake all they possessed to secure the freedom and happiness of their fellow countrymen. He had little faith in those who professed themselves mere mouthpieces of numerical majorities. He held that the English people at large were better and more truly represented by men chosen for their general character and weight in the community, and because the people knew them and liked them, and felt that they sympathized with their constituents, than by men bound to advocate particular measures. He believed that power was better exercised by those whose education, rank, and property tended to make them independent in forming, and fearless in expressing their own opinions, than by delegates pledged to express the opinions of others. 'With many of the changes which he saw carried out in his later years he thoroughly sympathized; but he mistrusted the mode in which, and the motives from which, they were effected, as tending to impair the stability of institutions which he wished to see reformed and perpetuated; not swept away.' He had a grand personal appearance. He was a very tall and altogether a large man, for his age very upright, with bold commanding features, a good nose and brow, and a peculiar expression perhaps of sarcasm, with a touch of hauteur about the corner of his mouth and nostrils.' No man was more beloved by his friends. A playful humour, kindliness and generosity characterised his every-day words and actions. 'But those who knew him most intimately soon discovered that the largest tolerance and charity were not incompatible with a thorough contempt for all that was mean and base; among other marks of true nobility of character he possessed the royal art of never humiliating one in any way inferior to himself. Meaner natures near him, while they saw and felt his superiority, tasted the luxury of feeling their own aims elevated, and of discovering a higher standard than that by which they had been accustomed to regulate their own actions. It was this quality which secured for him, at one and the same time, the affection of the poorest and weakest and the respect of the best and noblest who knew him well enough to judge of his true character.' In all respects he well deserved the epithet bestowed upon him by Coleridge-ὁ καλοκάγαθος ὁ φιλόκαλος.* The Attic phrase * Coleridge in his Will dated September, 1829, wrote as follows:'Further to Mr. Gillman, as the most expressive way in which I can only mark my phrase for a high-minded and accomplished gentleman marks "That bound like bold Prometheus on a rock, O Before we lighted on this passage, the same image had occurred to us as a type of that example, which such a life presents, of the noble spirit of humanity which Eschylus has portrayed. It was not indeed Mr. Frere's lot to teach the grand lesson of endurance under suffering-though he also suffered with noble patience; but his retirement nurtured the Promethean fire of pure intellect, to which we must ever have recourse to animate the material forms of life, however cunningly an Epimetheus may have contrived them. We may sum up in Frere's own words the value of such a bequest as his works have left us :'Since mind can only be delineated by language, the highest perfection of mind requires to be represented by the higher and more artificial form of language, by verse rather than prose.' We thank his nephews for their pious perpetuation of his life and labours: and we cannot give higher praise to Sir Bartle Frere's 'Memoir' than by saying how deeply we have felt its uniform tone of sympathy with what we conceive to be the spirit and lesson of his uncle's life. ART. III.-1. Songs before Sunrise. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. London, 1871. 2. Poems. By Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London, 1870. 3. The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. 4 vols. London, 1871. OF F the many remarkable poetical appearances in the early part of the present century, there was none more remarkable in its character and its influence than the poetry of Keats. my relation to him, and, in remembrance of a great and good man, revered by us both, I leave the manuscript volume lettered "Arist. Manuscript-Birds, Acharnians, Knights," presented to me by my dear friend and patron, the Rt. Hon. John Hookham Frere, who of all the men that I have had the means of knowing during my life, appears to me eminently to deserve to be characterized as & Kaλokάyalos ὁ φιλόκαλος. Differing Differing both in thought and style from all his contemporaries, and still more from all his predecessors, his writings have, we think, done more to determine the subsequent course of English poetry than those of any other poet. Though his own death is said to have been hastened by the hostility of his critics, his immediate successors have not only monopolised the field of poetry and silenced opposition, but, as a last triumph of ascendency, have turned criticism itself into their tool. Keats was the first purely literary English poet who had appeared since Spenser, and, since Keats, English poetry has had an exclusively literary mark. Our Till the extraordinary epoch to which we have referred, the character of our poetry, like that of every nation which has had vigorous institutions and a great history, was distinctively national. There is scarcely a prominent feature in our religion, our politics, or our landscape, which is not illustrated in our verse. old drama was as indigenous as that of Attica. Almost every one of our great poets is indebted to his country for some inspiring theme. At the very threshold of our literature we find the unfaded portraits of the Canterbury Pilgrims. The studious Spenser sums up his flattering allegory in the person of his Queen. Even Milton, whose imagination in the Paradise Lost' transcends the bounds of space and time, has filled 'L'Allegro,' 'Il Penseroso,' and Comus,' with the most enchanting descriptions of English country scenery. Our party politics are represented in verse by Dryden and Butler; Pope is the satirist of courtly manners, as Goldsmith is the pathetic painter of peasant life; while, as if in appropriate conclusion to the course of genuine English poetry, the verse of Crabbe is filled with portraits not less vigorous, if less picturesque, than those of Chaucer himself. The style of our poets till the beginning of this century was generally as idiomatic as their subjects were national. By far the greater number of them treated the language as an inheritance; and, as each generation valued and improved the work of its predecessor, a national rhetoric was gradually formed, which, always noble and impressive, was, when fully developed, singularly well adapted to express either dignity, humour, or pathos. Above all other metres, the heroic couplet, to those who have watched its progress from its great inventor, Chaucer, through writers of such various genius as Hall, Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, and Byron, must appear a measure scarcely less qualified than the ancient hexameter to catch the moods of the people among whom it originated. It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the great expansion of English poetry in the atmosphere of the Revolutionary era. Dwarfed Dwarfed by the magnitude of interests which seemed to embrace mankind, the nation ceased to be any longer the limit or even the sphere of the poet's inspiration. The active imagination of Byron and Scott opened a new world of adventure or romance; the calm spirit of Wordsworth was enlarged by the contemplation of the ancient examples of moral and political simplicity; the verse of Shelley, above all, caught the modern Republican enthusiasm for liberty and the future of the human race. But, amidst all this activity and high-wrought expectation, the poems of Keats sound to the reader of a later generation as the music of the nightingale sounded in his own ears : 'Forlorn! The very word is like a bell, To toll me back again to my sole self!' As far as we know, there is not in the poems of Keats a single allusion to passing events; there is certainly nothing to show that he was interested in them. While the thoughts of his contemporaries are full of energy or hope, his verse is marked by a languid melancholy. While they are all directly or indirectly inspired by the feelings of their time, he seeks his inspiration in the literature of the past. Too soft and sensuous by nature to be exhilarated by the conflict of modern opinions, he found at once food for his love of beauty, and an opiate for his despondency, in the remote tales of Greek mythology. We have said before that the spirit of Keats manifests itself more or less in the works of almost every poet who has succeeded him. It was natural enough that a period of disappointment should follow a period of exaggerated hope when it appeared that political liberty did not produce personal regeneration, and that the progress of mankind was rather towards a commercial than a moral millennium. The revolutionary element which had kindled the passion of the poets was the speculation of Condorcet, not the science of Adam Smith. In the post-revolutionary poetry of England there is to be found little of that ardour which marks the work of the previous generation. It is true that Mr. Tennyson, in 'Locksley Hall,' looks forward to a Parliament of nations, the Federation of the world;' but in his poem the misery of the individual is far more prominently represented than the happiness of the race, and the net result is less the confidence of faith than the resignation of despair. But though 'the steamship and the railway' are scarcely themes to inspire poetical enthusiasm, the thoughts that shake mankind' have doubtless survived the first great period of vigorous action which they helped to produce, and the imagination which has cherished them, disappointed of realising its aspirations in the world of man, consoles consoles itself by calling up the spirits it desires from the 'vasty deep' of books. Familiarity and sympathy with old forms of recorded thought prompt men to try to recover or adapt them. The classical writers have always exercised the greatest influence over the intellectual leaders of the revolution, and the robust freedom of mediaval fancy, perhaps because it is so unlike the pedantry of modern liberalism, has a strong fascination for it. Hence those curious anachronisms and incongruities to which the practice of our poets has long familiarised us. The chivalrous romance is revived in the garb of moral or theological allegory; the feeling of the Greek drama is restored in its modern copies with such exactness, that the reader is as puzzled as Christopher Sly, and doubts if the history of Christianity and the doctrines to which he has been accustomed can be anything but a dream. Gradual advances are also made towards the arts of painting and music. Thus dissevered from the thought of the large majority of living men, the pursuit of poetry tends to become a kind of intellectual opium-eating. It would, indeed, be strange if men of an active mind could continue to live in the midst of a stirring society, without in some degree participating in its interests, and we not unfrequently find the poet glancing from his literary seclusion upon the movements of national life. But, if he approaches a subject of general interest, he never confronts it directly, like Dryden or Pope, but views it through some literary medium. Thus, when Mr. Tennyson wishes to give a reflection of society, he reconnoitres it with a telescope, as in "The Princess,' or lifts his theme upon the stilts of a classical style, as in 'Aylmer's Field.' The great poetical revolution which we have sketched would not, however, have been complete without a corresponding change in our versification. Of the old poetical idiom, elaborated with such pains, and by so many poets, scarcely a trace survives. Byron, alone among the great poets of the last generation, saw how the previous practice of English verse-writers could be expanded without being overthrown, and, whether he uses the heroic couplet or the Spenser stanza, his style, however elevated, is plain and robust. Wordsworth, in his well-known 'Preface,' ostentatiously undervalues metre. Shelley, whose mind, as he himself says, was 'nourished on musical thoughts,' found means to express them in an ethereal language peculiarly his own. Keats, on the other hand, enchanted with his study of the Elizabethan poets, revived in his Endymion' the over-luxuriant sweetness of Marlowe's Sestiad.' This strange example of literary reaction has since been sanctioned by universal practice. The selection of classical subjects has led to a reproduction of the classical style, |