(_The Highlands_, 1778; _The Wye
and South Wales_, 1782; _The Lakes_, 1789; _Forest Scenery_, 1791; and
_The West of England and the Isle of Wight_, 1798) which he published in
the last quarter of the century. They were extremely popular, they set a
fashion which may be said never to have died out since, and they
attained the seal of parody in the famous _Dr. Syntax_ of William Combe
(1741-1823), an Eton and Oxford man who spent a fortune and then wrote
an enormous amount of the most widely various work in verse and prose,
of which little but _Syntax_ itself (1812 _sqq._) is remembered. Gilpin
himself is interesting as an important member of "the naturals," as they
have been oddly and equivocally called. His style is much more florid
and less just than Gilbert White's, and his observation correspondingly
less true. But he had a keen sense of natural beauty and did much to
instill it into others.

In all the work of the time, however, great and small, from
the half-unconscious inspiration of Burns and Blake to the
common journey-work of book-making, we shall find the same
character--incessantly recurring, and unmistakable afterwards if not
always recognisable at the time--of transition, of decay and seed-time
mingled with and crossing each other. There are no distinct spontaneous
literary schools: the forms which literature takes are either occasional
and dependent upon outward events, such as the wide and varied attack
and defence consequent upon the French Revolution, or else fantastic,
trivial, reflex. Sometimes the absence of any distinct and creative
impulse reveals itself in work really good and useful, such as the
editing of old writers, of which the labours of Malone are the chief
example and the forgeries of Ireland the corresponding corruption; or
the return to their study aesthetically, in which Headley, a now
forgotten critic, did good work. Sometimes it resulted in such things
as the literary reputation (which was an actual thing after a kind) of
persons like Sir James Bland Burges, Under-Secretary of State,
poetaster, connoisseur, and general fribble. Yet all the while, in
schools and universities, in London garrets and country villages, there
was growing up, and sometimes showing itself pretty unmistakably, the
generation which was to substitute for this trying and trifling the
greatest work in verse, and not the least in prose, that had been done
for two hundred years. The _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, the