g emotions tend to extremes, the age produced a new type of
novel which seems rather hysterical now, but which in its own day delighted
multitudes of readers whose nerves were somewhat excited, and who reveled
in "bogey" stories of supernatural terror. Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823)
was one of the most successful writers of this school of exaggerated
romance. Her novels, with their azure-eyed heroines, haunted castles,
trapdoors, bandits, abductions, rescues in the nick of time, and a general
medley of overwrought joys and horrors,[219] were immensely popular, not
only with the crowd of novel readers, but also with men of unquestioned
literary genius, like Scott and Byron.

In marked contrast to these extravagant stories is the enduring work of
Jane Austen, with her charming descriptions of everyday life, and of Maria
Edgeworth, whose wonderful pictures of Irish life suggested to Walter Scott
the idea of writing his Scottish romances. Two other women who attained a
more or less lasting fame were Hannah More, poet, dramatist, and novelist,
and Jane Porter, whose _Scottish Chiefs_ and _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ are still
in demand in our libraries. Beside these were Fanny Burney (Madame
D'Arblay) and several other writers whose works, in the early part of the
nineteenth century, raised woman to the high place in literature which she
has ever since maintained.

In this age literary criticism became firmly established by the appearance
of such magazines as the _Edinburgh Review_ (18O2), _The Quarterly Review_
(1808), _Blackwood's Magazine_ (1817), the _Westminster Review_ (1824),
_The Spectator_ (1828), _The Athenaeum_ (1828), and _Fraser's Magazine_
(1830). These magazines, edited by such men as Francis Jeffrey, John Wilson
(who is known to us as Christopher North), and John Gibson Lockhart, who
gave us the _Life of Scott_, exercised an immense influence on all
subsequent literature. At first their criticisms were largely destructive,
as when Jeffrey hammered Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron most unmercifully;
and Lockhart could find no good in either Keats or Tennyson; but with added
wisdom, criticism assumed its true function of construction. And when these
magazines began to seek and to publish the works of unknown writers, like
Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, they discovered the chief mission of the
modern magazine, which is to give every writer of ability the opportunity
to make his work known to the world.

I. THE POETS OF