a peck of clerisy.  They broke with the old school, as Protestantism broke with the old Church; but, like the sects, they separated again.  Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, while refusing to acknowledge the literary precedents of the past, submitted themselves to a self-imposed law.  The partialities of their maturity were towards things settled and regulated; their favourite virtues, endurance and humility; their conformity to established institutions was the basis of a new Conservatism.  The others were the Radicals of the movement:  they practically acknowledged no law but their own inspiration.  Dissatisfied with the existing order, their sympathies were with strong will and passion and defiant independence.  These found their master-types in Shelley and in Byron.

A reaction is always an extreme.  Lollards, Puritans, Covenanters, were in some respects nauseous antidotes to ecclesiastical corruption.  The ruins of the Scotch cathedrals and of the French nobility are warnings at once against the excess that provokes and the excess that avenges.  The revolt against the ancien regime in letters made possible the Ode that is the high-tide mark of modern English inspiration, but it was parodied in page on page of maundering rusticity.  Byron saw the danger, but was borne headlong by the rapids.  Hence the anomalous contrast between his theories and his performance.  Both Wordsworth and Byron were bitten by Rousseau; but the former is, at furthest, a Girondin.  The latter, acting like Danton on the motto “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace,” sighs after Henri Quatre et Gabrielle.  There is more of the spirit of the French Revolution in Don Juan than in all the works of the author’s contemporaries; but his criticism is that of Boileau, and when deliberate is generally absurd.  He never recognized the meaning of the artistic movement of his age, and overvalued those of his works which the Unities helped to destroy.  He hailed Gifford as his Magnus Apollo, and put Rogers next to Scott in his comical pyramid.  “Chaucer,” he writes, “I think obscene and contemptible.”  He could see no merit in Spenser, preferred Tasso to Milton, and called the old English dramatists “mad and turbid mountebanks.”  In the same spirit he writes:  “In the time of Pope it was all Horace, now it is all Claudian.”  He saw—­what fanatics had begun to deny—­that Pope was a great writer, and the “angel of reasonableness,” the strong common sense of both was a link between them; but the expressions he uses during his controversy with Bowles look like jests, till we are convinced of his earnestness by his anger.  “Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence....  Your whole generation are not worth a canto of the Dunciad, or anything that is his.”  All the while he was himself writing prose and verse, in grasp if not in vigour