97, Cowper in 1800. John Howard, the great pioneer of prison reform,
became a martyr to philanthropy in 1790. The most remarkable of those
manufacturing improvements and mechanical inventions upon which the
commercial supremacy of England is founded date from the same period,
and have been described in a previous volume. Steam navigation was still
untried, but preliminary experiments had already been made on both sides
of the Atlantic before 1789. The application of steam to locomotion by
land had scarcely been conceived, but the facilities of traffic and
travelling had been vastly developed in the first forty years of George
III.'s reign.

It may truly be said, however, that English literature in the early
party of the nineteenth century bears clear traces of the influence
exercised on receptive minds by the French revolution. Three of the
leading poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, were deeply infected
by its spirit, and indulged in their youth fantastic dreams of a social
millennium; Wordsworth, especially, who in his maturer years could be
justly described as the priest of nature-worship and the poet of rural
life, had imbibed violent republican ideas during a residence of more
than a year in France. These were passing off in 1798, when he
published, jointly with Coleridge, the volume of _Lyrical Ballads_
containing the latter's immortal tale of the _Ancient Mariner_. In the
following year he settled in the English lake-country, where Coleridge
established himself for a while, and Southey for life. Hence the popular
but very inaccurate title of the "Lake School," applied to a trio of
poets who, except as friends, had little in common with each other.
Indeed, after Wordsworth had developed his theory of poetical realism in
the preface to a volume published in 1800, Coleridge rejected and
criticised it as wholly untenable. All three, however, may be considered
as comrades in a revolt against the conventional diction of eighteenth
century poetry, from which Coleridge's "dreamy tenderness" and mystical
flights of fancy were as remote as Wordsworth's rusticity and almost
prosaic studies of humble life.

[Pageheading: _COLERIDGE AND SCOTT._]

Although Coleridge survived to 1834 and Wordsworth to 1850, both seem to
have lost at an early date that power of imagination, whether displayed
in sympathy or in creation, in which their greatness consisted.
Wordsworth wrote assiduously during the whole of this period; in 1