10. De Quincey.  What are the general characteristics of De Quincey’s essays?  Explain why he is called the psychologist of style.  What accounts for a certain unreal element in all his work.  Read a passage from The English Mail-Coach, or from Joan of Arc, or from Levana, Our Lady of Sorrows, and comment freely upon it, with regard to style, ideas, interest, and the impression of reality or unreality which it leaves.

11. Landor.  In what respect does Landor show a reaction from Romanticism?  What qualities make Landor’s poems stand out so clearly in the memory?  Why, for instance, do you think Lamb was so haunted by “Rose Aylmer”?  Quote from Landor’s poems to illustrate his tenderness, his sensitiveness to beauty, his power of awakening emotion, his delicacy of characterization.  Do you find the same qualities in his prose?  Can you explain why much of his prose seems like a translation from the Greek?  Compare a passage from the Imaginary Conversations with a passage from Gibbon or Johnson, to show the difference between the classic and the pseudo-classic style.  Compare one of Landor’s characters, in Imaginary Conversations, with the same character in history.

12. Jane Austen.  How does Jane Austen show a reaction from Romanticism?  What important work did she do for the novel?  To what kind of fiction was her work opposed?  In what does the charm of her novels consist?  Make a brief comparison between Jane Austen and Scott (as illustrated in Pride and Prejudice and Ivanhoe), having in mind the subject, the characters, the manner of treatment, and the interest of both narratives.  Do Jane Austen’s characters have to be explained by the author, or do they explain themselves?  Which method calls for the greater literary skill?  What does Jane Austen say about Mrs. Radcliffe, in Northanger Abbey?  Does she make any other observations on eighteenth-century novelists?

CHRONOLOGY
End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
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HISTORY | LITERATURE
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---------------- 1760-1820.  George III |
| 1770-1850.  Wordsworth
| 1771-1832.  Scott
1789-1799.  French Revolution |
| 1796-1816.  Jane Austen’s novels
| 1798.  Lyrical Balads of Wordsworth
| and Coleridge
1800.  Union of Great Britain and |
Ireland |
1802.  Colonization of Australia | 1802.  Scotts Minstrelsy of the Scottish
| Border
1805.  Battle of Trafalgar | 1805-1817.  Scotts poems
| 1807.  Wordsworth’s Intimations of
1807.  Abolition of slave trade | Immortality.  Lamb’s Tales
| from Shakespeare
1808-1814.  Peninsular War |