ufficiently take into consideration the peculiar
strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however
mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart, and a
new pulse, and so we are kept going. Blessed be those who grease
the wheels of the old world.'

This is the large-hearted, far-seeing judgment of one who could survey
the whole line and evolutionary succession of English verse, being
himself destined to close the long list of nineteenth-century poets,
which was opened by Byron and his contemporaries. The time has surely
now come when we may leave discussing Byron as a social outlaw, and
cease groping after more evidence of his misdeeds. The office of true
criticism is to show that he made so powerful an impression on our
literature as to win for himself permanent rank in its annals, and
that his work, with all its shortcomings, does yet mark and illustrate
an important stage in the connected development of our English poetry.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] _The Works of Lord Byron: a New, Revised, and Enlarged
Edition._--'Letters and Journals.' Edited by Rowland E. Prothero, M.
A. 'Poetry.' Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, M. A. London, John
Murray, 1898.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1900.

[25] Preface to the _Corsair_.

[26] _The Deformed Transformed_ (part I. scene i.).

[27] _Sardanapalus_ (act V. scene i.).

THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS[28]

Mr. Leslie Stephen combines the faculty of acute and searching
criticism with a style that is singularly clear, incisive, and exact.
His wide knowledge of English literature, and the close study which he
has given to the history of English opinions and controversies,
speculative, political, and economical, have enabled him to survey an
extensive field, to trace the lines of origin and development, to
disentangle complicated ideas, and to summarise conclusions in a
masterly manner. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since he
published his work on _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, and
his present book on the Utilitarians continues, and indeed brings down
to our own time, a similar investigation of the course of certain
views, principles, and doctrines which had taken their shape in
England and France during the period preceding the French Revolution,
and which profoundly influenced political discussion throughout the
first half of the nineteenth century. But on this occasion Mr.
Stephen's inquiry does not range ov