AN ILLUSTRATED RECORD IN EIGHT VOLUMES VOLUME IV-PART II FROM THE AGE OF JOHNSON TO THE A link between the age of Keats and Lamb and that of Browning and Dickens was the amiable Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874), better known as Barry Cornwall. He was a student of the Jacobean dramatists, and he published, with success, scenes in blank verse which read like extracts from some pensive contemporary of Shirley. He was also a writer of very graceful songs. Procter was a barrister, and for thirty years a Commissioner in Lunacy. His wife, who long survived him, was a most brilliant and caustic talker, "Our Lady of Bitterness," as some one styled her. A still more prominent figure in the social and literary life of the age was Richard Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton (1809-1885), the early associate of Tennyson, Thackeray, and Spedding. He published in the 'forties four volumes of reflective lyric verse which enjoyed considerable popularity, and R. Monckton Milnes From a Drawing by George Richmond some of his songs, such as "Strangers Yet" and "The Brookside," are favourites still. Lord Houghton was indefatigable in the pursuit of intellectual pleasure, and his sympathies were liberal and enlightened. Perhaps his most signal contribution to literature was the Life of Keats, which he published from materials hitherto unexplored, in 1848. The principal author of religious verse in this period was, unquestionably, the Rev. John Keble (1792-1866), whose lyrics were accepted as closely representative of the aspirations of English churchmen at the moment of the High Church revival. Keble, a country clergyman, was professor of poetry at Oxford, and he contributed to current Oxford theology. But he is really remembered for his two collections of sacred verse, The Christian Year, 1827, a series of poems in two volumes, commemorating the festivals of the Church, and Lyra John Keble From a Drawing by George Richmond |