ant but unmistakable Wordsworthian, sharing a partly
reluctant allegiance between Wordsworth, the ancients, Goethe, and
Tennyson himself, it is impossible not to think that a freer attitude, a
more independent and less literary aim, might have strengthened his
elegance, supplied his curious mixture of stiffness and grace, and even
made him less unequal than he actually is. And yet he is much the
greatest poet of the period. Its effect was more disastrous still upon
the second Lord Lytton, who was content to employ an excellent lyrical
vein, and a gift of verse satire of the fantastic kind so distinct and
fascinating, that it approaches the merit of fantasists in other kinds
of the former group, like Beddoes and Darley, to far too great an extent
on echoes. The fact is, that by this time, to speak conceitedly, the
obsession of the book was getting oppressive. Men could hardly sing for
remembering, or, at least, without remembering, what others had sung
before them, and became either slavishly imitative or wilfully
recalcitrant to imitation. The great leaders indeed continued to sing
each in his own way, and, though with perfect knowledge of their
forerunners, not in the least hampered by that knowledge. But something
else was needed to freshen the middle regions of song.

It was found in that remarkable completion of the English Romantic
movement, which is in relation to art called prae-Raphaelitism, and which
is represented in literature, to mention only the greatest names, by
Rossetti, his sister, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne. The death of the
two former, and the fact that the movement itself, still active in art,
has in a manner rounded itself off, though it is not necessarily
finished, in literature, enable us to discuss it here as a whole, though
its two chief poets are luckily still alive.

The first thing of interest in general history which strikes us, in
regard to this delightful chapter of English poetry, is its
illustration--a common one in life and letters--of the fact that there
is a false as well as a true side to the question quoted by Aristotle:
"If water chokes you, what are you to drink on the top of it?" "Wine,"
one kind of humourist might answer; "More water," another: and both
rightly. It has been said that the group which preceded this suffered
from the pressure of too constant, wide, and various reminiscence,
literary, artistic, and other. The prae-Raphaelites refreshed themselves
and the world b