in the eighteenth century, made Thackeray laugh; and he
summed it up in a doggerel ballad:

"Charlotte was a married woman
And a moral man was Werther,
And for nothing in creation
Would do anything to hurt her."

* * * * *

"Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted woman,
Went on cutting bread and butter."

Mr. Howells in Venice sneers at Byron's theatrical habit of riding
horseback on the Lido in "conspicuous solitude," as recorded in "Julian
and Maddalo." He notices the local traditions about Byron--a window from
which one of his mistresses was said to have thrown herself into the
canal, etc.--and confesses that these matters interest him very little.

As to the Walter Scott kind of romance, we know what Mr. Howells thinks
of it; and have read "Rebecca and Rowena," Thackeray's travesty of
"Ivanhoe." Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; he
passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift.
His masters were the English humourists of the eighteenth century. He
planned a literary history of that century, a design which was carried
out on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen. If he wrote
historical novels, their period was that of the Georges, and not of
Richard the Lion Heart. It will not do, of course, to lay too much
stress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and whose temper purely
anti-romantic. But if we turn to the leaders of the modern schools of
fiction, we shall find that some of them, like George Eliot and Anthony
Trollope, are even more closely realistic than Thackeray--who, says Mr.
Howells, is a caricaturist, not a true realist--and of others such as
Dickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever way they deviate
from realism as strictly understood, it is not in the direction of
romance.

In Matthew Arnold's critical essays we meet with a restatement of
classical principles and an application of them to the literature of the
last generation. There was something premature, he thinks, about the
burst of creative activity in the first quarter of the nineteenth
century. Byron was empty of matter, Shelley incoherent, Wordsworth
wanting in completeness and variety. He finds much to commend in the
influence of a literary tribunal like the French Academy, which embodies
that ideal of authority so dear to the classical heart. Such an
institution acts as