he
nevertheless had something of the spirit of the new movement. In 1783
the artist-poet Blake began to write verse which is absolutely
untrammelled by convention, mystical, strange, and unequal. Three years
later a volume by Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, contained
the outpouring of a passionate soul in musical verse, and in 1798, two
years after his death, the victory of the romantic school was secured by
the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
though its triumph was not confirmed until a few years later.

By 1760 Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett had established the English
novel, though Smollett's master-piece, _Humphrey Clinker_, did not
appear until 1771, the year of his death. Fiction developed in various
directions. In _The Vicar of Wakefield_ Goldsmith, in spite of his
literary conservatism, portrayed manners and character with a perfectly
natural grace, and with a delightful delicacy of touch. Laurence Sterne,
the humorous and indecent prebendary of York, illustrates the prevalence
of sensibility in contemporary society in his _Tristram Shandy_ and the
_Sentimental Journey_. It is a curious characteristic of the time that
displays of emotion by men and women alike were reckoned as proofs of
genuine fineness of feeling. Sterne's sentiment and discursiveness found
several feeble imitators. The taste for antiquity was strong in Horace
Walpole, and his admiration for "the gothick," expressed in the pointed
windows and sham battlements of his house at Strawberry hill, inspired
his romance, _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764), which began the romantic
movement in fiction. To this movement, destined to be adorned by the
genius of Scott, belong Beckford's _Vathek_, Clara Reeve's _Old English
Baron_, and the once widely popular tales of mystery of Mrs. Radcliffe
and "Monk" Lewis, as he was called after his best-known romance (1795).
The novel of manners was developed by Fanny Burney's (Madame d'Arblay)
_Evelina_ (1778), founded on acute observation, dealing almost wholly
with every-day life, replete with satire, and written with extraordinary
freshness and vivacity. _Castle Rackrent_, the first of Maria
Edgeworth's Irish tales, appeared in the last year of the century.
Before its close, too, Jane Austen was writing novels which as yet could
find no publisher, though in their faultless execution, their delicate
humour, and their life-like representation of the society with which