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THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



LESSONS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

 XXVIII. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 



JUST about the time when Dr. Johnson grew sick of life, and 

 lay down to die, a great idea fell sick also and died. This was 

 Classicalism. It had become a sorry, drivelling notion in the 

 hands of the Delia Cruscans, and still later poetasters, who 

 remind us of people trying to dance a minuet on stilts. The 

 world just then was in a state of unrest. Certain contemplative 

 thinkers were searching for something a little better for 

 the imagination and the heart than so-called " classical " 

 commonplaces. Other thinkers, more actively disposed, were 

 formulating into words the feeling which was slumbering 

 inarticulately in the hearts of the masses. This feeling was a 

 great hunger for freedom. At last these two pent up desires 

 made themselves potent. Romance, " like a pilgrim come from 

 far, sounded his horn, rousing peasant and king." And the 

 wild French mobs, in the turmoil of their great Revolution, 

 were cheered on by some of our greatest poets. Poetry was to 

 ba no longer a plaything, a dainty amusement for educated 

 dandies. Burns was one of the first to cut away the stilts from 

 under the faet of the poetasters. Poetry was now to be a 

 safety-valve through which a whole band of intensely excited 

 and earnest men were to ease the mighty pressure of wild 

 aspirations. 



Revolutionary ideas worked strangely in the mind of Burns. 

 A young man lilting behind his plough on an Ayrshire farm 

 was not a likely being to rebel at every conventionality regnant 

 in his conventional country. But his over-sensitive soul found 

 every circumstance of hia life an oppression, and his whole 

 poetry is a cry for freedom, freedom of love, freedom of creed, 

 freedom from cant, freedom from social tyranny. Turbulent, 

 lawless, libertine even, his nature was in some of its aspects ; 

 but it was also filled to overflowing with exquisite sympathies 

 for all that is delicately beautiful in God's earth and the human 

 spirit. His was a soul to use a line from Shelley 



'' Struggling' fierce toward Heaven's free wilderness." 

 That soul wandered often, and wandered into sad ways, but it 

 never had fair play, and with all its faults, it made most 

 precious music for itself and for us. 



Robert Burns was born near Ayr in 1759. He worked on his 

 father's farm when a lad, and had little to read except 

 Mackenzie's " Man of Feeling " and a book of songs. Verses 

 of his own bagan to be circulated about his home, and after- 

 wards in the neighbourhood of Manchline, where he settled for 

 a time. Boon companions liked to drink with him, and hear 

 poetry from him. His life grew disreputable in several ways. 

 It had its gleams of triumph however. He was feted for a 

 season at Edinburgh, and a collection of his poems, originally 

 printed at Kilmarnock in 1786, went through more than one 

 edition. But fortune never smiled serenely upon him. The 

 staple of his income was about =70 a year, earned in the 

 capacity of exciseman at Dumfries. Broken by the strife of a 

 proud spirit with hard circumstances and inflammable inclina- 

 tions, he wasted himself away in drink and riot, and died 

 miserably in 1796. The world had not taken the least care of 

 him. It was only after he had been snatched from it that it 

 recognised what a gift of God to humanity a heart like his is. 

 It had throbbed and thrilled itself into lyrics as purely beautiful 

 as ever pen transcribed. He is all heart, as a poet. You feel 

 the warm blood pulsing warmly through his writings. Any one 

 who reads the poetry of Burns gets as near the secret sources 

 of pure human emotions as can be. 



Walter Scott was also a revolutionary, but only in a strictly 

 literary way. His was a happy, sound nature that goes with 

 steady work and strong digestion and undisturbed sleep. He 

 did not feel himself " born to put the crooked straight ; " but he 

 was sick of the sillinesses and commonplaces that were so rife 

 in the fashionable literature of his time, and he determined to 

 try his hand at something better. He was the son of a lawyer 

 practising in Edinburgh, where he was born in 1771. Ho was 

 rather a dunce at school, and even at college he was nick- 

 named Duns Scotus. By-and-by, pinned to a desk in his 

 father's office, he secretly regaled himself, not with deeds and 

 statute-books, but with ballads and romances of chivalry. 

 Scott's mind would have echoed the whimsical saying of 

 Charles Lamb, "Hang posterity! Let me write for antiquity." 



His heart was in bygone ages, and he made the past a pa- 

 geantry. His first novel was " Waverley " (1814). When this 

 had taken the kingdom by storm, he went to work steadily 

 to produce a long series of romances of the same kind. 

 In earlier years he had also created a sensation with his 

 romances in verse, of which the best are " The Lay of the 

 Last Minstrel," " Marmion," and "The Lady of the Lake." 

 George IV. made him a baronet. He had built himself a sort 

 of baronial palace at Abbotsford, and entertained there in 

 princely style. Then disaster came through commercial 

 relations with Constable and Co., printers. Scott lost ,150, 000. 

 At once he began the task of paying off all his creditors and 

 retrieving his fortunes. He wrote " Woodstock " for ,9,000, 

 and a " Life of Napoleon " for 18,000. Many other labours 

 succeeded these, and wore him out. He died at his beloved 

 Abbotsford, with the Tweed murmuring in his ear, on the 

 21st of September, 1832. Sir Walter Scott is free enough in 

 his treatment of history ; he is content to extract from it 

 romance, not bare fact. Yet to him we owe, not merely the 

 pleasure of the ordinary novel-reader, but a sense of vivified 

 history which duller, if more accurate, chronicles do not afford 

 us. The historian peers into the dim past with a candle, and 

 shows us facts in their truth. But Scott leads us into it with 

 a many-coloured lamp, and lights it up with dazzling hues. 



Scott had been tempted by popularity to stake his chances of 

 fame on his poetical efforts. But he was wise, and recognised 

 that a far truer poet was competing with him. That was 

 Byron. George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in London in 

 1788, and as early as the year 1807 he had acquired notoriety 

 as a clever but selfish man of pleasure. In that year he 

 published a volume of verse entitled " Hours of Idleness." 

 This was ridiculed by tho Edinburgh Review ; and the article in 

 this periodical drew from him the bitter satire, " English 

 Bards and Scotch Reviewers." Byron soom developed to 

 maturity all the vices of Burns, in fuller measure, and without 

 the excuses Burns had. With Burns poetry was the life, vice 

 the accident. It almost seems as if, for a time at least, vice 

 was the life of Byron, and poetry the accident. In 1812 he 

 published the first two cantos of his languidly voluptuous 

 " Childe Harold," and he records that "he awoke one morning 

 and found himself famous." The romance that was in the air 

 at that time now impelled him to write tales in passionate 

 verse such as " The Giaour," " The Bride of Abydos," " The 

 Corsair," "Lara," "The Prisoner of Chillon," "Manfred. 1 ' 

 His " Childe Harold " was likewise completed, and he startled 

 the world with an amazingly clever licentious poem called 

 "Don Juan," about which almost anything bad or good may 

 be said. Byron wrote many memory-haunting lyrics ; his 

 descriptive powers were of a high order ; and his dramatic 

 talent, though irregular, was strong. His chief fault is poetic 

 egotism ; his self pervades all that he writes. Macaulay likens 

 him to the india-rubber face in the toy-books, which thrusts 

 itself through page after page, and puts the same head on all 

 sorts of figuT Is. One admires Byron without respecting him. 

 He died in 1824 at Missolonghi, whither he had gone to give a 

 little glory to his tarnished life by fighting for the cause of 

 Greek independence. 



We have still to notice two bands of poets in whom modern 

 ideas were fermenting during this period. One of these bands 

 was what was called the Cockney School of Poetry. It was for 

 a time headed by Leigh Hunt, a poet and essayist whose 

 reputation still lives. Perhaps his best poem is that for which 

 he was most assailed, " Francesca da Rimini." It deals with 

 a somewhat unpleasant theme. Hunt had all a Londoner's 

 ways about him, and " babbled of green fields " in rather a 

 second-hand style. His language was perhaps rather luscious 

 at times, and there was a gush about his expression of emotion 

 that critics were not accustomed to. They attacked him severely, 

 but not so irrationally as they attacked Keats, whom they pro- 

 nounced a pupil of Hunt's Cockney School. 



John Keats, the son of a livery-stable keeper, was born in 

 London in 1796, and became articled to a surgeon, and after- 

 wards attempted to practise for himself. His real bent, how- 

 ever, was towards literature, and his first poem, " Endymion," 

 appeared in 1818. The Quarterly Review and Blackwood's 

 Magazine vilified this grand poem as maundering, meaningless 

 trash. Keats by -and -by brought forth another volume 

 entitled " Tales and Poems." This contained the noble 



