WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 389 



who almost exactly reproduced the Elizabethans in their 

 blemishes and virtues, like Wells and Beddoes, poets who 

 caricatured them with a pathetic touch of difference, like 

 Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, appeared about the 

 middle of the century. And then Browning loomed on the 

 horizon, surely the brawniest neo-Elizabethan Titan whom 

 our age has seen, and whom it has latterly chosen to adore. 

 As years advanced, mere haphazard fluency grew to be less 

 and less admired ; and while keeping still within the sphere 

 of romantic as opposed to classical art, the English poets 

 aimed at chastened diction, correct form, polished versification. 

 Tennyson, who represents the height of the Victorian period, 

 brought poetic style again to the Miltonic or Virgilian point 

 of finish. In him a just conception of the work as a whole, 

 a cousciousness of his aims and how to attain them, together 

 with a high standard of verbal execution, are combined with 

 richness of fancy and sensuous magnificence worthy of an 

 Elizabethan poet in all his glory. 



When, therefore, we compare the two epochs upon this 

 point of taste and style, we are able to award the palm of 

 excellence to the latter. Having lost much, we have gained 

 at least what is implied in artistic self-control, without relapsing 

 into the rigidity of the last century. 



VIII 



The freedom, about which I have said so much, as forming 

 the main note of Elizabethan poetry, accounts for the boldness 

 with which men of letters treated moral topics, and for their 

 clear-sighted outlook over a vast sphere of ethical casuistry. 

 Not to the spirifc of that age, but to the genius of our nation, 

 I ascribe the manly instinct which guided these pioneers of 

 exploration and experience through many a hazardous 

 passage. The touch of the Elizabethan poets in such matters 

 was almost uniformly right. They may show themselves 

 gross, plain-spoken, voluptuous. We should not tolerate 

 Jonson's Crispinus, or Shakespeare's Mercutio, or Marlowe's 

 Hero and Leander at the present day. But they were not 



