.

[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by the
spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far deeper
than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank verse,
which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of Dickens's
otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines, a tendency
(outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr. Saintsbury
admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden; yet, on the
other hand, it might be maintained, and would be maintained by its
French critics, that our English poetry has been too apt to dispense
with those prose qualities, which, though not the indispensable
qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of all first-rate
poetry--the qualities, namely, of orderly structure, and such
qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts. A collection of
specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of exhibiting the
achievement of prose excellences by it (in their legitimate measure) is
a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury. It is the assertion, the
development, the product of those very different indispensable
qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal
or superior to all other modern literature--the native, sublime, and
beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English
poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals,
in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted.
That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in
the light of the excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone
to the making of it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold
upon contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
study of what belongs to the past. Beginning with an elaborate notice
of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he never forgets
that his subject is, after all, poetry. The followers of Chaucer, and
the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him--old
Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour." The product of
a large store of reading has been here secreted anew for the reader who
desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade of a long and
varied period of poetic literature, by way of preparation for
Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,)
explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be expla