Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them.  But in so crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter, accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not only the most important, but the most representative of the various tendencies of their time.

[Illustration:  Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats.]

The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly stimulating.  The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers.  Every one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some sort of a hearing.  A special feature of the time is the multiplication of periodicals.  The great London dailies, like the Times and the Morning Post, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th century, were something quite new in journalism.  The first of the modern reviews, the Edinburgh, was established in 1802, as the organ of the Whig party in Scotland.  This was followed by the London Quarterly, in 1808, and by Blackwood’s Magazine, in 1817, both in the Tory interest.  The first editor of the Edinburgh was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and lord chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty sayings are still current.  The first editor of the Quarterly was William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the Baviad and Maeviad ridicule of literary affectations.  He was succeeded in 1824 by John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an excellent Life of Scott. Blackwood’s was edited by John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under the pen-name of “Christopher North,” contributed to his magazine a series of brilliant imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the day, entitled Noctes Ambrosianae, because they were supposed to take place at Ambrose’s tavern in Edinburgh.  These papers were full of a profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys.  These reviews and magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, became the nuclei about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered.  Political controversy under the Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no longer so largely by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like Swift’s Public Spirit of the Allies, Johnson’s Taxation