and
the most popular in his tastes and aims--is perhaps the nearest to a
"schoolman," adapting Scott as he does in his _Lays_; yet even here
there is no mere imitation.

Thus the people of this minor transition exhibit--in a most interesting
way, rendered even more interesting by the repetition of it which, as we
have seen and shall see, came about twenty years later--the mixed
phenomena of an after-piece and a _lever de rideau_, of precursorship
and what we must for want of a better word call decadence. They were not
strong enough in themselves, or were not favourably enough
circumstanced, entirely to refresh or redirect the main current of
poetry; so they deviated from it. But hardly in the least of them is
there absent the sign and symptom of the poetic spirit being still
about, of the poetic craft still in full working order. And their
occasional efforts, their experiments in the half-kinds they affected,
have a curious charm. English poetry would be undeniably poorer without
the unearthly snatches of Beddoes, the exquisitely urbane
verse-of-society of Praed, the pathetic-grotesque of Hood, even the
stately tirades of Horne and Taylor. Some of them, if not all, may at
this or that time have been exaggerated in value, by caprice, by
reaction, by mere personal sympathy. But no universal critic will refuse
admiration to them in and for themselves.

In the next stage we are again face to face, not with half-talents,
uncertain of their direction, but with whole genius, inevitably working
on its predestined lines. Nothing quite like the poetical career and the
poetical conception of Alfred Tennyson and of Robert Browning, so
different in all respects, except that of duration and coincidence in
time, meets us in English, perhaps nothing similar meets us in any
literature. It is easy to overestimate both; and both have been
over-estimated. It is still easier to depreciate both; and both have
been depreciated. Both wrote constantly, and at frequent intervals, for
some sixty years--the same sixty years--and, with not more than fair
allowance for the effects of time, both wrote at the end better than at
the beginning, and nearly as well as at the best time of each.
Wordsworth, it is true, wrote for nearly as long, but no one can assert
the same duration of equality in his production.

In a certain sense, no doubt, neither can claim the same distinct
individuality, the same unmistakable and elementary _quality_, as that
wh