| 1809-1818.  Byron’s Childe Harold
1812.  Second war with United States | 1810-1813.  Coleridge’s Lectures on
| Shakespeare
1814.  Congress of Vienna | 1814-1831.  Waverley Novels 1815.  Battle of Waterloo |
| 1816.  Shelley’s Alastor
| 1817.  Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria
| 1817-1820.  Keats’s poems
| 1818-1820.  Shelley’s Prometheus
1819.  First Atlantic steamship |
1820.  George IV (d. 1830) | 1820.  Wordsworth’s Duddon Sonnets
| 1820-1833.  Lamb’s Essays of Elia
| 1821.  De Quincey’s Confessions
| 1824-1846.  Landor’s Imaginary
| Conversations.
1826.  First Temperance Society |
1829.  Catholic Emancipation Bill |
1830.  William IV (d. 1837) | 1830.  Tennyson’s first poems
First railway |
| 1831.  Scott’s last novel
1832.  Reform Bill |
1833.  Emancipation of slaves | 1833.  Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
| Browning’s Pauline
1834.  System of national education |
1837.  Victoria (d. 1901) |
| 1853-1861.  De Quincey’s Collected
| Essays
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* * * * *

CHAPTER XI

THE VICTORIAN AGE (1850-1900)

THE MODERN PERIOD OF PROGRESS AND UNREST

When Victoria became queen, in 1837, English literature seemed to have entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic fruitfulness of the romantic age which we have just studied.  Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Scott had passed away, and it seemed as if there were no writers in England to fill their places.  Wordsworth had written, in 1835,

    Like clouds that rake, the mountain summits,
      Or waves that own no curbing hand,
    How fast has brother followed brother,
      From sunshine to the sunless land!

In these lines is reflected the sorrowful spirit of a literary man of the early nineteenth century who remembered the glory that had passed away from the earth.  But the leanness of these first years is more apparent than real.  Keats and Shelley were dead, it is true, but already there had appeared three disciples of these poets who were destined to be far more widely, read than were their masters.  Tennyson had been publishing poetry since 1827, his first poems appearing almost simultaneously with the last work of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; but it was not until 1842, with the publication of his collected poems, in two volumes, that England recognized in him one of her great literary leaders.  So also Elizabeth Barrett had been writing since 1820, but not till twenty years later did her poems become deservedly popular; and Browning had published his Pauline