WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 371 



of ecclesiastical censure, before his eyes. How different in 

 this respect was the liberty of Shakespeare from the servitude 

 of Tasso. At the same time, as we have already seen, this 

 spontaneity was controlled by a strong sense of national 

 unity. The English were possessed with an ideal, which 

 tuned their impassioned utterances to one keynote. The 

 spirit of the people was patriotic, highly moralised, intensely 

 human, animated by a robust belief in reality; martial, yet 

 jealous of domestic peace; assiduous in toil, yet quick to 

 overleap material obstacles and revel in the dreams of the 

 imagination ; manly, but delicate ; inured to hardship, but 

 not quelled as yet by disappointment and the disillusion of 

 experience. In a word, Elizabethan poetry is the utterance 

 of l a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong 

 man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks .... like 

 an eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled 

 eyes at the full midday beam.' 



Freedom being thus the dominant note of Elizabethan 

 poetry, it follows that the genius of the race will return to it 

 with love and admiration at epochs marked by the resurgent 

 spirit of liberty. This is why the literature of the Victorian 

 age has been so powerfully influenced by that of Elizabeth. 

 The French Revolution shook Europe to the centre, and 

 opened illimitable vistas at the commencement of the century. 

 In 1815, England, after her long struggle with Napoleon, 

 stood crowned with naval and military laurels, in possession 

 of a hardly-earned peace. It is not to be wondered that critics 

 like Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, editors like Gifford, historians 

 like Collier, should have ransacked the forgotten treasures of 

 the Shakespearian drama at this moment. Poetry aimed at 

 Elizabethan phraseology and used Elizabethan metres. Byron 

 adapted the Spenserian and octave stanzas to his purposes 

 of satire and description : Keats and Shelley treated the 

 heroic couplet with Elizabethan laxity of structure and 

 variety of cadence; Wordsworth and Coleridge revived the 

 Elizabethan rhythms of blank verse. The sonnet was culti- 

 vated, and lyrical measures assumed bewildering forms of 

 richness. At the same time, a revolt began against those 



BB'2 



