uses, more
amusements--in short, "beer and skittles" in reasonable amount. The
Socialism of Ruskin and Morris was an outcome of their aesthetic feeling.
They liked to imagine the work people of the future as an intelligent and
artistic body of handicraftsmen, living in pretty Gothic cottages among
gardens of their own, scattered all over England in small rural towns or
villages, and joyfully engaged in making sound and beautiful objects of
use, tools, furniture, woven goods, etc. To the followers of Mr. Hyndman
these motives, if not these aims, must have seemed somewhat unpractical.
And in reading "Fors Clavigera," one sometimes has a difficulty in
understanding just what sort of person Ruskin imagined the British
workman to be.

THE NEO-ROMANTICISTS.--The literature of each new generation is apt to be
partly an imitation of the last, and partly a reaction against it. The
impulse first given by Rossetti was communicated, through Morris and
Swinburne, to a group of younger poets whom Mr. Stedman distinguishes as
"Neo-Romanticists." [45] The most noteworthy among these are probably
Arthur O'Shaughnessy,[46] John Payne,[47] and Theophile Marzials;[48]
though mention (want of space forbids more) should also be made of George
Augustus Simcox, whose "Poems and Romances" (1869) are in the
Pre-Raphaelite tradition. The work of each of these has pronounced
individuality; yet, as a whole, it reminds one continually now of
Rossetti, now of Morris, and again of Swinburne; not infrequently, too,
of Keats or Leigh Hunt, but never of the older romanticism, never of
Scott nor even of Coleridge or Tennyson. The reminder comes sometimes
through a turn of phrase or the trick of the verse; but more insistently
in the choice of subject and the entire attitude of the poet towards art
and life, an attitude that may be vaguely described as "aesthetic." Even
more distinctly than in Swinburne, English romanticism in these latest
representatives is seen to be taking a French direction. They show the
influence not only of Hugo and Gautier, but of those more recent schools
of "decadents" which exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescent
stage; writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baudelaire; books
like Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit." Morbid states of passion,
the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics;
the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (_serres
chaudes_); the