writers, and to consider all their claims
to remembrance would of itself require a volume. Though these are generally
classed as secondary writers, much of their work has claims to popularity,
and some of it to permanence. Moore's _Irish Melodies_, Campbell's lyrics,
Keble's _Christian Year_, and Jane Porter's _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and
_Scottish Chiefs_ have still a multitude of readers, where Keats, Lamb, and
De Quincey are prized only by the cultured few; and Hallam's historical and
critical works are perhaps better known than those of Gibbon, who
nevertheless occupies a larger place in our literature. Among all these
writers we choose only two, Jane Austen and Walter Savage Landor, whose
works indicate a period of transition from the Romantic to the Victorian
Age.

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

We have so lately rediscovered the charm and genius of this gifted young
woman that she seems to be a novelist of yesterday, rather than the
contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and few even of her readers
realize that she did for the English novel precisely what the Lake poets
did for English poetry,--she refined and simplified it, making it a true
reflection of English life. Like the Lake poets, she met with scanty
encouragement in her own generation. Her greatest novel, _Pride and
Prejudice_, was finished in 1797, a year before the appearance of the
famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge; but while the latter
book was published and found a few appreciative readers, the manuscript of
this wonderful novel went begging for sixteen years before it found a
publisher. As Wordsworth began with the deliberate purpose of making poetry
natural and truthful, so Miss Austen appears to have begun writing with the
idea of presenting the life of English country society exactly as it was,
in opposition to the romantic extravagance of Mrs. Radcliffe and her
school. But there was this difference,--that Miss Austen had in large
measure the saving gift of humor, which Wordsworth sadly lacked. Maria
Edgeworth, at the same time, set a sane and excellent example in her tales
of Irish life, _The Absentee_ and _Castle Rackrent;_ and Miss Austen
followed up the advantage with at least six works, which have grown
steadily in value until we place them gladly in the first rank of our
novels of common life. It is not simply for her exquisite charm, therefore,
that we admire her, but also for her influence in bringing our novels back
to t