Rossetti's impulses were generous, but his habits were eccentric and selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engagement with Miss Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was prolonged by his lack of means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic, while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died, and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his treatment of her Rossetti buried his poems, still unpublished, in her coffin. After some years, however, he was persuaded to disinter and publish them. Meanwhile he had formed friendships with the slightly younger artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and they established a company for the manufacture of furniture and other articles, to be made beautiful as well as useful, and thus to aid in spreading the esthetic sense among the English people. After some years Rossetti and Burne-Jones withdrew from the enterprise, leaving it to Morris. Rossetti continued all his life to produce both poetry and paintings. His pictures are among the best and most gorgeous products of recent romantic art—'Dante's Dream,' 'Beata Beatrix,' 'The Blessed Damosel,' and many others. During his later years he earned a large income, and he lived in a large house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea (near Carlyle), where for a while, as long as his irregular habits permitted, the novelist George Meredith and the poet Swinburne were also inmates. He gradually grew more morbid, and became a rather pitiful victim of insomnia, the drug chloral, and spiritualistic delusions about his wife. He died in 1882.

Rossetti's poetry is absolutely unlike that of any other English poet, and the difference is clearly due in large part to his Italian race and his painter's instinct. He has, in the didactic sense, absolutely no religious, moral, or social interests; he is an artist almost purely for art's sake, writing to give beautiful embodiment to moods, experiences, and striking moments. If it is true of Tennyson, however, that he stands aloof from actual life, this is far truer of Rossetti. His world is a vague and languid region of enchantment, full of whispering winds, indistinct forms of personified abstractions, and the murmur of hidden streams; its landscape sometimes bright, sometimes shadowy, but always delicate, exquisitely arranged for luxurious decorative effect. In his ballad-romances, to be sure, such as, 'The King's Tragedy,' there is much dramatic vigor; yet there is still more of medieval weirdness. Rossetti, like Dante, has much of spiritual mysticism, and his interest centers in the inner rather than the outer life; but his method, that of a painter and a southern Italian, is always highly sensuous. His melody is superb and depends partly on a highly Latinized vocabulary, archaic pronunciations, and a delicate genius in sound-modulation, the effect being heightened also by frequent alliteration and masterly use of refrains. 'Sister Helen,' obviously influenced by the popular ballad 'Edward, Edward,' derives much of its tremendous tragic power from the refrain, and in the use of this device is perhaps the most effective poem in the world. Rossetti is especially facile also with the sonnet. His sonnet sequence, 'The House of Life,' one of the most notable in English, exalts earthly Love as the central force in the world and in rather fragmentary fashion traces the tragic influence of Change in both life and love.

WILLIAM MORRIS. William Morris, a man of remarkable versatility and tremendous energy, which expressed themselves in poetry and many other ways, was the son of a prosperous banker, and was born in London in 1834. At Oxford in 1853-55 he became interested in medieval life and art, was stimulated by the poetry of Mrs. Browning and Tennyson, became a friend of Burne-Jones, wrote verse and prose, and was a member of a group called 'The Brotherhood,' while a little later published for a year a monthly magazine not unlike 'The Germ.' He apprenticed himself to an architect, but at the same time also practised several decorative arts, such as woodcarving, illuminating manuscripts, and designing furniture, stained glass and embroidery. Together with Burne-Jones, moreover, he became an enthusiastic pupil of Rossetti in painting. His first volume of verse, 'The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems,' put forth in 1858, shows the influence of Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism, but it mainly gives vivid presentation to the spirit of fourteenth-century French chivalry. In 1861 came the foundation of the decorative-art firm of Morris and Co. (above, p. 337), which after some years grew into a large business, continued to be Morris' main occupation to the end of his life, and has exercised a great influence, both in England and elsewhere, on the beautifying of the surroundings of domestic life.

Meanwhile Morris had turned to the writing of long narrative poems, which he composed with remarkable fluency. The most important is the series of versions of Greek and Norse myths and legends which appeared in 1868-70 as 'The Earthly Paradise.' Shortly after this he became especially interested in Icelandic literature and published versions of some of its stories; notably one of the Siegfried tale, 'Sigurd the Volsung.' In the decade from 1880 to 1890 he devoted most of his energy to work for the Socialist party, of which he became a leader. His ideals were largely identical with those of Ruskin; in particular he wished to restore (or create) in the lives of workingmen conditions which should make of each of them an independent artist. The practical result of his experience was bitter disappointment, he was deposed from his leadership, finally abandoned the party, and returned to art and literature. He now published a succession of prose romances largely inspired by the Icelandic sagas and composed in a strange half-archaic style. He also established the 'Kelmscott Press,' which he made famous for its production of elaborate artistic editions of great books. He died in 1896.

Morris' shorter poems are strikingly dramatic and picturesque, and his longer narrations are remarkably facile and often highly pleasing. His facility, however, is his undoing. He sometimes wrote as much as eight hundred lines in a day, and he once declared: 'If a chap can't compose an epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up; he'll never do any good at all.' In reading his work one always feels that there is the material of greatness, but perhaps nothing that he wrote is strictly great. His prose will certainly prove less permanent than his verse.

SWINBURNE. A younger disciple of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement but also a strongly original artist was Algernon Charles Swinburne. Born in 1837 into a wealthy family, the son of an admiral, he devoted himself throughout his life wholly to poetry, and his career was almost altogether devoid of external incident. After passing through Eton and Oxford he began as author at twenty-three by publishing two plays imitative of Shakspere. Five years later he put forth 'Atalanta in Calydon,' a tragedy not only drawn from Greek heroic legend, but composed in the ancient Greek manner, with long dialogs and choruses. These two volumes express the two intensely vigorous forces which were strangely combined in his nature; for while no man has ever been a more violent romanticist than Swinburne, yet, as one critic has said, 'All the romantic riot in his blood clamored for Greek severity and Greek restraint.' During the next fifteen years he was partly occupied with a huge poetic trilogy in blank verse on Mary Queen of Scots, and from time to time he wrote other dramas and much prose criticism, the latter largely in praise of the Elizabethan dramatists and always wildly extravagant in tone. He produced also some long narrative poems, of which the chief is 'Tristram of Lyonesse.' His chief importance, however, is as a lyric poet, and his lyric production was large. His earlier poems in this category are for the most part highly objectionable in substance or sentiment, but he gradually worked into a better vein. He was a friend of George Meredith, Burne-Jones, Morris, Rossetti (to whom he loyally devoted himself for years), and the painter Whistler. He died in 1909.

Swinburne carried his radicalism into all lines. Though an ardently patriotic Englishman, he was an extreme republican; and many of his poems are dedicated to the cause of Italian independence or to liberty in general. The significance of his thought, however, is less than that of any other English poet who can in any sense be called great; his poetry is notable chiefly for its artistry, especially for its magnificent melody. Indeed, it has been cleverly said that he offers us an elaborate service of gold and silver, but with little on it except salt and pepper. In his case, however, the mere external beauty and power often seem their own complete and satisfying justification. His command of different meters is marvelous; he uses twice as many as Browning, who is perhaps second to him in this respect, and his most characteristic ones are those of gloriously rapid anapestic lines with complicated rime-schemes. Others of his distinctive traits are lavish alliteration, rich sensuousness, grandiose vagueness of thought and expression, a great sweep of imagination, and a corresponding love of vastness and desolation. He makes much decorative use of Biblical imagery and of vague abstract personifications—in general creates an atmosphere similar to that of Rossetti. Somewhat as in the case of Morris, his fluency is almost fatal—he sometimes pours out his melodious but vague emotion in forgetfulness of all proportion and restraint. From the intellectual and spiritual point of view he is nearly negligible, but as a musician in words he has no superior, not even Shelley.

OTHER VICTORIA POETS. Among the other Victorian poets, three, at least, must be mentioned. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), tutor at Oxford and later examiner in the government education office, expresses the spiritual doubt and struggle of the period in noble poems similar to those of Matthew Arnold, whose fine elegy 'Thyrsis' commemorates him. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), Irish by birth, an eccentric though kind-hearted recluse, and a friend of Tennyson, is known solely for his masterly paraphrase (1859) of some of the Quatrains of the skeptical eleventh-century Persian astronomer-poet Omar Khayyam. The similarity of temper between the medieval oriental scholar and the questioning phase of the Victorian period is striking (though the spirit of Fitzgerald's verse is no doubt as much his own as Omar's), and no poetry is more poignantly beautiful than the best of this. Christina Rossetti (1830-94), the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, lived in London with her mother in the greatest seclusion, occupied with an ascetic devotion to the English Church, with her poetry, and with the composition, secondarily, of prose articles and short stories. Her poetry is limited almost entirely to the lyrical expression of her spiritual experiences, much of it is explicitly religious, and all of it is religious in feeling. It is tinged with the Pre-Raphaelite mystic medievalism; and a quiet and most affecting sadness is its dominant trait; but the power and beauty of a certain small part of it perhaps entitle her to be called the chief of English poetesses.

THE NOVEL. THE EARLIER SECONDARY NOVELISTS. To Scott's position of unquestioned supremacy among romancers and novelists Charles Dickens succeeded almost immediately on Scott's death, but certain secondary early Victorian novelists may be considered before him. In the lives of two of these, Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli, there are interesting parallels. Both were prominent in politics, both began writing as young men before the commencement of the Victorian period, and both ended their literary work only fifty years later. Edward Bulwer, later created Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and finally raised to the peerage as Lord Lytton (1803-1873), was almost incredibly fluent and versatile. Much of his life a member of Parliament and for a while of the government, he was a vigorous pamphleteer. His sixty or more really literary works are of great variety; perhaps the best known of them are his second novel, the trifling 'Pelham' (1828), which inaugurated a class of so-called 'dandy' novels, giving sympathetic presentation to the more frivolous social life of the 'upper' class, and the historical romances 'The Last Days of Pompeii' (1834) and 'Harold' (1843). In spite of his real ability, Bulwer was a poser and sentimentalist, characteristics for which he was vigorously ridiculed by Thackeray. Benjamin Disraeli, [Footnote: The second syllable is pronounced like the word 'rail' and has the accent, so that the whole name is Disraily.] later Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881), a much less prolific writer, was by birth a Jew. His immature earliest novel, 'Vivian Grey' (1826), deals, somewhat more sensibly, with the same social class as Bulwer's 'Pelham.' In his novels of this period, as in his dress and manner, he deliberately attitudinized, a fact which in part reflected a certain shallowness of character, in part was a device to attract attention for the sake of his political ambition. After winning his way into Parliament he wrote in 1844-7 three political novels,' Coningsby,' 'Sybil,' and 'Tancred,' which set forth his Tory creed of opposition to the dominance of middle-class Liberalism. For twenty-five years after this he was absorbed in the leadership of his party, and he at last became Prime Minister. In later life he so far returned to literature as to write two additional novels.

Vastly different was the life and work of Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855). Miss Bronte, a product and embodiment of the strictest religious sense of duty, somewhat tempered by the liberalizing tendency of the time, was the daughter of the rector of a small and bleak Yorkshire village, Haworth, where she was brought up in poverty. The two of her sisters who reached maturity, Emily and Anne, both still more short-lived than she, also wrote novels, and Emily produced some lyrics which strikingly express the stern, defiant will that characterized all the children of the family. Their lives were pitifully bare, hard, and morbid, scarcely varied or enlivened except by a year which Charlotte and Emily spent when Charlotte was twenty-six in a private school in Brussels, followed on Charlotte's part by a return to the same school for a year as teacher. In 1847 Charlotte's novel 'Jane Eyre' (pronounced like the word 'air') won a great success. Her three later novels are less significant. In 1854 she was married to one of her father's curates, a Mr. Nicholls, a sincere but narrow-minded man. She was happy in the marriage, but died within a few months, worn out by the unremitting physical and moral strain of forty years.

The significance of 'Jane Eyre' can be suggested by calling it the last striking expression of extravagant Romanticism, partly Byronic, but grafted on the stern Bronte moral sense. One of its two main theses is the assertion of the supreme authority of religious duty, but it vehemently insists also on the right of the individual conscience to judge of duty for itself, in spite of conventional opinion, and, difficult as this may be to understand to-day, it was denounced at the time as irreligious. The Romanticism appears further in the volcanic but sometimes melodramatic power of the love story, where the heroine is a somewhat idealized double of the authoress and where the imperfect portrayal of the hero reflects the limitations of Miss Bronte's own experience.

Miss Bronte is the subject of one of the most delightfully sympathetic of all biographies, written by Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell was authoress also of many stories, long and short, of which the best known is 'Cranford' (1853), a charming portrayal of the quaint life of a secluded village.

CHARLES DICKENS. [Footnote: The life of Dickens by his friend John Forster is another of the most famous English biographies.] The most popular of all English novelists, Charles Dickens, was born in 1812, the son of an unpractical and improvident government navy clerk whom, with questionable taste, he later caricatured in 'David Copperfield' as Mr. Micawber. The future novelist's schooling was slight and irregular, but as a boy he read much fiction, especially seventeenth and eighteenth century authors, whose influence is apparent in the picaresque lack of structure of his own works. From childhood also he showed the passion for the drama and the theater which resulted from the excitably dramatic quality of his own temperament and which always continued to be the second moving force of his life. When he was ten years old his father was imprisoned for debt (like Micawber, in the Marshalsea prison), and he was put to work in the cellar of a London shoe-blacking factory. On his proud and sensitive disposition this humiliation, though it lasted only a few months, inflicted a wound which never thoroughly healed; years after he was famous he would cross the street to avoid the smell from an altogether different blacking factory, with its reminder 'of what he once was.' To this experience, also, may evidently be traced no small part of the intense sympathy with the oppressed poor, especially with helpless children, which is so prominent in his novels. Obliged from the age of fifteen to earn his own living, for the most part, he was for a while a clerk in a London lawyer's office, where he observed all sorts and conditions of people with characteristic keenness. Still more valuable was his five or six years' experience in the very congenial and very active work of a newspaper reporter, where his special department was political affairs. This led up naturally to his permanent work. The successful series of lively 'Sketches by Boz' dealing with people and scenes about London was preliminary to 'The Pickwick Papers,' which made the author famous at the age of twenty-four.

During the remaining thirty-three years of his life Dickens produced novels at the rate of rather more than one in two years. He composed slowly and carefully but did not revise greatly, and generally published by monthly installments in periodicals which, latterly, he himself established and edited. Next after 'The Pickwick Papers' came 'Oliver Twist,' and 'David Copperfield' ten years later. Of the others, 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' 'Dombey and Son,' 'Bleak House,' and 'A Tale of Two Cities,' are among the best. For some years Dickens also published an annual Christmas story, of which the first two, 'A Christmas Carol' and 'The Chimes,' rank highest.

His exuberant physical energy gave to his life more external variety than is common with authors. At the age of thirty he made a visit to the United States and travelled as far as to the then extreme western town of St. Louis, everywhere received and entertained with the most extravagant enthusiasm. Even before his return to England, however, he excited a reaction, by his abundantly justified but untactful condemnation of American piracy of English books; and this reaction was confirmed by his subsequent caricature of American life in 'American Notes' and 'Martin Chuzzlewit.' For a number of years during the middle part of his career Dickens devoted a vast amount of energy to managing and taking the chief part in a company of amateur actors, who performed at times in various cities. Later on he substituted for this several prolonged series of semi-dramatic public readings from his works, an effort which drew heavily on his vitality and shortened his life, but which intoxicated him with its enormous success. One of these series was delivered in America, where, of course, the former ill-feeling had long before worn away.

Dickens lived during the greater part of his life in London, but in his later years near Rochester, at Gadshill, the scene of Falstaff's exploit. He made long sojourns also on the Continent. Much social and outdoor life was necessary to him; he had a theory that he ought to spend as much time out of doors as in the house. He married early and had a large family of children, but pathetically enough for one whose emotions centered so largely about the home, his own marriage was not well-judged; and after more than twenty years he and his wife (the Dora Spenlow of 'David Copperfield') separated, though with mutual respect. He died in 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey in the rather ostentatiously unpretentious way which, with his deep-seated dislike for aristocratic conventions, he had carefully prescribed in his will.

Dickens' popularity, in his own day and since, is due chiefly: (1) to his intense human sympathy; (2) to his unsurpassed emotional and dramatic power; and (3) to his aggressive humanitarian zeal for the reform of all evils and abuses, whether they weigh upon the oppressed classes or upon helpless individuals. Himself sprung from the lower middle class, and thoroughly acquainted with the life of the poor and apparently of sufferers in all ranks, he is one of the most moving spokesmen whom they have ever had. The pathos and tragedy of their experiences—aged and honest toilers subjected to pitiless task-masters or to the yoke of social injustice; lonely women uncomplainingly sacrificing their lives for unworthy men; sad-faced children, the victims of circumstances, of cold-blooded parents, or of the worst criminals—these things play a large part in almost all of Dickens' books. In almost all, moreover, there is present, more or less in the foreground, a definite humanitarian aim, an attack on some time-consecrated evil—the poor-house system, the cruelties practised in private schools, or the miscarriage of justice in the Court of Chancery. In dramatic vividness his great scenes are masterly, for example the storm in 'David Copperfield,' the pursuit and discovery of Lady Dedlock in 'Bleak House,' and the interview between Mrs. Dombey and James Carker in 'Dombey and Son.'

Dickens' magnificent emotional power is not balanced, however, by a corresponding intellectual quality; in his work, as in his temperament and bearing, emotion is always in danger of running to excess. One of his great elements of strength is his sense of humor, which has created an almost unlimited number of delightful scenes and characters; but it very generally becomes riotous and so ends in sheer farce and caricature, as the names of many of the characters suggest at the outset. Indeed Dickens has been rightly designated a grotesque novelist—the greatest of all grotesque novelists. Similarly his pathos is often exaggerated until it passes into mawkish sentimentality, so that his humbly-bred heroines, for example, are made to act and talk with all the poise and certainty which can really spring only from wide experience and broad education. Dickens' zeal for reform, also, sometimes outruns his judgment or knowledge and leads him to assault evils that had actually been abolished long before he wrote.

No other English author has approached Dickens in the number of characters whom he has created; his twenty novels present literally thousands of persons, almost all thoroughly human, except for the limitations that we have already noted. Their range is of course very great, though it never extends successfully into the 'upper' social classes. For Dickens was violently prejudiced against the nobility and against all persons of high social standing, and when he attempted to introduce them created only pitifully wooden automatons. For the actual English gentleman we must pass by his Sir Leicester Dedlocks and his Mr. Veneerings to novelists of a very different viewpoint, such as Thackeray and Meredith.

Dickens' inexhaustible fertility in characters and scenes is a main cause of the rather extravagant lack of unity which is another conspicuous feature of his books. He usually made a good preliminary general plan and proceeded on the whole with firm movement and strong suspense. But he always introduces many characters and sub-actions not necessary to the main story, and develops them quite beyond their real artistic importance. Not without influence here was the necessity of filling a specified number of serial instalments, each of a definite number of pages, and each requiring a striking situation at the end. Moreover, Dickens often follows the eighteenth-century picaresque habit of tracing the histories of his heroes from birth to marriage. In most respects, however, Dickens' art improved as he proceeded. The love element, it should be noted, as what we have already said implies, plays a smaller part than usual among the various aspects of life which his books present.

Not least striking among Dickens' traits is his power of description. His observation is very quick and keen, though not fine; his sense for the characteristic features, whether of scenes in Nature or of human personality and appearance, is unerring; and he has never had a superior in picturing and conveying the atmosphere both of interiors and of all kinds of scenes of human life. London, where most of his novels are wholly or chiefly located, has in him its chief and most comprehensive portrayer.

Worthy of special praise, lastly, is the moral soundness of all Dickens' work, praise which is not seriously affected by present-day sneers at his 'middle-class' and 'mid-Victorian' point of view. Dickens' books, however, like his character, are destitute of the deeper spiritual quality, of poetic and philosophic idealism. His stories are all admirable demonstrations of the power and beauty of the nobler practical virtues, of kindness, courage, humility, and all the other forms of unselfishness; but for the underlying mysteries of life and the higher meanings of art his positive and self-formed mind had very little feeling. From first to last he speaks authentically for the common heart of humanity, but he is not one of the rarer spirits, like Spenser or George Eliot or Meredith, who transport us into the realm of the less tangible realities. All his limitations, indeed, have become more conspicuous as time has passed; and critical judgment has already definitely excluded him from the select ranks of the truly greatest authors.

WILLIAM M. THACKERAY. Dickens' chief rival for fame during his later lifetime and afterward was Thackeray, who presents a strong contrast with him, both as man and as writer.

Thackeray, the son of an East India Company official, was born at Calcutta in 1811. His father died while he was a child and he was taken to England for his education; he was a student in the Charterhouse School and then for a year at Cambridge. Next, on the Continent, he studied drawing, and though his unmethodical and somewhat idle habits prevented him from ever really mastering the technique of the art, his real knack for it enabled him later on to illustrate his own books in a semi-grotesque but effective fashion. Desultory study of the law was interrupted when he came of age by the inheritance of a comfortable fortune, which he managed to lose within a year or two by gambling, speculations, and an unsuccessful effort at carrying on a newspaper. Real application to newspaper and magazine writing secured him after four years a place on 'Eraser's Magazine,' and he was married. Not long after, his wife became insane, but his warm affection for his daughters gave him throughout his life genuine domestic happiness.

For ten years Thackeray's production was mainly in the line of satirical humorous and picaresque fiction, none of it of the first rank. During this period he chiefly attacked current vices, snobbishness, and sentimentality, which latter quality, Thackeray's special aversion, he found rampant in contemporary life and literature, including the novels of Dickens. The appearance of his masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair' (the allegorical title taken from a famous incident in 'Pilgrim's Progress'), in 'Fraser's Magazine' in 1847-8 (the year before Dickens' 'David Copperfield') brought him sudden fame and made him a social lion. Within the next ten years he produced his other important novels, of which the best are 'Pendennis,' 'Henry Esmond,' and 'The Newcomes,' and also his charming essays (first delivered as lectures) on the eighteenth century in England, namely 'English Humorists,' and 'The Four Georges.' All his novels except 'Henry Esmond' were published serially, and he generally delayed composing each instalment until the latest possible moment, working reluctantly except under the stress of immediate compulsion. He was for three years, at its commencement, editor of 'The Cornhill Magazine.' He died in 1863 at the age of fifty-two, of heart failure.

The great contrast between Dickens and Thackeray results chiefly from the predominance in Thackeray of the critical intellectual quality and of the somewhat fastidious instinct of the man of society and of the world which Dickens so conspicuously lacked. As a man Thackeray was at home and at ease only among people of formal good breeding; he shrank from direct contact with the common people; in spite of his assaults on the frivolity and vice of fashionable society, he was fond of it; his spirit was very keenly analytical; and he would have been chagrined by nothing more than by seeming to allow his emotion to get the better of his judgment. His novels seem to many readers cynical, because he scrutinizes almost every character and every group with impartial vigor, dragging forth every fault and every weakness into the light. On the title page of 'Vanity Fair' he proclaims that it is a novel without a hero; and here, as in some of his lesser works, most of the characters are either altogether bad or worthless and the others very largely weak or absurd, so that the impression of human life which the reader apparently ought to carry away is that of a hopeless chaos of selfishness, hypocrisy, and futility. One word, which has often been applied to Thackeray, best expresses his attitude—disillusionment. The last sentences of 'Vanity Fair' are characteristic: 'Oh! Vanitas Vanitatum! which, of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—Come, children, let us shut the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.'

Yet in reality Thackeray is not a cynic and the permanent impression left by his books is not pessimistic. Beneath his somewhat ostentatious manner of the man of the world were hidden a heart and a human sympathy as warm as ever belonged to any man. However he may ridicule his heroes and his heroines (and there really are a hero and heroine in 'Vanity Fair'), he really feels deeply for them, and he is repeatedly unable to refrain from the expression of his feeling. Nothing is more truly characteristic of him than the famous incident of his rushing in tears from the room in which he had been writing of the death of Colonel Newcome with the exclamation, 'I have killed the Colonel!' In his books as clearly as in those of the most explicit moralizer the reader finds the lessons that simple courage, honesty, kindliness, and unselfishness are far better than external show, and that in spite of all its brilliant interest a career of unprincipled self-seeking like that of Becky Sharp is morally squalid. Thackeray steadily refuses to falsify life as he sees it in the interest of any deliberate theory, but he is too genuine an artist not to be true to the moral principles which form so large a part of the substratum of all life.

Thackeray avowedly took Fielding as his model, and though his spirit and manner are decidedly finer than Fielding's, the general resemblance between them is often close. Fielding's influence shows partly in the humorous tone which, in one degree or another, Thackeray preserves wherever it is possible, and in the general refusal to take his art, on the surface, with entire seriousness. He insists, for instance, on his right to manage his story, and conduct the reader, as he pleases, without deferring to his readers' tastes or prejudices. Fielding's influence shows also in the free-and-easy picaresque structure of his plots; though this results also in part from his desultory method of composition. Thackeray's great fault is prolixity; he sometimes wanders on through rather uninspired page after page where the reader longs for severe compression. But when the story reaches dramatic moments there is ample compensation; no novelist has more magnificent power in dramatic scenes, such, for instance, as in the climactic series in 'Vanity Fair.' This power is based largely on an absolute knowledge of character: in spite of a delight in somewhat fanciful exaggeration of the ludicrous, Thackeray when he chooses portrays human nature with absolute finality.

'Henry Esmond' should be spoken of by itself as a special and unique achievement. It is a historical novel dealing with the early eighteenth century, and in preparing for it Thackeray read and assimilated most of the literature of the period, with the result that he succeeded in reproducing the 'Augustan' spirit and even its literary style with an approach to perfection that has never been rivaled. On other grounds as well the book ranks almost if not quite beside 'Vanity Pair.' Henry Esmond himself is Thackeray's most thoroughly wise and good character, and Beatrix is as real and complex a woman as even Becky Sharp.

GEORGE ELIOT. The perspective of time has made it clear that among the Victorian novelists, as among the poets, three definitely surpass the others. With Dickens and Thackeray is to be ranked only 'George Eliot' (Mary Anne Evans).

George Eliot was born in 1819 in the central county of Warwick from which Shakspere had sprung two centuries and a half before. Her father, a manager of estates for various members of the landed gentry, was to a large extent the original both of her Adam Bede and of Caleb Garth in 'Middlemarch,' while her own childish life is partly reproduced in the experiences of Maggie in 'The Mill on the Floss.' Endowed with one of the strongest minds that any woman has ever possessed, from her very infancy she studied and read widely. Her nature, however, was not one-sided; all her life she was passionately fond of music; and from the death of her mother in her eighteenth year she demonstrated her practical capacity in the management of her father's household. Circumstances. combined with her unusual ability to make her entire life one of too high pressure, and her first struggle was religious. She was brought up a Methodist, and during her girlhood was fervently evangelical, in the manner of Dinah Morris in 'Adam Bede'; but moving to Coventry she fell under the influence of some rationalistic acquaintances who led her to adopt the scientific Positivism of the French philosopher Comte. Her first literary work, growing out of the same interest, was the formidable one of translating the 'Life of Jesus' of the German professor Strauss. Some years of conscientious nursing of her father, terminated by his death, were followed by one in Geneva, nominally a year of vacation, but she spent it largely in the study of experimental physics. On her return to England she became a contributor and soon assistant editor of the liberal periodical 'The Westminster Review.' This connection was most important in its personal results; it brought her into contact with a versatile man of letters, George Henry Lewes, [Footnote: Pronounced in two syllables.] and in 1854 they were united as man and wife. Mr. Lewes had been unhappily married years before to a woman who was still alive, and English law did not permit the divorce which he would have secured in America. Consequently the new union was not a legal marriage, and English public opinion was severe in its condemnation. In the actual result the sympathetic companionship of Mr. Lewes was of the greatest value to George Eliot and brought her much happiness; yet she evidently felt keenly the equivocal social position, and it was probably in large part the cause of the increasing sadness of her later years.

She was already thirty-six when in 1856 she entered on creative authorship with the three 'Scenes from Clerical Life.' The pseudonym which she adopted for these and her later stories originated in no more substantial reason than her fondness for 'Eliot' and the fact that Mr. Lewes' first name was 'George.' 'Adam Bede' in 1859 completely established her reputation, and her six or seven other books followed as rapidly as increasingly laborious workmanship permitted. 'Romola.' [Footnote: Accented on the first syllable.] in 1863, a powerful but perhaps over-substantial historical novel, was the outcome partly of residence in Florence. Not content with prose, she attempted poetry also, but she altogether lacked the poet's delicacy of both imagination and expression. The death of Mr. Lewes in 1878 was a severe blow to her, since she was always greatly dependent on personal sympathy; and after a year and a half, to the surprise of every one, she married Mr. John W. Cross, a banker much younger than herself. But her own death followed within a few months in 1880.

George Eliot's literary work combines in an interesting way the same distinct and even strangely contrasting elements as her life, and in her writings their relative proportions alter rather markedly during the course of her career. One of the most attractive qualities, especially in her earlier books, is her warm and unaffected human sympathy, which is temperamental, but greatly enlarged by her own early experience. The aspiration, pathos and tragedy of life, especially among the lower and middle classes in the country and the small towns, can scarcely be interpreted with more feeling, tenderness, or power than in her pages. But her sympathy does not blind her to the world of comedy; figures like Mrs. Poyser in 'Adam Bede' are delightful. Even from the beginning, however, the really controlling forces in George Eliot's work were intellectual and moral. She started out with the determination to render the facts of life with minute and conscientious accuracy, an accuracy more complete than that of Mrs. Gaskell, who was in large degree her model; and as a result her books, from the beginning, are masterpieces of the best sort of realism. The characters, life, and backgrounds of many of them are taken from her own Warwickshire acquaintances and country, and for the others she made the most painstaking study. More fundamental than her sympathy, indeed, perhaps even from the outset, is her instinct for scientific analysis. Like a biologist or a botanist, and with much more deliberate effort than most of her fellow-craftsmen, she traces and scrutinizes all the acts and motives of her characters until she reaches and reveals their absolute inmost truth. This objective scientific method has a tendency to become sternly judicial, and in extreme cases she even seems to be using her weak or imperfect characters as deterrent examples. Inevitably, with her disposition, the scientific tendency grew upon her. Beginning with 'Middlemarch' (1872), which is perhaps her masterpiece, it seems to some critics decidedly too preponderant, giving to her novels too much the atmosphere of psychological text-books; and along with it goes much introduction of the actual facts of nineteenth century science. Her really primary instinct, however, is the moral one. The supremacy of moral law may fairly be called the general theme of all her works; to demonstrating it her scientific method is really in the main auxiliary; and in spite of her accuracy it makes of her more an idealist than a realist. With unswerving logic she traces the sequence of act and consequence, showing how apparently trifling words and deeds reveal the springs of character and how careless choices and seemingly insignificant self-indulgences may altogether determine the issues of life. The couplet from Aeschylus which she prefixed to one of the chapters of 'Felix Holt' might stand at the outset of all her work:

'Tis law as steadfast as the throne of Zeus— Our days are heritors of days gone by.

Her conviction, or at least her purpose, is optimistic, to show that by honest effort the sincere and high-minded man or woman may win happiness in the face of all difficulties and disappointments; but her own actual judgment of life was somber, not altogether different from that which Carlyle repudiated in 'The Everlasting Yea'; so that the final effect of her books, though stimulating, is subdued rather than cheerful.

In technique her very hard work generally assured mastery. Her novels are firmly knit and well-proportioned, and have the inevitable movement of life itself; while her great scenes equal those of Thackeray in dramatic power and, at their best, in reserve and suggestiveness. Perhaps her chief technical faults are tendencies to prolixity and too much expository analysis of characters and motives.

SECONDARY MIDDLE AND LATER VICTORIAN NOVELISTS. Several of the other novelists of the mid-century and later produced work which in a period of less prolific and less highly developed art would have secured them high distinction. Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) spent most of his life, by his own self-renouncing choice, as curate and rector of the little Hampshire parish of Eversley, though for some years he also held the professorship of history at Cambridge. An aggressive Protestant, he drifted in his later years into the controversy with Cardinal Newman which opened the way for Newman's 'Apologia.' From the outset, Kingsley was an enthusiastic worker with F. D. Maurice in the Christian Socialist movement which aimed at the betterment of the conditions of life among the working classes. 'Alton Locke' and 'Yeast,' published in 1849, were powerful but reasonable and very influential expressions of his convictions—fervid arguments in the form of fiction against existing social injustices. His most famous books are 'Hypatia' (1853), a novel dealing with the Church in its conflict with Greek philosophy in fifth-century Alexandria, and 'Westward Ho!' (1855) which presents with sympathetic largeness of manner the adventurous side of Elizabethan life. His brief 'Andromeda' is one of the best English poems in the classical dactylic hexameter.

Charles Reade (1814-1884), a man of dramatic disposition somewhat similar to that of Dickens (though Reade had a University education and was admitted to the bar), divided his interest and fiery energies between the drama and the novel. But while his plays were of such doubtful quality that he generally had to pay for having them acted, his novels were often strong and successful. Personally he was fervently evangelical, and like Dickens he was often inspired to write by indignation at social wrongs. His 'Hard Cash' (1863), which attacks private insane asylums, is powerful; but his most important work is 'The Cloister and the Hearth' (1861), one of the most informing and vivid of all historical novels, with the father of Erasmus for its hero. No novelist can, be more thrilling and picturesque than Reade, but he lacks restraint and is often highly sensational and melodramatic.

Altogether different is the method of Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) in his fifty novels. Trollope, long a traveling employe in the post-office service, was a man of very assertive and somewhat commonplace nature. Partly a disciple of Thackeray, he went beyond Thackeray's example in the refusal to take his art altogether seriously as an art; rather, he treated it as a form of business, sneering at the idea of special inspiration, and holding himself rigidly to a mechanical schedule of composition—a definite and unvarying number of pages in a specified number of hours on each of his working days. The result is not so disastrous as might have been expected; his novels have no small degree of truth and interest. The most notable are the half dozen which deal with ecclesiastical life in his imaginary county of Barsetshire, beginning with 'The Warden' and 'Barchester Towers.' His 'Autobiography' furnishes in some of its chapters one of the noteworthy existing discussions of the writer's art by a member of the profession.

Richard Blackmore (1825-1900), first a lawyer, later manager of a market-garden, was the author of numerous novels, but will be remembered only for 'Lorna Doone' (1869), a charming reproduction of Devonshire country life assigned to the romantic setting of the time of James II. Its simple-minded and gigantic hero John Ridd is certainly one of the permanent figures of English fiction.

Joseph H. Shorthouse (1834-1903), a Birmingham chemical manufacturer, but a man of very fine nature, is likewise to be mentioned for a single book, 'John Inglesant' (1881). Located in the middle of the seventeenth century, when the strife of religious and political parties afforded material especially available for the author's purpose, this is a spiritual romance, a High Churchman's assertion of the supremacy of the inner over the outer life. From this point of view it is one of the most significant of English novels, and though much of it is philosophical and though it is not free from technical faults, parts of it attain the extreme limit of absorbing narrative interest.

Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford Fellow, also represents distinctly the spirit of unworldliness, which in his case led to a personal aloofness from active life. He was the master of a delicately-finished, somewhat over-fastidious, style, which he employed in essays on the Renaissance and other historical and artistic topics and in a spiritual romance, 'Marius the Epicurean' (1885). No less noteworthy than 'John Inglesant,' and better constructed, this latter is placed in the reign of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but its atmosphere is only in part historically authentic.

GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1910). Except for a lack of the elements which make for popularity, George Meredith would hold an unquestioned place in the highest rank of novelists. In time he is partly contemporary with George Eliot, as he began to publish a little earlier than she. But he long outlived her and continued to write to the end of his life; and his recognition was long delayed; so that he may properly be placed in the group of later Victorian novelists. His long life was devoid of external incident; he was long a newspaper writer and afterward literary reader for a publishing house; he spent his later years quietly in Surrey, enjoying the friendship of Swinburne and other men of letters.

Among novelists he occupies something the same place which Browning, a person of very different temperament and ideas, holds among poets. He writes only for intelligent and thoughtful people and aims to interpret the deeper things of life and character, not disregarding dramatic external incident, but using it as only one of the means to his main purpose. His style is brilliant, epigrammatic, and subtile; and he prefers to imply many things rather than to state them directly. All this makes large, perhaps sometimes too large, demands on the reader's attention, but there is, of course, corresponding stimulation. Meredith's general attitude toward life is the fine one of serene philosophic confidence, the attitude in general of men like Shakspere and Goethe. He despises sentimentality, admires chiefly the qualities of quiet strength and good breeding which are exemplified among the best members of the English aristocracy; and in all his interpretation is very largely influenced by modern science. His virile courage and optimism are as pronounced as those of Browning; he wrote a noteworthy 'Essay on Comedy' and oftentimes insists on emphasizing the comic rather than the tragic aspect of things, though he can also be powerful in tragedy; and his enthusiasms for the beauty of the world and for the romance of youthful love are delightful. He may perhaps best be approached through 'Evan Harrington' (1861) and 'The Ordeal of Richard Feverel' (1859). 'The Egoist' (1879) and 'Diana of the Crossways' (1885) are among his other strongest books. In his earlier years he wrote a considerable body of verse, which shows much the same qualities as his prose. Some of it is rugged in form, but other parts magnificently dramatic, and some few poems, like the unique and superb 'Love in the Valley,' charmingly beautiful.

THOMAS HARDY. In Thomas Hardy (born 1840) the pessimistic interpretation of modern science is expressed frankly and fully, with much the same pitiless consistency that distinguishes contemporary European writers such as Zola. Mr. Hardy early turned to literature from architecture and he has lived a secluded life in southern England, the ancient Wessex, which he makes the scene of all his novels. His knowledge of life is sure and his technique in all respects masterly. He has preferred to deal chiefly with persons in the middle and poorer classes of society because, like Wordsworth, though with very different emphasis, he feels that in their experiences the real facts of life stand out most truly. His deliberate theory is a sheer fatalism—that human character and action are the inevitable result of laws of heredity and environment over which man has no control. 'The Return of the Native' (1878) and 'Far from the Madding Crowd' (1874) are among his best novels, though the sensational frankness of 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (1891) has given it greater reputation.

STEVENSON. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), the first of the rather prominent group of recent Scotch writers of fiction, is as different as possible from Hardy. Destined for the career of civil engineer and lighthouse builder in which his father and grandfather were distinguished, he proved unfitted for it by lack both of inclination and of health, and the profession of law for which he later prepared himself was no more congenial. From boyhood he, like Scott, studied human nature with keen delight in rambles about the country, and unlike Scott he was incessantly practising writing merely for the perfection of his style. As an author he won his place rather slowly; and his whole mature life was a wonderfully courageous and persistent struggle against the sickness which generally prevented him from working more than two or three hours a day and often kept him for months in bed unable even to speak. A trip to California in an emigrant train in 1879-1880 brought him to death's door but accomplished its purpose, his marriage to an American lady, Mrs. Osbourne, whom he had previously met in artist circles in France. He first secured a popular success with the boys' pirate story, 'Treasure Island,' in 1882. 'A Child's Garden of Verses' (1885) was at once accepted as one of the most irresistibly sympathetic of children's classics; and 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886), a unique and astonishingly powerful moral lesson in the form of a thrilling little romance which strangely anticipates the later discoveries of psychology, made in its different way a still stronger impression. Stevenson produced, considering his disabilities, a remarkably large amount of work—essays, short stories, and romances—but the only others of his books which need here be mentioned are the four romances of Scotch life in the eighteenth century which belong to his later years; of these 'The Master of Ballantrae' and the fragmentary 'Weir of Hermiston' are the best. His letters, also, which, like his widely-circulated prayers, reveal his charming and heroic personality, are among the most interesting in the history of English Literature. His bodily weakness, especially tuberculosis, which had kept him wandering from one resort to another, at last drove him altogether from Europe to the South Seas. He finally settled in Samoa, where for the last half dozen years of his life he was busy not only with clearing his land, building his house, and writing, but with energetic efforts to serve the natives, then involved in broils among themselves and with England, Germany, and the United States. His death came suddenly when he was only forty-four years old, and the Samoans, who ardently appreciated what he had done for them, buried him high up on a mountain overlooking both his home and the sea.

Stevenson, in the midst of an age perhaps too intensely occupied with the deeper questions, stood for a return to the mere spirit of romance, and for occasional reading he furnishes delightful recreation. In the last analysis, however, his general lack of serious significance condemns him at most to a secondary position. At his best his narrative technique (as in 'The Master of Ballantrae') is perfect; his portrayal of men (he almost never attempted women) is equally certain; his style has no superior in English; and his delicate sensibility and keenness of observation render him a master of description. But in his attitude toward life he never reached full maturity (perhaps because of the supreme effort of will necessary for the maintenance of his cheerfulness); not only did he retain to the end a boyish zest for mere adventure, but it is sometimes adventure of a melodramatic and unnecessarily disagreeable kind, and in his novels and short stories he offers virtually no interpretation of the world. No recent English prose writer has exercised a wider influence than he, but none is likely to suffer as time goes on a greater diminution of reputation.

RUDYARD KIPLING. The name which naturally closes the list of Victorian writers is that of Rudyard Kipling, though he belongs, perhaps, as much to the twentieth century as to the one preceding. The son of a professor of architecture and sculpture in the University of Bombay, India, he was born in that city in 1865. Educated in England in the United Services College (for officers in the army and navy), he returned at the age of seventeen to India, where he first did strenuous editorial work on newspapers in Lahore, in the extreme northwestern part of the country. He secured his intimate knowledge of the English army by living, through the permission of the commanding general, with the army on the frontiers. His instinct for story-telling in verse and prose had showed itself from his boyhood, but his first significant appearance in print was in 1886, with a volume of poems later included among the 'Departmental Ditties.' 'Plain Tales from the Hills' in prose, and other works, followed in rapid succession and won him enthusiastic recognition. In 1890 he removed to the United States, where he married and remained for seven years. Since then he has lived in England, with an interval in South Africa. He wrote prolifically during the '90's; since then both the amount of his production and its quality have fallen off.

Kipling is the representative of the vigorous life of action as led by manly and efficient men, and of the spirit of English imperialism. His poem "The White Man's Burden" sums up his imperialism—the creed that it is the duty of the higher races to civilize the lower ones with a strong hand; and he never doubts that the greater part of this obligation rests at present upon England—a theory, certainly, to which history lends much support. Kipling is endowed with the keenest power of observation, with the most genuine and most democratic human sympathies, and with splendid dramatic force. Consequently he has made a unique contribution to literature in his portrayals, in both prose and verse, of the English common soldier and of English army life on the frontiers of the Empire. On the other hand his verse is generally altogether devoid of the finer qualities of poetry. 'Danny Deever,' 'Pharaoh and the Sergeant,' 'Fuzzy Wuzzy,' 'The Ballad of East and West,' 'The Last Chantey,' 'Mulholland's Contract,' and many others, are splendidly stirring, but their colloquialism and general realism put them on a very different level from the work of the great masters who express the deeper truths in forms of permanent beauty. At times, however, Kipling too gives voice to religious feelings, of a simple sort, in an impressive fashion, as in 'McAndrews' Hymn,' 'The Recessional,' and 'When earth's last picture is painted.' His sweeping rhythms and his grandiose forms of expression, suggestive of the vast spaces of ocean and plain and of inter-stellar space with which he delights to deal, have been very widely copied by minor verse-writers. His very vivid and active imagination enables him not only to humanize animal life with remarkable success, as in the prose 'Jungle-Books,' but to range finely in the realms of the mysterious, as in the short stories 'They' and 'The Brushwood Boy.' Of short-stories he is the most powerful recent writer, as witness 'The Man Who Would Be King,' 'The Man Who Was,' 'Without Benefit of Clergy,' and 'Wee Willie Winkie'; though with all the frankness of modern realism he sometimes leads us into scenes of extreme physical horror. With longer stories he is generally less successful; 'Kim,' however, has much power.

THE HISTORIANS. The present book, as a brief sketch of English Literature rather strictly defined, has necessarily disregarded the scientists, economists, and philosophers whose writings did much to mold the course of thought during the Victorian period. Among the numerous prominent historians, however, two must be mentioned for the brilliant literary quality of their work. James Anthony Froude (1818-1894) was a disciple of Carlyle, from whom he took the idea of making history center around its great men and of giving to it the vivid effectiveness of the drama. With Froude too this results in exaggeration, and further he is sadly inaccurate, but his books are splendidly fascinating. His great 'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Armada' is his longest work; his 'Sketch' of Julius Casar is certainly one of the most interesting books of biography and history ever written. John Richard Green (1837-1883), who was a devoted clergyman before he became a historian, struggled all his life against the ill-health which finally cut short his career. His 'History of the English People' is an admirable representative of the modern historical spirit, which treats general social conditions as more important than mere external events; but as a narrative it vies in interest with the very different one of Macaulay. Very honorable mention should be made also of W. E. H. Lecky, who belongs to the conscientiously scientific historical school. His 'History of Rationalism in Europe,' for example, is a very fine monument of the most thorough research and most effective statement; but to a mature mind its interest is equally conspicuous.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Beginning as early as the latter part of the eighteenth century literary production, thanks largely to the tremendous increase of education and of newspapers and magazines, has steadily grown, until now it has reached bewildering volume and complexity, in which the old principles are partly merged together and the new tendencies, for contemporary observers, at least, scarcely stand out with decisive distinctness. Most significant to-day, perhaps, are the spirit of independence, now carried in some respects beyond the farthest previous Romantic limits, and the realistic impulse, in which the former impulses of democracy and humanitarianism play a large part. Facts not to be disregarded are the steady advance of the short story, beginning early in the Victorian period or before, to a position of almost chief prominence with the novel; and the rise of American literature to a position approaching equality with that of England. Of single authors none have yet certainly achieved places of the first rank, but two or three may be named. Mr. William De Morgan, by profession a manufacturer of artistic pottery, has astonished the world by beginning to publish at the age of sixty-five a series of novels which show no small amount of Thackeray's power combined with too large a share of Thackeray's diffuseness. Mr. Alfred Noyes (born 1880) is a refreshingly true lyric poet and balladist, and Mr. John Masefield has daringly enlarged the field of poetry by frank but very sincere treatment of extremely realistic subjects. But none of these authors can yet be termed great. About the future it is useless to prophesy, but the horrible war of 1914 is certain to exert for many years a controlling influence on the thought and literature of both England and the whole world, an influence which, it may be hoped, will ultimately prove stimulating and renovating.

Whatever may be true of the future, the record of the past is complete. No intelligent person can give even hasty study to the fourteen existing centuries of English Literature without being deeply impressed by its range and power, or without coming to realize that it stands conspicuous as one of the noblest and fullest achievements of the human race.



A LIST OF AVAILABLE EDITIONS FOR THE STUDY OF IMPORTANT AUTHORS

The author has in preparation an annotated anthology of poems from the popular ballads down, exclusive of long poems. In the meantime existing anthologies may be used with the present volume. The following list includes rather more of the other authors than can probably be studied at first hand in one college year. The editions named are chosen because they combine inexpensiveness with satisfactory quality. It is the author's experience that a sufficient number of them to meet the needs of the class may well be supplied by the college. 'Everyman' means the editions in the 'Everyman Library' series of Messrs. E. P. Dutton and Co.; 'R. L. S.' the 'Riverside Literature Series' of The Houghton Mifflin Co.

BEOWULF. Prose translation by Child; R. L. S., cloth, 25 cents. Metrical translation by J. L. Hall; D. O. Heath & Co., cloth, 75 cents, paper, 30 cents.

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. Prose translation by Miss J. L. Weston, Scribner, 75 cents.

CHAUCER. Among numerous school editions of the Prolog and The Knight's Tale may be named one issued by The American Book Co., 20 cents.

MALORY'S MORTE DARTHUR. Everyman, two vols., 35 cents each. The Medieval Drama, Early Plays, ed. Child, R. L. S., cloth, 40 cents. 'Everyman and Other Plays' (modernized), Everyman, 35 cents.

SPENSER'S FAERIE QUEENE. Everyman, three vols., 35 cents each. Vol. I contains Books I and II.

ELIZABETHAN LYRICS, ed. Schelling, Ginn, 75 cents. Marlowe's Plays. Mermaid ed., Scribner, $1.00.

SHAKSPERE'S PLAYS. Among the most useful 25 cent editions are those in the R. L. S., the Arden series of D. C. Heath and Co., and the Tudor Series of the Macmillan Co.

JONSON'S SEJANUS. Mermaid ed. of Jonson (Scribner), Vol. II, $1.00.

BACON'S ESSAYS. R. L. S., cloth, 40 cents. Everyman, 35 cents.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY LYRICS, ed. Schelling, Ginn, 75 cents.

MILTON'S PARADISE LOST. Astor ed., T. Y. Crowell and Co., 60 cents.

BUNYAN'S PILGRIMS' PROGRESS. Everyman, 35 cents.

DRYDEN'S ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL. In Satires of Dryden, ed. Collins, Macmillan.

DEFOE'S ROBINSON CRUSOE. Everyman.

SWIFT'S GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. Everyman. There are two excellent volumes of Selections from Swift, ed. Craik, Oxford University Press.

THE SPECTATOR PAPERS. Everyman, four vols.

SAMUEL JOHNSON. Selections, ed. Osgood, Henry Holt and Co., 50 cents.

BURKE. Selections, ed. Perry, Holt, 50 cents.

THOMSON'S SEASONS. Astor ed., Crowell, 60 cents.

MACAULAY'S ESSAYS. Everyman, three vols. Vol. I has the essays on Clive and Hastings.

CARLYLE'S SARTOR RESARTUS. Everyman.

RUSKIN. Selections, ed. Tinker, R. L. S., 50 cents.

ARNOLD'S CULTURE AND ANARCHY. Nelson and Sons, 25 cents.

NINETEENTH CENTURY NOVELS. Largely included in Everyman.



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY

These assignments must of course be freely modified in accordance with actual needs. The discussions of the authors' works should sometimes, at least, be made by the student in writing, sometimes after a day or two of preliminary oral discussion in class. In addition to the special questions here included, the treatment of the various authors in the text often suggests topics for further consideration; and of course the material of the preliminary chapter is assumed. Any discussion submitted, either orally or in writing, may consist of a rather general treatment, dealing briefly with several topics; or it may be a fuller treatment of a single topic. Students should always express their own actual opinions, using the judgments of others, recorded in this book or elsewhere, as helps, not as final statements. Students should also aim always to be definite, terse, and clear. Do not make such vague general statements as 'He has good choice of words,' but cite a list of characteristic words or skilful expressions. As often as possible support your conclusions by quotations from, the author or by page-number references to relevant passages.

THE ASSIGNMENTS

1. Above, Chapter I. One day.

2. 'BEOWULF.' Two days. For the first day review the discussion of the poem above, pp. 33-36; study the additional introductory statement which here follows; and read in the poem as much as time allows. For the second day continue the reading, at least through the story of Beowulf's exploits in Hrothgar's country (in Hall's translation through page 75, in Child's through page 60), and write your discussion. Better read one day in a prose translation, the other in a metrical translation, which will give some idea of the effect of the original.

The historical element in the poem above referred to is this: In several places mention is made of the fact that Hygelac, Beowulf's king, was killed in an expedition in Frisia (Holland), and medieval Latin chronicles make mention of the death of a king 'Chocilaicus' (evidently the same person) in a piratical raid in 512 A. D. The poem states that Beowulf escaped from this defeat by swimming, and it is quite possible that he was a real warrior who thus distinguished himself.

The other facts at the basis of the poem are equally uncertain. In spite of much investigation we can say of the tribes and localities which appear in it only that they are those of the region of Scandinavia and Northern Germany. As to date, poems about a historical Beowulf, a follower of Hygelac, could not have existed before his lifetime in the sixth century, but there is no telling how far back the possibly mythical elements may go. The final working over of the poem into its present shape, as has been said, probably took place in England in the seventh or eighth century; in earlier form, perhaps in the original brief ballads, it may have been brought to the country either by the Anglo-Saxons or by stray 'Danes.' It is fundamentally a heathen work, and certain Christian ideas which have been inserted here and there, such as the mention of Cain as the ancestor of Grendel, and the disparagement of heathen gods, merely show that one of the later poets who had it in hand was a Christian.

The genealogical introduction of something over fifty lines (down to the first mention of Hrothgar) has nothing to do with the poem proper; the Beowulf there mentioned is another person than the hero of the poem. In the epic itself we can easily recognize as originally separate stories: 1. Beowulf's fight with Grendel. 2. His fight with Grendel's mother. 3. His fight with the fire-drake. And of course, 4, the various stories referred to or incidentally related in brief.

Subjects for discussion: 1. Narrative qualities, such as Movement, Proportion, Variety, Suspense. Do the style (terse and suggestive rather than explicit) and the tendency to digressions seriously interfere with narrative progress and with the reader's (or listener's) understanding? 2. Dramatic vividness of scenes and incidents. 3. Descriptive qualities. 4. Do you recognize any specifically epic characteristics? 5. Characterization, both in general and of individuals. 6. How much of the finer elements of feeling does the poet show? What things in Nature does he appreciate? His sense of pathos and humor? 7. Personal and social ideals and customs. 8. The style; its main traits; the effect of the figures of speech; are the things used for comparisons in metaphors and similes drawn altogether from the outer world, or partly from the world of thought? 9. The main merits and defects of the poem and its absolute poetic value?

Written discussions may well begin with a very brief outline of the story (not over a single page).

3. Above, chapter II. One day.

4. 'SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT' (in translation). One day. Preliminary, pages 57-58 above. The romance combines two stories which belong to the great body of wide-spread popular narrative and at first had no connection with each other: 1. The beheading story. 2. The temptation. They may have been united either by the present author or by some predecessor of his. Subjects for discussion: 1. Narrative qualities—Unity, Movement, Proportion, Variety, Suspense. Is the repetition of the hunts and of Gawain's experience in the castle skilful or the reverse, in plan and in execution? 2. Dramatic power—how vivid are the scenes and experiences? How fully do we sympathize with the characters? 3. Power of characterization and of psychological analysis? Are the characters types or individuals? 4. Power of description of scenes, persons, and Nature? 5. Character of the author? Sense of humor? How much fineness of feeling? 6. Theme of the story? 7. Do we get an impression of actual life, or of pure romance? Note specific details of feudal life. 8. Traits of style, such as alliteration and figures of speech, so far as they can be judged from the translation.

5. THE PERIOD OF CHAUCER. Above, pages 59-73. One day.

6. CHAUCER'S POEMS. Two or three days. The best poems for study are: The Prolog to the Canterbury Tales. The Nuns' Priest's Tale. The Knight's Tale. The Squire's Tale. The Prolog to the Legend of Good Women. The text, above, pp. 65 ff., suggests topics for consideration, if general discussion is desired in addition to reading of the poems.

7. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY AND THE POPULAR BALLADS. One day. Study above, pages 74-77, and read as many ballads as possible. A full discussion of the questions of ballad origins and the like is to be found in the 'Cambridge' edition (Houghton Mifflin) of the ballads, edited by Sargent and Kittredge. In addition to matters treated in the text, consider how much feeling the authors show for Nature, and their power of description.

8. MALORY AND CAXTON. Two or three days. Study above, pages 77-81, and read in Le Morte Darthur as much as time permits. Among the best books are: VII, XXI, I, Xlll-XVII. Subjects for discussion: 1. Narrative qualities. 2. Characterization, including variety of characters. 3. Amount and quality of description. 4. How far is the book purely romantic, how far does reality enter into it? Consider how much notice is given to other classes than the nobility. 5. The style.

9. THE EARLIER MEDIEVAL DRAMA, INCLUDING THE MYSTERY PLAYS. Two days. Above, Chapter IV, through page 88. Among the best plays for study are: Abraham and Isaac (Riverside L. S. vol., p. 7); The Deluge or others in the Everyman Library vol., pp. 29-135 (but the play 'Everyman' is not a Mystery play and belongs to the next assignment); or any in Manly's 'Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama,' vol. I, pp. 1-211. The Towneley Second Shepherds' Play (so called because it is the second of two treatments of the Nativity theme in the Towneley manuscript) is one of the most notable plays, but is very coarse. Subjects for discussion: 1. Narrative structure and qualities. 2. Characterization and motivation. 3. How much illusion of reality? 4. Quality of the religious and human feeling? 5. The humor and its relation to religious feeling. 6. Literary excellence of both substance and expression (including the verse form).

10. THE MORALITIES AND INTERLUDES. One day. Above, pp. 89-91. Students not familiar with 'Everyman' should read it (E. L. S. vol., p. 66; Everyman Library vol., p. 1). Further may be read 'Mundus et Infans' (The World and the Child. Manly's 'Specimens,' I, 353). Consider the same questions as in the last assignment and compare the Morality Plays with the Mysteries in general excellence and in particular qualities.

11. THE RENAISSANCE, with special study of The Faerie Queene. Four days. Above, Chapter V, through page 116. Read a few poems of Wyatt and Surrey, especially Wyatt's 'My lute, awake' and 'Forget not yet,' and Surrey's 'Give place, ye lovers, heretofore.' In 'The Faerie Queene' read the Prefatory Letter and as many cantos of Book I (or, if you are familiar with that, of some other Books) as you can assimilate—certainly not less than three or four cantos. Subjects for discussion: 1. The allegory; its success; how minutely should it be applied? 2. Narrative qualities. 3. The descriptions. 4. General beauty. 5. The romantic quality. 6. The language. 7. The stanza, e. g., the variety of poetical uses and of treatment in such matters as pauses. The teacher may well read to the class the more important portions of Lowell's essay on Spenser, which occur in the latter half.

12. THE ELIZABETHAN LYRIC POEMS. Two days. Above, pages 117-121. Read as widely as possible in the poems of the authors named. Consider such topics as: subjects and moods; general quality and its contrast with that of later lyric poetry; emotion, fancy, and imagination; imagery; melody and rhythm; contrasts among the poems; the sonnets. Do not merely make general statements, but give definite references and quotations. For the second day make special study of such particularly 'conceited' poems as the following and try to explain the conceits in detail and to form some opinion of their poetic quality: Lyly's 'Apelles' Song'; Southwell's 'Burning Babe'; Ralegh's 'His Pilgrimage'; and two or three of Donne's.

13. THE EARLIER ELIZABETHAN DRAMA, with study of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I. Two days. Above, Chapter VI, through page 129. Historically, Tamerlane was a Mongol (Scythian) leader who in the fourteenth century overran most of Western Asia and part of Eastern Europe in much the way indicated in the play, which is based on sixteenth century Latin lives of him. Of course the love element is not historical but added by Marlowe. Written discussions should begin with a very brief outline of the story (perhaps half a page). Other matters to consider: 1. Is there an abstract dramatic theme? 2. Can regular dramatic structure be traced, with a clear central climax? 3. Variety of scenes? 4. Qualities of style, e. g., relative prominence of bombast, proper dramatic eloquence, and sheer poetry. 5. Qualities, merits, and faults of the blank verse, in detail. E.g.: How largely are the lines end-stopped (with a break in the sense at the end of each line, generally indicated by a mark of punctuation), how largely run-on (without such pause)? Is the rhythm pleasing, varied, or monotonous? 6. Characterization and motivation.

14. THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE; SHAKSPERE; AND 'RICHARD II' AS A REPRESENTATIVE CHRONICLE-HISTORY PLAY. Three days. Above, pages 129-140. The historical facts on which Richard II is based may be found in any short English history, years 1382-1399, though it must be remembered that Shakspere knew them only in the 'Chronicle' of Holinshed. In brief outline they are as follows: King Richard and Bolingbroke (pronounced by the Elizabethans Bullenbroke) are cousins, grandsons of Edward III. Richard was a mere child when he came to the throne and after a while five lords, among whom were his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester (also called in the play Woodstock), and Bolingbroke, took control of the government. Later, Richard succeeded in recovering it and' imprisoned Gloucester at Calais in the keeping of Mowbray. There Gloucester was murdered, probably by Richard's orders. According to Holinshed, whom Shakspere follows, Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of the murder. (This is historically wrong; Bolingbroke's charge was another, trumped up, one; but that does not concern us.) Bolingbroke's purpose is to fix the crime on Mowbray and then prove that Mowbray acted at Richard's orders.

The story of the play is somewhat similar to that of Marlowe's 'Edward II,' from which Shakspere doubtless took his suggestion. Main matters to consider throughout are: The characters, especially Richard and Bolingbroke; the reasons for their actions; do they change or develop? How far are the style and spirit like Marlowe; how far is there improvement? Is the verse more poetic or rhetorical? In what sorts of passages or what parts of scenes is rime chiefly used? Just what is the value of each scene in furthering the action, or for the other artistic purposes of the play? As you read, note any difficulties, and bring them up in the class.

For the second day, read through Act III. Act I: Why did Richard at first try to prevent the combat, then yield, and at the last moment forbid it? Are these changes significant, or important in results? (The 'long flourish' at I, iii, 122, is a bit of stage symbolism, representing an interval of two hours in which Richard deliberated with his council.)

For the third day, finish the play and write your discussion, which should consist of a very brief outline of the story and consideration of the questions that seem to you most important. Some, in addition to those above stated, are: How far is it a mere Chronicle-history play, how far a regular tragedy? Has it an abstract theme, like a tragedy? Are there any scenes which violate unity? Is there a regular dramatic line of action, with central climax? Does Shakspere indicate any moral judgment on Bolingbroke's actions? General dramatic power—rapidity in getting started, in movement, variety, etc.? Note how large a part women have in the play, and how large a purely poetic element there is, as compared with the dramatic. The actual historical time is about two years. Does it appear so long?

15. 'TWELFTH NIGHT' AS A REPRESENTATIVE ROMANTIC COMEDY. Three days, with written discussion. In the Elizabethan period the holiday revelry continued for twelve days after Christmas; the name of the play means that it is such a one as might be used to complete the festivities. Helpful interpretation of the play is to be found in such books as: F. S. Boas, 'Shakspere and his Predecessors,' pp. 313 ff; Edward Dowden, 'Shakspere's Mind and Art,' page 328; and Barrett Wendell, 'William Shakspere,' pp. 205 ff. Shakspere took the outline of the plot from a current story, which appears, especially, in one of the Elizabethan 'novels.' Much of the jesting of the clown and others of the characters is mere light trifling, which loses most of its force in print to-day. The position of steward (manager of the estate) which Malvolio holds with Olivia was one of dignity and importance, though the steward was nevertheless only the chief servant. The unsympathetic presentation of Malvolio is of the same sort which Puritans regularly received in the Elizabethan drama, because of their opposition to the theater. Where is Illyria, and why does Shakspere locate the play there?

First day: Acts I and II. 1. Make sure you can tell the story clearly. 2. How many distinct actions? 3. Which one is chief? 4. Why does Shakspere combine them in one play? 5. Which predominates, romance or realism? 6. Note specifically the improbable incidents. 7. For what sorts of scenes are verse and prose respectively used? Poetic quality of the verse? 8. Characterize the main persons and state their relations to the others, or purposes in regard to them. Which set of persons is most distinctly characterized?

Second day: The rest. (The treatment given to Malvolio was the regular one for madmen; it was thought that madness was due to an evil spirit, which must be driven out by cruelty.) Make sure of the story and characters as before. 9. How skilful are the interweaving and development of the actions? 10. How skilful the 'resolution' (straightening out) of the suspense and complications at the end? 11. Is the outcome, in its various details, probable or conventional? 12. Is there ever any approach to tragic effect?

Third day: Write your discussion, consisting of: I, a rather full outline of the story (in condensing you will do better not always to follow Shakspere's order), and II, your main impressions, including some of the above points or of the following: 13. How does the excellence of the characterization compare with that in 'Richard II'? 14. Work out the time-scheme of the play—the amount of time which it covers, the end of each day represented, and the length of the gaps to be assumed between these days. Is there entire consistency in the treatment of time? 15. Note in four parallel columns, two for the romantic action and two for the others together, the events in the story which respectively are and are not presented on the stage.

16. 'HAMLET' AS A REPRESENTATIVE TRAGEDY. Four days, with written discussion. Students can get much help from good interpretative commentaries, such as: C. M. Lewis, 'The Genesis of Hamlet,' on which the theories here stated are partly based; A. C. Bradley, 'Shakspearean Tragedy,' pp. 89-174; Edward Dowden, 'Shakspere Primer,' 119 ff.; Barrett Wendell, 'William Shakspere,' 250 ff.; Georg Brandes, 'William Shakespeare,' one vol. ed., book II, chaps. xiii-xviii; F. S. Boas, 'Shakespeare and his Predecessors,' 384 ff.; S. T. Coleridge, 'Lectures on Shakspere,' including the last two or three pages of the twelfth lecture.

The original version of the Hamlet story is a brief narrative in the legendary so-called 'Danish History,' written in Latin by the Dane Saxo the Grammarian about the year 1200. About 1570 this was put into a much expanded French form, still very different from Shakspere's, by the 'novelist' Belleforest, in his 'Histoires Tragiques.' (There is a translation of Belleforest in the second volume of the 'Variorum' edition of 'Hamlet'; also in Hazlitt's 'Shakespeare Library,' I, ii, 217 ff.) Probably on this was based an English play, perhaps written by Thomas Kyd, which is now lost but which seems to be represented, in miserably garbled form, in an existing text of a German play acted by English players in Germany in the seventeenth century. (This German play is printed in the 'Variorum' edition of 'Hamlet,' vol. II.) This English play was probably Shakspere's source. Shakspere's play was entered in the 'Stationers' Register' (corresponding to present-day copyrighting) in 1602, and his play was first published (the first quarto) in 1603. This is evidently only Shakspere's early tentative form, issued, moreover, by a piratical publisher from the wretchedly imperfect notes of a reporter sent to the theater for the purpose. (This first quarto is also printed in the 'Variorum' edition.) The second quarto, virtually Shakspere's finished form, was published in 1604. Shakspere, therefore, was evidently working on the play for at least two or three years, during which he transformed it from a crude and sensational melodrama of murder and revenge into a spiritual study of character and human problems. But this transformation could not be complete—the play remains bloody—and its gradual progress, as Shakspere's conception of the possibilities broadened, has left inconsistencies in the characters and action.

It is important to understand the situation and events at the Danish court just before the opening of the play. In Saxo the time was represented as being the tenth century; in Shakspere, as usual, the manners and the whole atmosphere are largely those of his own age. The king was the elder Hamlet, father of Prince Hamlet, whose love and admiration for him were extreme. Prince Hamlet was studying at the University of Wittenberg in Germany; in Shakspere's first quarto it is made clear that he had been there for some years; whether this is the assumption in the final version is one of the minor questions to consider. Hamlet's age should also be considered. The wife of the king and mother of Prince Hamlet was Gertrude, a weak but attractive woman of whom they were both very fond. The king had a brother, Claudius, whom Prince Hamlet had always intensely disliked. Claudius had seduced Gertrude, and a few weeks before the play opens murdered King Hamlet in the way revealed in Act I. Of the former crime no one but the principals were aware; of the latter at most no one but Claudius and Gertrude; in the first quarto it is made clear that she was ignorant of it; whether that is Shakspere's meaning in the final version is another question to consider. After the murder Claudius got himself elected king by the Danish nobles. There was nothing illegal in this; the story assumes that as often in medieval Europe a new king might be chosen from among all the men of the royal family; but Prince Hamlet had reason to feel that Claudius had taken advantage of his absence to forestall his natural candidacy. The respect shown throughout the play by Claudius to Polonius, the Lord Chamberlain, now in his dotage, suggests that possibly Polonius was instrumental in securing Claudius' election. A very few weeks after the death of King Hamlet, Claudius married Gertrude. Prince Hamlet, recalled to Denmark by the news of his father's death, was plunged into a state of wretched despondency by the shock of that terrible grief and by his mother's indecently hasty marriage to a man whom he detested.

There has been much discussion as to whether or not Shakspere means to represent Hamlet as mad, but very few competent critics now believe that Hamlet is mad at any time. The student should discover proof of this conclusion in the play; but it should be added that all the earlier versions of the story explicitly state that the madness is feigned. Hamlet's temperament, however, should receive careful consideration. The actual central questions of the play are: 1. Why does Hamlet delay in killing King Claudius after the revelation by his father's Ghost in I iv? 2. Why does he feign madness? As to the delay: It must be premised that the primitive law of blood-revenge is still binding in Denmark, so that after the revelation by the Ghost it is Hamlet's duty to kill Claudius. Of course it is dramatically necessary that he shall delay, otherwise there would be no play; but that is irrelevant to the question of the human motivation. The following are the chief explanations suggested, and students should carefully consider how far each of them may be true. 1. There are external difficulties, a. In the earlier versions of the story Claudius was surrounded by guards, so that Hamlet could not get at him. Is this true in Shakspere's play? b. Hamlet must wait until he can justify his deed to the court; otherwise his act would be misunderstood and he might himself be put to death, and so fail of real revenge. Do you find indications that Shakspere takes this view? 2. Hamlet is a sentimental weakling, incapable by nature of decisive action. This was the view of Goethe. Is it consistent with Hamlet's words and deeds? 3. Hamlet's scholar's habit of study and analysis has largely paralyzed his natural power of action. He must stop and weigh every action beforehand, until he bewilders himself in the maze of incentives and dissuasives. 4. This acquired tendency is greatly increased by his present state of extreme grief and despondency. (Especially argued by Professor Bradley.) 5. His moral nature revolts at the idea of assassination; in him the barbarous standard of a primitive time and the finer feelings of a highly civilized and sensitive man are in conflict. 6. He distrusts the authenticity of the Ghost and wishes to make sure that it is not (literally) a device of the devil before obeying it. Supposing that this is so, does it suffice for the complete explanation, and is Hamlet altogether sincere in falling back on it?

In a hasty study like the present the reasons for Hamlet's pretense of madness can be arrived at only by starting not only with some knowledge of the details of the earlier versions but with some definite theory. The one which follows is substantially that of Professor Lewis. The pretense of madness was a natural part of the earlier versions, since in them Hamlet's uncle killed his father openly and knew that Hamlet would naturally wish to avenge the murder; in those versions Hamlet feigns madness in order that he may seem harmless. In Shakspere's play (and probably in the older play from which he drew), Claudius does not know that Hamlet is aware of his guilt; hence Hamlet's pretense of madness is not only useless but foolish, for it attracts unnecessary attention to him and if discovered to be a pretense must suggest that he has some secret plan, that is, must suggest to Claudius that Hamlet may know the truth. Shakspere, therefore, retains the pretense of madness mainly because it had become too popular a part of the story (which was known beforehand to most theater-goers) to be omitted. Shakspere suggests as explanations (motivation) for it, first that it serves as a safety-valve for Hamlet's emotions (is this an adequate reason?); and second that he resolves on it in the first heat of his excitement at the Ghost's revelation (I, iv). The student should consider whether this second explanation is sound, whether at that moment Hamlet could weigh the whole situation and the future probabilities, could realize that he would delay in obeying the Ghost and so would need the shield of pretended madness. Whether or not Shakspere's treatment seems rational on analysis the student should consider whether it is satisfactory as the play is presented on the stage, which is what a dramatist primarily aims at. It should be remembered also that Shakspere's personal interest is in the struggle in Hamlet's inner nature.

Another interesting question regards Hamlet's love for Ophelia. When did it begin? Is it very deep, so that, as some critics hold, when Ophelia fails him he suffers another incurable wound, or is it a very secondary thing as compared with his other interests? Is the evidence in the play sufficiently clear to decide these questions conclusively? Is it always consistent?

For the second day, study to the end of Act II. Suggestions on details (the line numbers are those adopted in the 'Globe' edition and followed in most others): I, ii: Notice particularly the difference in the attitude of Hamlet toward Claudius and Gertrude respectively and the attitude of Claudius toward him. At the end of the scene notice the qualities of Hamlet's temperament and intellect. Scenes iv and v: Again notice Hamlet's temperament, v, 107: The 'tables' are the waxen tablet which Hamlet as a student carries. It is of course absurd for him to write on them now; he merely does instinctively, in his excitement and uncertainty, what he is used to doing. 115-116: The falconer's cry to his bird; here used because of its penetrating quality. 149 ff.: The speaking of the Ghost under the floor is a sensational element which Shakspere keeps for effect from the older play, where it is better motivated—there Hamlet started to tell everything to his companions, and the Ghost's cries are meant to indicate displeasure. II, ii, 342; 'The city' is Wittenberg. What follows is a topical allusion to the rivalry at the time of writing between the regular men's theatrical companies and those of the boys.

Third day, Acts III and IV. III, i, 100-101: Professor Lewis points out that these lines, properly placed in the first quarto, are out of order here, since up to this point in the scene Ophelia has reason to tax herself with unkindness, but none to blame Hamlet. This is an oversight of Shakspere in revising. Scene ii, 1 ff.: A famous piece of professional histrionic criticism, springing from Shakspere's irritation at bad acting; of course it is irrelevant to the play. 95: Note 'I must be idle.' Scene iii: Does the device of the play of scene ii prove wise and successful, on the whole? 73 ff.: Is Hamlet sincere with himself here?

Fourth day: Finish the play and write your discussion. V, i: Why are the clowns brought into the play? ii, 283: A 'union' was a large pearl, here dissolved in the wine to make it more precious. In the old play instead of the pearl there was a diamond pounded fine, which constituted the poison. Why is Fortinbras included in the play?

Your discussion should include a much condensed outline of the play, a statement of its theme and main meanings as you see them, and a careful treatment of whatever question or questions most interest you. In addition to those above suggested, the character of Hamlet is an attractive topic.

17. The Rest of the Dramatists to 1642, and the Study of Jonson's 'Sejanus.' Three days, with written discussion of 'Sejanus.' Above, pp. 141-150. Preliminary information about 'Sejanus:' Of the characters in the play the following are patriots, opposed to Sejanus: Agrippina, Drusus, the three boys, Arruntius, Silius, Sabinus, Lepidus, Cordus, Gallus, Regulus. The rest, except Macro and Laco, are partisans of Sejanus. In his estimate of Tiberius' character Jonson follows the traditional view, which scholars now believe unjust. Sejanus' rule actually lasted from 23-31 A.D.; Jonson largely condenses. Livia Augusta, still alive at the time of the play, and there referred to as 'the great Augusta,' was mother of Tiberius and a Drusus (now dead) by a certain Tiberius Claudius Nero (not the Emperor Nero). After his death she married the Emperor Augustus, who adopted Tiberius and whom Tiberius has succeeded. The Drusus above-mentioned has been murdered by Tiberius and Sejanus. By the Agrippina of the play Drusus was mother of the three boys of the play, Nero (not the Emperor), Drusus Junior, and Caligula (later Emperor). The Drusus Senior of the play is son of Tiberius. In reading the play do not omit the various introductory prose addresses, etc. (The collaborator whose part Jonson has characteristically displaced in the final form of the play may have been Shakspere.)

For the second day, read through Act IV. Questions: 1. How far does Jonson follow the classical principles of art and the drama, general and special? 2. Try to formulate definitely the differences between Jonson's and Shakspere's method of presenting Roman life, and their respective power and effects. Does Jonson's knowledge interfere with his dramatic effectiveness? 3. The characters. Why so many? How many are distinctly individualized? Characterize these. What methods of characterization does Jonson use? 4. Compare Jonson's style and verse with Shakspere's. 5. Effectiveness of III, 1? Is Tiberius sincere in saying that he meant to spare Silius?

For the third day, finish the reading and write your discussion. 6. Excellence in general dramatic qualities, especially Movement, Suspense, Variety. Is the act-division organic? 7. State the theme. 8. Locate the points in the line of action, especially the central climax. 9. Specific points of influence from Greek and Senecan tragedy. Begin your discussion with a summary of the story (but do not merely copy from Jonson's own preliminary 'argument').