Byron was born in 1788, and first sprang into notice as the author of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a fierce and bitter reply to critics who had disparaged his first essay in poetry. This satire appeared in 1809, when he was just of age, after which he travelled with Hobhouse, and it was not until 1812 that he "woke to find himself famous," on publishing the first two cantos of Childe Harold. During the next three years, he poured forth a succession of characteristic poems, including the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, Lara, and the Siege of Corinth. His later work was of a more finished order, including the remaining cantos of Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, and Mazeppa, and when he died at Mesolongi in 1824, he left unfinished what is, in some ways, the most remarkable of his works, Don Juan. Long before his death he had become the prophet and hero of a pseudo-romantic school, composed of young Englishmen dazzled by his intellectual brilliancy, and attracted rather than repelled by a certain Satanic taint in his moral sentiments. But he also won the admiration of Goethe, and the reaction against his fame in a later generation is as exaggerated as the idolatry of which he was the object under the regency. His morbid egotism, his stormy rhetoric, and his meretricious exaltation of passion, have lost their magical effect, but his poetical gifts would have commanded homage in any age. The message which he professed to deliver was a false message, but few poets have surpassed him in daring vigour of imagination, in descriptive force, in wit, or in pathos. His style was eminently such as to invite imitation, yet no one has successfully imitated him. Had he been a better man, and had his life been prolonged, he might perhaps have towered above his literary contemporaries as Napoleon did among the generals and rulers of Europe.
KEATS, SHELLEY, TENNYSON.
Yet among these contemporaries were Keats and Shelley, whom some critics of a younger generation would place above him in poetical originality. Their chief merit lay neither in thought nor in strength, but in an exquisite sweetness of expression, which in the case of Shelley at least was quite independent of the subject-matter. Keats, though junior to Shelley, has been described as his poetical father, but his chief poem, Endymion, did not appear until several years after Shelley had formed his own distinctive style. He died in 1821 at the age of twenty-six, leaving a poetical inheritance of the highest quality, which, though limited in quantity and unequal in workmanship, has gained an enduring reputation. Nevertheless his work lent itself readily to imitation, and he exercised a marked influence on the style of later poets, not only in this period, but in the Victorian age as well. The rebellious spirit of Shelley had already shown itself at an early age in his poetry, and especially in Queen Mab, printed in 1812. His ethereal fancy, his dreamy obscurity, and his witchery of language, designated him from the first as a master of lyrical poetry; though he wrote longer pieces, his fame rests on the numerous short poems which continued to appear till his death in 1822.
Perhaps the greatest master of melody was one who was only coming to the front at the close of this period, Alfred Tennyson, born in 1809, contributed with two of his brothers to a collection of verses, misleadingly entitled Poems by Two Brothers, which appeared in 1826. At Cambridge his Timbuctoo won the chancellor's prize, but the first proof of his powers was given by a volume of short poems published in 1830, followed by a similar volume two years later. By far the greater part of his work lies in the next period, but the volume of 1833 already included some of his best known poems.
Among minor poets of this period the highest rank must perhaps be assigned to Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore as authors of some of the most stirring and graceful lyrics in the English language. The former had attained celebrity by the Pleasures of Hope, published before the end of the eighteenth century, but his choicest poems, such as Ye Mariners of England, the fine verses on Hohenlinden and Copenhagen, and Gertrude of Wyoming, appeared between 1802 and 1809. The series of Moore's Irish melodies, on which his poetical fame largely rests, was begun in 1807, though not completed until long afterwards. They were followed by other lyrical pieces of great merit, and by a series of witty and malicious lampoons, collected in 1813 into a volume called the Twopenny Post Bag. Lalla Rookh, his most ambitious effort, was not published until 1817.
Two prose writers of the same epoch, Southey and Bentham, claim special notice, though Southey may also be numbered among the poets. Having established himself close to Keswick in 1804, he prosecuted a literary career with the most untiring industry until his mental faculties at last failed him some thirty-six years later. During this period he produced above a hundred volumes in poetry and prose, besides numerous scattered articles and other papers. Most of these were of merely ephemeral interest, but the Life of Nelson, published in 1813, may be said to have set a standard of simplicity, purity, and dignity in English prose which has been of permanent value. Bentham's style, on the contrary, was so wanting in beauty and perspicuity that one at least of his chief works is best known to English readers in the admirable French paraphrase of his friend Dumont. This is his famous Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in which the doctrines of the utilitarian philosophy are rigorously applied to jurisprudence and the regulation of human conduct. Several of his numerous treatises had been planned, and others actually composed, before the end of the eighteenth century, but his practical influence, ultimately so great, first made itself felt in the early part of the nineteenth century. This influence may be compared within the sphere of social reform to that of Adam Smith within the sphere of economy. Many amendments of the law, an improved system of prison discipline, and even the reform of the poor law, may be directly traced to his counsels, and it was he who inspired the leading radicals when radicalism was not so much a destructive creed as a protest against real and gross abuses.
MALTHUS.
Perhaps, next to Bentham, no writer of this period influenced educated opinion so powerfully as Malthus, whose Essay on Population, first published anonymously in 1798, attracted comparatively little attention until 1803, when it was republished in a maturer form. No work has ever been more persistently misrepresented. While he shows that population, if unchecked, will surely increase in a ratio far outstripping any possible increase in the means of subsistence, he also shows, by elaborate proofs, that it will inevitably be checked by vice and misery, whether or not they are aided by moral restraint. Later experience has done little to weaken his reasoning, but it has proved that "moral restraint" (in the most general sense) operates more widely than he ventured to expect, and that larger tracts of the earth's surface than he recognised could be brought under profitable cultivation. With these modifications, his theory holds the field, and the people of Great Britain only escape starvation by ever-growing importations of grain from countries whose production—for the present—exceeds their consumption.
Several other writers of eminence, such as Sheridan and Paley, who lived in the latter days of George III. are more properly to be regarded as survivors of eighteenth century literature. Horne Tooke was returned for Old Sarum in 1801, and enjoyed a reputation in society until his death in 1812, but his old-fashioned radicalism had long since been superseded by a newer creed. Dugald Stewart continued to lecture on moral philosophy until 1809, and was fortunate in numbering among his pupils Palmerston, Lansdowne, and Russell. A younger student of philosophy was Richard Whately, who was born in 1787, and elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1811. He soon began to play an active part in university life, and, after being principal of St. Alban Hall, was removed to the archbishopric of Dublin in 1831. Though not a great philosopher, he was an acute logician, and his Logic, published in 1826, entitled him to a high place among the thinkers of his generation. But it was not merely as a teacher and writer that Whately promoted the cause of philosophy in Oxford. He was one of the leaders in that organisation of studies which made philosophy one of the principal studies, if not the principal study, of the abler students in that university, and gave elementary logic a place in the ordinary "pass-man's" curriculum.
The best work of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen appeared in the early part of the nineteenth century. Maria Edgeworth's novel, Castle Rackrent, was published in 1800, and rapidly followed by other tales descriptive of Irish life; four of Jane Austen's novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, were published between 1811 and 1816, while Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared after her death in 1817. All her work displays a power of minute analysis of character shared by few, if any, of our other novelists. Both authors deserve gratitude not only for having inspired Scott with a new idea of novel-writing, but for having exercised a purifying influence on the moral tone of English romance.