His English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a clever attack upon the critics and poets of his time. The Vision of Judgment is directed against the poet Southey, who had aroused Byron's ire by praising George III. Don Juan, the most famous of all, is a comprehensive satire on modern society. Byron ruthlessly exposes the social corruption hidden beneath the conventional veneer. The work is licentious but brilliant. It is, of all Byron's poems, the most complete expression of his strange personality.

John Keats (1796-1821) occupies a place apart from his fellow-romanticists. He took almost no interest in the problems of his own time. His poetic inspiration came almost exclusively from the classical and medieval past. Most of his information about Greek story and mythology came out of the classical dictionary, for he could not read the Greek language; yet somehow he gained a sympathetic appreciation of the Greek spirit. At the same time, he knew and loved medieval romance with all its imaginative luxuriance. The combination of the classical and the romantic in his nature made him unique in his time. Endymion is a classical theme treated with romantic extravagance. Lamia, too, is rich in romantic coloring. Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes are medieval themes. The Eve of St. Agnes has been called an "unsurpassed example of the pure charm of colored and romantic narrative in English verse." Hyperion shows the Miltonic influence; it is an example of "the grand style in poetry." His great odes, especially the Ode on a Grecian Urn and the Ode to a Nightingale, have rare beauty and finish. Indeed, Keats worshiped beauty. His poetic creed is expressed at the end of the Ode on a Grecian Urn:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, this is all
We know on earth and all we need to know."

The second volume he published began with the line

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Keats died at the age of twenty-five; yet he left work of such rare excellence that it has had a profound influence upon subsequent verse.

(b) PROSE

As the age of reason and common sense was preeminently an age of prose, so the age of imagination and emotion was an age of poetry. Still, romanticism had its stories in prose and its essays. Sir Walter Scott was the great exponent of the prose romance. When his poetic inspiration began to abate, and Byron threatened to take away his popularity, Scott turned to the writing of prose stories, and published Waverley, the first of the so-called Waverley Novels. He did not continue the realistic traditions of Richardson or Fielding, but set himself rather to develop the method of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, looking back to the Middle Ages for inspiration, exploiting the mystery and superstition and high adventure of that romantic past. He played upon it all, however, with the hand of an artist, so that, although Mrs. Radcliffe and her school are now ridiculous, Scott still remains one of our great English masters.

Scott's Prose Romances. His romances may be divided into two general classes: one pertaining to the medieval past of England; the other, to the past of Scotland. Ivanhoe is a story of the time of the crusades; Kenilworth, of the time of Queen Elizabeth. These represent the English past. Old Mortality treats of the Scotch Covenanters. Other Scotch romances are Guy Mannering, The Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy.

Scott's Method. eantry and adventure.

Scott placed the emphasis on pag

To be sure, the characters are often

fine typical figures: Bailie Jarvis in Rob Roy, Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering are vivid Scotch portraits. Yet we are interested not so much in their character as in their fortunes; and not so much in the meaning of life as in its outward show. Scott's chief purpose was to entertain. He was not a romanticist of the Byron or Shelley type; he had no radical tendencies, political or social; he did not feel the tyranny of conventional life. He had just a fascinating interest in the past of England and Scotland and knew how to make its pageantry and high adventure live again. He exploited the simple and fundamental aspects of romance.

Wordsworth's Critical Writings. The romantic school also developed a literature of criticism. Wordsworth, in

his famous prefaces to the various editions of The Lyrical Ballads, took direct issue with the classicists. First, he insisted that the passions were the subject matter for poetry. Poetry, to him, was not a mechanical process, but "the spontaneous overflow of the feelings," modified, to be sure, by reflection, but generated, not manufactured. He spoke of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity." Secondly, he believed that the poor and the lowly are fitter subjects for poetry than the great, because among the plain people the simple and fundamental emotions are to be found in the greatest sincerity and truth. In the third place, he discarded the old doctrine of poetic diction, going so far as to claim that the language of poetry differs in no essential particular from the language of prose. In the fourth place, he insisted upon the imagination as the shaping power of poetry.

Coleridge as a Critic. Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria and other critical and philosophical works, agreed in general with Wordsworth, except in the matter of poetic