bbe, to see how they try to put the new wine in the old bottles, to
compare them with Goldsmith and Thomson on the one hand, with Wordsworth
and Coleridge on the other. Hayley perhaps alone, or almost alone, is
rebel to the comparative method. Hayley is one of these hopeless
creatures who abound at all periods, and whose native cast of
nothingness takes a faint fashion from the time. But even in the verse
of "Monk" Lewis we see the itch for new measures, the craving for lyric
movement; even in the day-flies of the Della Crusca group the desire to
be "something different." And then in Bowles, with his sonnets of
places, in Sayers, with his rhymeless Pindarics, we come upon the actual
guides to the right way, guides the oddest, the blindest, the most
stumbling, but still--as not merely chronology but the positive
testimony and the still more positive practice of those who followed
them show--real guides and no misleaders.

Least studied, perhaps, because of its want of positive savour in
comparison with their later achievements, but more interesting than all
of these, is the early work of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth
themselves, and the work, not merely early but later, of men like
Rogers and Campbell. Here the spectacle already presented in Crabbe and
Cowper is repeated; but the process is in a further stage, and the
fermentation is determining, according to the nature of the fermenting
material. On Rogers it is nearly powerless; in Campbell only in his
lyrics does it succeed in breaking up and dissolving the old crust; in
Southey the effect is never quite complete; in Coleridge and Wordsworth,
but especially in Coleridge, the leaven changes all the latter lump.
Thenceforward the process is reversed. Instead of instances of advance
amid a mass of inertia or aimless wandering we have instances of
reaction amid a mass of advance. The work of the revolutionary time is
done; the scholar, contrary to Goethe's dictum, has now not merely to
exercise himself but to perfect.

The phenomena of the time in fiction are of the same character, but they
lead as yet to no such distinct turn. The tale-telling of Beckford is
like the singing of Burns, not uncoloured by the time, but still in the
main purely individual; the purpose of the novels of Holcroft, Godwin,
and Bage is groping in the dark; the Radcliffian romance and its
exaggeration by Lewis exhibit the same uncertainty, the same application
of the Rule of False. And there