CHAPTER XIII.
WITH THE WITS.
The ten years of the Thirties are a period concerning whose literary history the ordinary reader knows next to nothing. Yet a good deal that has survived for fifty years, and promises to live longer, was accomplished in that period. Dickens, for example, began his career in the year 1837 with his ‘Sketches by “Boz”’ and the ‘Pickwick Papers;’ Lord Lytton, then Mr. Lytton Bulwer, had already before that year published five novels, including ‘Paul Clifford’ and ‘The Last Days of Pompeii.’ Tennyson had already issued the ‘Poems, by Two Brothers,’ and ‘Poems chiefly Lyrical.’ Disraeli had written ‘The Young Duke,’ ‘Vivian Grey,’ and ‘Venetia.’ Browning had published ‘Paracelsus’ and ‘Strafford;’ Marryat began in 1834; Carlyle published the ‘Sartor Resartus’ in 1832. But one must not estimate a period by its beginners. All these writers belong to the following thirty years of the century. If we look for those who were flourishing—that is, those who were producing their best work—it will be found that this decade was singularly poor. The principal name is that of Hood. There were also Hartley Coleridge, Douglas Jerrold, Procter, Sir Archibald Alison, Theodore Hook, G. P. R. James, Charles Knight, Sir Henry Taylor, Milman, Ebenezer Elliott, Harriet Martineau, James Montgomery, Talfourd, Henry Brougham, Lady Blessington, Harrison Ainsworth, and some others of lesser note. This is not a very imposing array. On the other hand, nearly all the great writers whom we associate with the first thirty years of the century were living, though their best work was done. After sixty, I take it, the hand of the master may still work with the old cunning, but his designs will be no longer new or bold. Wordsworth was sixty in 1830, and, though he lived for twenty years longer, and published the ‘Yarrow Revisited,’ and, I think, some of his ‘Sonnets,’ he hardly added to his fame. Southey was four years younger. He published his ‘Doctor’ and ‘Essays’ in this decade, but his best work was done already. Scott died in 1832; Coleridge died in 1834; Byron was already dead; James Hogg died in 1835; Felicia Hemans in the same year; Tom Moore was a gay young fellow of fifty in 1830, the year in which his life of Lord Byron appeared. He did very little afterwards. Campbell was two years older than Moore, and he, too, had exhausted himself. Rogers, older than any of them, had entirely concluded his poetic career. It is wonderful to think that he began to write in 1783 and died in 1855. Beckford, whose ‘Vathek’ appeared in 1786, was living until 1844. Among others who were still living in 1837 were James and Horace Smith, Wilson Croker, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Trollope, Lucy Aikin, Miss Opie (who lived to be eighty-five), Jane Porter (prematurely cut off at seventy-four), and Harriet Lee (whose immortal work, the ‘Errors of Innocence,’ appeared in 1786, when she was already thirty) lived on till 1852, when she was ninety-six. Bowles, that excellent man, was not yet seventy, and meant to live for twenty years longer. De Quincey was fifty-two in 1837, Christopher North was in full vigour, Thomas Love Peacock, who published his first novel in 1810, was destined to produce a last, equally good, in 1860; Landor, born in 1775, was not to die until 1864; Leigh Hunt, who in 1837 was fifty-three years of age, belongs to the time of Byron. John Keble, whose ‘Christian Year’ was published in 1827, was forty-four in 1837; ‘L. E. L.’ died in 1838. In America, Washington Irving, Emerson, Channing, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, make a good group. In France, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Béranger, Alfred de Musset, Scribe, and Dumas were all writing, a group much stronger than our English team.
CHARLES KNIGHT
(From a Photograph by Hughes & Mullins, Regina House, Ryde, Isle of Wight)
Wm Wordsworth
-WILLIAM WORDSWORTH-
ROBERT SOUTHEY