by the seventeenth-century writers, he attempted definitely to create a new style which should combine the best elements of prose and poetry.  In consequence, his prose works are often, like those of Milton, more imaginative and melodious than much of our poetry.  He has been well called “the psychologist of style,” and as such his works will never be popular; but to the few who can appreciate him he will always be an inspiration to better writing.  One has a deeper respect for our English language and literature after reading him.

SECONDARY WRITERS OF ROMANTICISM.  One has only to glance back over the authors we have been studying—­Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott, Lamb, De Quincey—­to realize the great change which swept over the life and literature of England in a single half century, under two influences which we now know as the French Revolution in history and the Romantic Movement in literature.  In life men had rebelled against the too strict authority of state and society; in literature they rebelled even more vigorously against the bonds of classicism, which had sternly repressed a writer’s ambition to follow his own ideals and to express them in his own way.  Naturally such an age of revolution was essentially poetic,—­only the Elizabethan Age surpasses it in this respect,—­and it produced a large number of minor writers, who followed more or less closely the example of its great leaders.  Among novelists we have Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Porter, and Susan Ferrier,—­all women, be it noted; among the poets, Campbell, Moore, Hogg ("the Ettrick Shepherd"), Mrs. Hemans, Heber, Keble, Hood, and “Ingoldsby” (Richard Barham); and among miscellaneous writers, Sidney Smith, “Christopher North” (John Wilson), Chalmers, Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Hallam, and Landor.  Here is an astonishing variety of writers, and to consider all their claims to remembrance would of itself require a volume.  Though these are generally classed as secondary writers, much of their work has claims to popularity, and some of it to permanence.  Moore’s Irish Melodies, Campbell’s lyrics, Keble’s Christian Year, and Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw and Scottish Chiefs have still a multitude of readers, where Keats, Lamb, and De Quincey are prized only by the cultured few; and Hallam’s historical and critical works are perhaps better known than those of Gibbon, who nevertheless occupies a larger place in our literature.  Among all these writers we choose only two, Jane Austen and Walter Savage Landor, whose works indicate a period of transition from the Romantic to the Victorian Age.

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)