ction and
exclusion was applied to the subject matter of poetry. Passion, lyric
exaltation, delight in the concrete life of man and nature, passed out
of fashion; in their stead came social satire, criticism, generalized
observation. While the classical influence, as it is usually called, was
at its height, with such men as Dryden and Pope to exemplify it, it did
a great work; but toward the end of the eighth decade of the eighteenth
century it had visibly run to seed. The feeble Hayley, the silly Della
Crusca, the arid Erasmus Darwin, were its only exemplars. England was
ripe for a literary revolution, a return to nature and to passion; and
such a revolution was not slow in coming.

It announced itself first in George Crabbe, who turned to paint the life
of the poor with patient realism; in Burns, who poured out in his songs
the passion of love, the passion of sorrow, the passion of conviviality;
in Blake, who tried to reach across the horizon of visible fact to
mystical heavens of more enduring reality. Following close upon these
men came the four poets destined to accomplish the revolution which the
early comers had begun. They were born within four years of each other,
Wordsworth in 1770, Scott in 1771, Coleridge in 1772, Southey in 1774.
As we look at these four men now, and estimate their worth as poets, we
see that Southey drops almost out of the account, and that Wordsworth
and Coleridge stand, so far as the highest qualities of poetry go, far
above Scott, as, indeed, Blake and Burns do also. But the contemporary
judgment upon them was directly the reverse; and Scott's poetry
exercised an influence over his age immeasurably greater than that of
any of the other three. Let us attempt to discover what qualities this
poetry possessed which gave it its astonishing hold upon the age when it
was written. In so doing, we may discover indirectly some of the reasons
why it still retains a large portion of its popularity, and perhaps
arrive at some grounds of judgment by which we may test its right
thereto.

One reason why Scott's poetry was immediately welcomed, while that of
Wordsworth and of Coleridge lay neglected, is to be found in the fact
that in the matter of diction Scott was much less revolutionary than
they. By nature and education he was conservative; he put _The Lay of
the Last Minstrel_ into the mouth of a rude harper of the North in order
to shield himself from the charge of "attempting to set up a new sch