English Literature · Chapter 32The Age of Romanticism (1800-1850) (5)
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Life. De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. In neither his father, who was a prosperous merchant, nor his mother, who was a quiet, unsympathetic woman, do we see any suggestion of the son's almost uncanny genius. As a child he was given to dreams, more vivid and intense but less beautiful than those of the young Blake to whom he bears a strong resemblance. In the grammar school at Bath he displayed astonishing ability, and acquired Greek and Latin with a rapidity that frightened his slow tutors. At fifteen he not only read Greek, but spoke it fluently; and one of his astounded teachers remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." From the grammar school at Manchester, whither he was sent in 1800, he soon ran away, finding the instruction far below his abilities, and the rough life absolutely intolerable to his sensitive nature. An uncle, just home from India, interceded for the boy lest he be sent back to the school, which he hated; and with an allowance of a guinea a week he started a career of vagrancy, much like that of Goldsmith, living on the open hills, in the huts of shepherds and charcoal burners, in the tents of gypsies, wherever fancy led him. His fear of the Manchester school finally led him to run away to London, where, without money or friends, his life was even more extraordinary than his gypsy wanderings. The details of this vagrancy are best learned in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, where we meet not simply the facts of his life, but also the confusion of dreams and fancies in the midst of which he wandered like a man lost on the mountains, with storm clouds under his feet hiding the familiar earth. After a year of vagrancy and starvation he was found by his family and allowed to go to Oxford, where his career was marked by the most brilliant and erratic scholarship. When ready for a degree, in 1807, he passed his written tests successfully, but felt a sudden terror at the thought of the oral examination and disappeared from the university, never to return.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
It was in Oxford that De Quincey began the use of opium; to relieve the pains of neuralgia, and the habit increased until he was an almost hopeless slave to the drug. Only his extraordinary will power enabled him to break away from the habit, after some thirty years of misery. Some peculiarity of his delicate constitution enabled De Quincey to take enormous quantities of opium, enough to kill several ordinary men; and it was largely opium, working upon a sensitive imagination, which produced his gorgeous dreams, broken by intervals of weakness and profound depression. For twenty years he resided at Grasmere in the companionship of the Lake poets; and here, led by the loss of his small fortune, he began to write, with the idea of supporting his family. In 1821 he published his first famous work, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and for nearly forty years afterwards he wrote industriously, contributing to various magazines an astonishing number of essays on a great variety of subjects. Without thought of literary fame, he contributed these articles anonymously; but fortunately, in 1853, he began to collect his own works, and the last of fourteen volumes was published just after his death.
In 1830, led by his connection with Blackwood's Magazine, to which he was the chief contributor, De Quincey removed with his family to Edinburgh, where his erratic genius and his singularly childlike ways produced enough amusing anecdotes to fill a volume. He would take a room in some place unknown to his friends and family; would live in it for a few years, until he had filled it, even to the bath tub, with books and with his own chaotic manuscripts, allowing no one to enter or disturb his den; and then, when the place became too crowded, he would lock the door and go away and take another lodging, where he repeated the same extraordinary performance. He died in Edinburgh in 1859. Like Lamb, he was a small, boyish figure, gentle, and elaborately courteous. Though excessively shy, and escaping as often as possible to solitude, he was nevertheless fond of society, and his wide knowledge and vivid imagination made his conversations almost as prized as those of his friend Coleridge.
Works. De Quincey's works may be divided into two general classes. The first includes his numerous critical articles, and the second his autobiographical sketches. All his works, it must be remembered, were contributed to various magazines, and were hastily collected just before his death. Hence the general impression of chaos which we get from reading them.
Critical essaysFrom a literary view point the most illuminating of De Quincey's critical works is his. Literary Reminiscences. This contains brilliant appreciations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, and Landor, as well as some interesting studies of the literary figures of the age preceding. Among the best of his brilliant critical essays are On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth (1823), which is admirably suited to show the man's critical genius, and Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827), which reveals his grotesque humor Other suggestive critical works, if one must choose among such a multitude, are his Letters to a Young Man (1823), Joan of Arc (1847), The Revolt of the Tartars (1840), and The English Mail-Coach (1849). In the last-named essay the "Dream Fugue" is one of the most imaginative of all his curious works.
Confessions of an Opium-Eater, etc.Of De Quincey's autobiographical sketches the best known is his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). This is only partly a record of opium dreams, and its chief interest lies in glimpses it gives us of De Quincey's own life and wanderings. This should be followed by Suspiria de Profundis (1845), which is chiefly a record of gloomy and terrible dreams produced by opiates. The most interesting parts of his Suspiria, showing De Quincey's marvelous insight into dreams, are those in which we are brought face to face with the strange feminine creations "Levana," "Madonna," "Our Lady of Sighs," and "Our Lady of Darkness." A series of nearly thirty articles which he collected in 1853, called Autobiographic Sketches, completes the revelation of the author's own life. Among his miscellaneous works may be mentioned, in order to show his wide range of subjects, Klosterheim, a novel, Logic of Political Economy, the Essays on Style and Rhetoric, Philosophy of Herodotus, and his articles on Goethe, Pope, Schiller, and Shakespeare which he contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The style of De QuinceyDe Quincey's style is a revelation of the beauty of the English language, and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the Victorian Age. It has two chief faults,--diffuseness, which continually leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it. Notwithstanding these faults, De Quincey's prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in our language. Though he was profoundly influenced by the seventeenth-century writers, he attempted definitely to create a new style which should combine the best elements of prose and poetry. In consequence, his prose works are often, like those of Milton, more imaginative and melodious than much of our poetry. He has been well called "the psychologist of style," and as such his works will never be popular; but to the few who can appreciate him he will always be an inspiration to better writing. One has a deeper respect for our English language and literature after reading him.
Secondary Writers of Romanticism. One has only to glance back over the authors we have been studying--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott, Lamb, De Quincey--to realize the great change which swept over the life and literature of England in a single half century, under two influences which we now know as the French Revolution in history and the Romantic Movement in literature. In life men had rebelled against the too strict authority of state and society; in literature they rebelled even more vigorously against the bonds of classicism, which had sternly repressed a writer's ambition to follow his own ideals and to express them in his own way. Naturally such an age of revolution was essentially poetic,--only the Elizabethan Age surpasses it in this respect,--and it produced a large number of minor writers, who followed more or less closely the example of its great leaders. Among novelists we have Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Porter, and Susan Ferrier,--all women, be it noted; among the poets, Campbell, Moore, Hogg ("the Ettrick Shepherd"), Mrs. Hemans, Heber, Keble, Hood, and "Ingoldsby" (Richard Barham); and among miscellaneous writers, Sidney Smith, "Christopher North" (John Wilson), Chalmers, Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Hallam, and Landor. Here is an astonishing variety of writers, and to consider all their claims to remembrance would of itself require a volume. Though these are generally classed as secondary writers, much of their work has claims to popularity, and some of it to permanence. Moore's Irish Melodies, Campbell's lyrics, Keble's Christian Year, and Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw and Scottish Chiefs have still a multitude of readers, where Keats, Lamb, and De Quincey are prized only by the cultured few; and Hallam's historical and critical works are perhaps better known than those of Gibbon, who nevertheless occupies a larger place in our literature. Among all these writers we choose only two, Jane Austen and Walter Savage Landor, whose works indicate a period of transition from the Romantic to the Victorian Age.
JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)
We have so lately rediscovered the charm and genius of this gifted young woman that she seems to be a novelist of yesterday, rather than the contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and few even of her readers realize that she did for the English novel precisely what the Lake poets did for English poetry,--she refined and simplified it, making it a true reflection of English life. Like the Lake poets, she met with scanty encouragement in her own generation. Her greatest novel, Pride and Prejudice, was finished in 1797, a year before the appearance of the famous Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge; but while the latter book was published and found a few appreciative readers, the manuscript of this wonderful novel went begging for sixteen years before it found a publisher. As Wordsworth began with the deliberate purpose of making poetry natural and truthful, so Miss Austen appears to have begun writing with the idea of presenting the life of English country society exactly as it was, in opposition to the romantic extravagance of Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. But there was this difference,--that Miss Austen had in large measure the saving gift of humor, which Wordsworth sadly lacked. Maria Edgeworth, at the same time, set a sane and excellent example in her tales of Irish life, The Absentee and Castle Rackrent; and Miss Austen followed up the advantage with at least six works, which have grown steadily in value until we place them gladly in the first rank of our novels of common life. It is not simply for her exquisite charm, therefore, that we admire her, but also for her influence in bringing our novels back to their true place as an expression of human life. It is due partly, at least, to her influence that a multitude of readers were ready to appreciate Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, and the powerful and enduring work of George Eliot.
Life. Jane Austen's life gives little opportunity for the biographer, unless, perchance, he has something of her own power to show the beauty and charm of commonplace things. She was the seventh child of Rev. George Austen, rector of Steventon, and was born in the parsonage of the village in 1775. With her sisters she was educated at home, and passed her life very quietly, cheerfully, in the doing of small domestic duties, to which love lent the magic lamp that makes all things beautiful. She began to write at an early age, and seems to have done her work on a little table in the family sitting room, in the midst of the family life. When a visitor entered, she would throw a paper or a piece of sewing over her work, and she modestly refused to be known as the author of novels which we now count among our treasured possessions. With the publishers she had little success. Pride and Prejudice went begging, as we have said, for sixteen years; and Northanger Abbey (1798) was sold for a trivial sum to a publisher, who laid it aside and forgot it, until the appearance and moderate success of Sense and Sensibility in 1811. Then, after keeping the manuscript some fifteen years, he sold it back to the family, who found another publisher.
An anonymous article in the Quarterly Review, following the appearance of Emma in 1815, full of generous appreciation of the charm of the new writer, was the beginning of Jane Austen's fame; and it is only within a few years that we have learned that the friendly and discerning critic was Walter Scott. He continued to be her admirer until her early death; but these two, the greatest writers of fiction in their age, were never brought together. Both were home-loving people, and Miss Austen especially was averse to publicity and popularity. She died, quietly as she had lived, at Winchester, in 1817, and was buried in the cathedral. She was a bright, attractive little woman, whose sunny qualities are unconsciously reflected in all her books.
Works. Very few English writers ever had so narrow a field of work as Jane Austen. Like the French novelists, whose success seems to lie in choosing the tiny field that they know best, her works have an exquisite perfection that is lacking in most of our writers of fiction. With the exception of an occasional visit to the watering place of Bath, her whole life was spent in small country parishes, whose simple country people became the characters of her novels. Her brothers were in the navy, and so naval officers furnish the only exciting elements in her stories; but even these alleged heroes lay aside their imposing martial ways and act like themselves and other people. Such was her literary field, in which the chief duties were of the household, the chief pleasures in country gatherings, and the chief interests in matrimony. Life, with its mighty interests, its passions, ambitions, and tragic struggles, swept by like a great river; while the secluded interests of a country parish went round and round quietly, like an eddy behind a sheltering rock. We can easily understand, therefore, the limitations of Jane Austen; but within her own field she is unequaled. Her characters are absolutely true to life, and all her work has the perfection of a delicate miniature painting. The most widely read of her novels is Pride and Prejudice; but three others, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Mansfield Park, have slowly won their way to the front rank of fiction. From a literary view point Northanger Abbey is perhaps the best; for in it we find that touch of humor and delicate satire with which this gentle little woman combated the grotesque popular novels of the Udolpho type. Reading any of these works, one is inclined to accept the hearty indorsement of Sir Walter Scott: "That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bowwow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!"
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864)
While Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, and other romantic critics went back to early English literature for their inspiration, Landor shows a reaction from the prevailing Romanticism by his imitation of the ancient classic writers. His life was an extraordinary one and, like his work, abounded in sharp contrasts. On the one hand, there are his egoism, his unncontrollable anger, his perpetual lawsuits, and the last sad tragedy with his children, which suggests King Lear and his daughters; on the other hand there is his steady devotion to the classics and to the cultivation of the deep wisdom of the ancients, which suggests Pindar and Cicero. In his works we find the wild extravagance of Gebir, followed by the superb classic style and charm of Pericles and Aspasia. Such was Landor, a man of high ideals, perpetually at war with himself and the world.
Life. Lander's stormy life covers the whole period from Wordsworth's childhood to the middle of the Victorian Era. He was the son of a physician, and was born at Warwick, in 1775. From his mother he inherited a fortune; but it was soon scattered by large expenditures and law quarrels; and in his old age, refused help by his own children, only Browning's generosity kept Landor from actual want. At Rugby, and at Oxford, his extreme Republicanism brought him into constant trouble; and his fitting out a band of volunteers to assist the Spaniards against Napoleon, in 1808, allies him with Byron and his Quixotic followers. The resemblance to Byron is even more strikingly shown in the poem Gebir, published in 1798, a year made famous by the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
A remarkable change in Lander's life is noticeable in 1821, when, at forty-six years of age, after having lost his magnificent estate of Llanthony Abbey, in Glamorganshire, and after a stormy experience in Como, he settled down for a time at Fiesole near Florence. To this period of calm after storm we owe the classical prose works for which he is famous. The calm, like that at the center of a whirlwind, lasted but a short time, and Landor, leaving his family in great anger, returned to Bath, where he lived alone for more than twenty years. Then, in order to escape a libel suit, the choleric old man fled back to Italy. He died at Florence, in 1864. The spirit of his whole life may be inferred from the defiant farewell which he flung to it:
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Works. Landor's reaction from Romanticism is all the more remarkable in view of his early efforts, such as Gebir, a wildly romantic poem, which rivals any work of Byron or Shelley in its extravagance. Notwithstanding its occasional beautiful and suggestive lines, the work was not and never has been successful; and the same may be said of all his poetical works. His first collection of poems was published in 1795, his last a full half century later, in 1846. In the latter volume, The Hellenics,--which included some translations of his earlier Latin poems, called Idyllia Heroica,--one has only to read "The Hamadryad," and compare it with the lyrics of the first volume, in order to realize the astonishing literary vigor of a man who published two volumes, a half century apart, without any appreciable diminution of poetical feeling. In all these poems one is impressed by the striking and original figures of speech which Landor uses to emphasize his meaning.
It is by his prose works, largely, that Landor has won a place in our literature; partly because of their intrinsic worth, their penetrating thought, and severe classic style; and partly because of their profound influence upon the writers of the present age. The most noted of his prose works are his six volumes of Imaginary Conversations (1824-1846). For these conversations Landor brings together, sometimes in groups, sometimes in couples, well-known characters, or rather shadows, from the four corners of the earth and from the remotest ages of recorded history. Thus Diogenes talks with Plato, Æsop with a young slave girl in Egypt, Henry VIII with Anne Boleyn in prison, Dante with Beatrice, Leofric with Lady Godiva,--all these and many others, from Epictetus to Cromwell, are brought together and speak of life and love and death, each from his own view point. Occasionally, as in the meeting of Henry and Anne Boleyn, the situation is tense and dramatic; but as a rule the characters simply meet and converse in the same quiet strain, which becomes, after much reading, somewhat monotonous. On the other hand, one who reads the Imaginary Conversations is lifted at once into a calm and noble atmosphere which braces and inspires him, making him forget petty things, like a view from a hilltop. By its combination of lofty thought and severely classic style the book has won, and deserves, a very high place among our literary records.
The same criticism applies to Pericles and Aspasia, which is a series of imaginary letters, telling the experiences of Aspasia, a young lady from Asia Minor, who visits Athens at the summit of its fame and glory, in the great age of Pericles. This is, in our judgment, the best worth reading of all Landor's works. One gets from it not only Landor's classic style, but--what is well worth while--a better picture of Greece in the days of its greatness than can be obtained from many historical volumes.
Summary of the Age of Romanticism. This period extends from the war with the colonies, following the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, to the accession of Victoria in 1837, both limits being very indefinite, as will be seen by a glance at the Chronology following. During the first part of the period especially, England was in a continual turmoil, produced by political and economic agitation at home, and by the long wars that covered two continents and the wide sea between them. The mighty changes resulting from these two causes have given this period the name of the Age of Revolution. The storm center of all the turmoil at home and abroad was the French Revolution, which had a profound influence on the life and literature of all Europe. On the Continent the overthrow of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815) apparently checked the progress of liberty, which had started with the French Revolution,[233] but in England the case was reversed. The agitation for popular liberty, which at one time threatened a revolution, went steadily forward till it resulted in the final triumph of democracy, in the Reform Bill of 1832, and in a number of exceedingly important reforms, such as the extension of manhood suffrage, the removal of the last unjust restrictions against Catholics, the establishment of a national system of schools, followed by a rapid increase in popular education, and the abolition of slavery in all English colonies (1833). To this we must add the changes produced by the discovery of steam and the invention of machinery, which rapidly changed England from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation, introduced the factory system, and caused this period to be known as the Age of Industrial Revolution.
The literature of the age is largely poetical in form, and almost entirely romantic in spirit. For, as we have noted, the triumph of democracy in government is generally accompanied by the triumph of romanticism in literature. At first the literature, as shown especially in the early work of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, reflected the turmoil of the age and the wild hopes of an ideal democracy occasioned by the French Revolution. Later the extravagant enthusiasm subsided, and English writers produced so much excellent literature that the age is often called the Second Creative period, the first being the Age of Elizabeth. The six chief characteristics of the age are: the prevalence of romantic poetry; the creation of the historical novel by Scott; the first appearance of women novelists, such as Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, Jane Porter, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen; the development of literary criticism, in the work of Lamb, De Quincey, Coleridge, and Hazlitt; the practical and economic bent of philosophy, as shown in the work of Malthus, James Mill, and Adam Smith; and the establishment of great literary magazines, like the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly, Blackwood's, and the Athenaeum.
In our study we have noted (1) the Poets of Romanticism: the importance of the Lyrical Ballads of 1798; the life and work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; (2) the Prose Writers: the novels of Scott; the development of literary criticism; the life and work of the essayists, Lamb, De Quincey, Landor, and of the novelist Jane Austen.
Selections for Reading. Manly's English Poetry and Manly's English Prose (each one vol.) contain good selections from all authors studied. Ward's English Poets (4 vols.), Craik's English Prose Selections (5 vols.), Braithwaite's The Book of Georgian Verse, Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century, and Garnett's English Prose from Elizabeth to Victoria, may also be used to advantage. Important works, however, should be read entire in one of the inexpensive school editions given below. (Full titles and publishers may be found in the General Bibliography at the end of this book.)
Wordsworth. Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, best lyrics and sonnets, in Selections, edited by Dowden (Athenaeum Press Series); selections and short poems, edited by M. Arnold, in Golden Treasury Series; Selections, also in Everyman's Library, Riverside Literature Series, Cassell's National Library, etc.
Coleridge. Ancient Mariner, edited by L. R. Gibbs, in Standard English Classics; same poem, in Pocket Classics, Eclectic English Classics, etc.; Poems, edited by J. M. Hart, in Athenæum Press (announced, 1909); Selections, Golden Book of Coleridge, in Everyman's Library; Selections from Coleridge and Campbell, in Riverside Literature; Prose Selections (Ginn and Company, also Holt); Lectures on Shakespeare, in Everyman's Library, Bohn's Standard Library, etc.
Scott. Lady of the Lake, Marmion, Ivanhoe, The Talisman, Guy Mannering, Quentin Durward. Numerous inexpensive editions of Scott's best poems and novels in Standard English Classics, Pocket Classics, Cassell's National Library, Eclectic English Classics, Everyman's Library, etc.; thus, Lady of the Lake, edited by Edwin Ginn, and Ivanhoe, edited by W. D. Lewis, both in Standard English Classics; Marmion, edited by G. B. Acton, and The Talisman, edited by F. Treudly, in Pocket Classics, etc.
Byron. Mazeppa and The Prisoner of Chillon, edited by S. M. Tucker, in Standard English Classics; short poems, Selections from Childe Harold, etc., in Canterbury Poets, Riverside Literature, Holt's English Readings, Pocket Classics, etc.
Shelley. To a Cloud, To a Skylark, West Wind, Sensitive Plant, Adonais, etc., all in Selections from Shelley, edited by Alexander, in Athenæum Press Series; Selections, edited by Woodberry, in Belles Lettres Series; Selections, also in Pocket Classics, Heath's English Classics, Golden Treasury Series, etc.
Keats. Ode on a Grecian Urn, Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, To a Nightingale, etc., in Selections from Keats, in Athenæum Press; Selections also in Muses' Library, Riverside Literature, Golden Treasury Series, etc.
Lamb. Essays: Dream Children, Old China, Dissertation on Roast Pig, etc., edited by Wauchope, in Standard English Classics; various essays also in Camelot Series, Temple Classics, Everyman's Library, etc. Tales from Shakespeare, in Home and School Library (Ginn and Company); also in Riverside Literature, Pocket Classics, Golden Treasury, etc.
De Quincey. The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc, in Standard English Classics, etc.; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in Temple Classics, Morley's Universal Library, Everyman's Library, Pocket Classics, etc.; Selections, edited by M. H. Turk, in Athenæum Press; Selections, edited by B. Perry (Holt).
Landor. Selections, edited by W. Clymer, in Athenæum Press; Pericles and Aspasia, in Camelot Series; Imaginary Conversations, selected (Ginn and Company); the same, 2 vols., in Dutton's Universal Library; selected poems, in Canterbury Poets; selections, prose and verse, in Golden Treasury Series.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice, in Everyman's Library, Pocket Classics, etc.
Bibliography.[234]
History. Text-book, Montgomery, pp. 323-357; Cheyney, 576-632. General Works. Green, X, 2-4, Traill, Gardiner, Macaulay, etc. Special Works. Cheyney's Industrial and Social History of England; Warner's Landmarks of English Industrial History; Hassall's Making of the British Empire; Macaulay's William Pitt; Trevelyan's Early Life of Charles James Fox; Morley's Edmund Burke; Morris's Age of Queen Anne and the Early Hanoverians.
Literature. General Works. Mitchell, Courthope, Garnett and Gosse, Taine (see General Bibliography). Special Works. Beers's English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century; A. Symons's The Romantic Movement in English Poetry; Dowden's The French Revolution and English Literature, also Studies in Literature, 1789-1877; Hancock's The French Revolution and the English Poets; Herford's The Age of Wordsworth (Handbooks of English Literature); Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Centuries; Saintsbury's History of Nineteenth Century Literature; Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other Essays; Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, vols. 1-3; Gates's Studies and Appreciations; S. Brooke's Studies in Poetry; Rawnsley's Literary Associations of the English Lakes (2 vols.).
Wordsworth. Texts: Globe, Aldine, Cambridge editions, etc.; Poetical and Prose Works, with Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, edited by Knight, Eversley Edition (London and New York, 1896); Letters of the Wordsworth Family, edited by Knight, 3 vols. (Ginn and Company); Poetical Selections, edited by Dowden, in Athenaeum Press; various other selections, in Golden Treasury, etc.; Prose Selections, edited by Gayley (Ginn and Company). Life: Memoirs, 2 vols., by Christopher Wordsworth; by Knight, 3 vols.; by Myers (English Men of Letters); by Elizabeth Wordsworth; Early Life (a Study of the Prelude) by E. Legouis, translated by J. Matthews; Raleigh's Wordsworth; N.C. Smith's Wordsworth's Literary Criticism; Rannie's Wordsworth and His Circle. Criticism: Herford's The Age of Wordsworth; Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; Magnus's Primer of Wordsworth; Wilson's Helps to the Study of Arnold's Wordsworth; Essays, by Lowell, in Among My Books; by M. Arnold, in Essays in Criticism; by Hutton, in Literary Essays; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library, and in Studies of a Biographer; by Bagehot, in Literary Studies; by Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age; by Pater, in Appreciations; by De Quincey, in Essays on the Poets; by Fields, in Yesterdays with Authors; by Shairp, in Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. See also Knight's Through the Wordsworth Country, and Rawnsley's Literary Associations of the English Lakes.