gression. He frequently leaves his
main theme and follows some line of thought that has been suggested to
his well-stored mind. These digressions are often very long, and
sometimes one leads to another, until several subjects receive
treatment in a single paper. De Quincey, however, always returns to
the subject in hand and defines very sharply the point of digression
and of return. Another of his faults is an indulgence in involved
sentences, which weaken the vigor and simplicity of the style.

Despite these faults, De Quincey is a great master of language. He
deserves study for the three most striking characteristics of his
style,--precision, stateliness, and harmony.

SUMMARY

The tide of reaction, which had for same time been gathering force,
swept triumphantly over England in this age of Romanticism.

Men rebelled against the aristocracy, the narrow conventions of
society, the authority of the church and of the government, against
the supremacy of cold classicism in literature, against confining
intellectual activity to tangible commonplace things, and against the
repression of imagination and of the soul's aspirations. The two
principal forces behind these changes were the Romantic movement,
which culminated in changed literary ideals, and the spirit of the
French Revolution, which emphasized the close kinship of all ranks of
humanity.

The time was preeminently poetic. The Elizabethan age alone excels it
in the glory of its poetry. The principal subjects of verse in the age
of Romanticism were nature and man. Nature became the embodiment of an
intelligent, sympathetic, spiritual force. Cowper, Burns, Scott,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats constitute a group of
poets who gave to English literature a new poetry of nature. The
majority of these were also poets of man, of a more ideal humanity.
The common man became an object of regard. Burns sings of the Scotch
peasant. Wordsworth pictures the life of shepherds and dalesmen.
Byron's lines ring with a cry of liberty for all, and Shelley
immortalizes the dreams of a universal brotherhood of man. Keats, the
poet of the beautiful, passed away before he heard clearly the message
of "the still sad music of humanity."

While the prose does not take such high rank as the poetry, there are
some writers who will not soon be forgotten. Scott will be remembered
as the great master of the historical novel, Jane Austen as the
skillful realistic interprete