A link between the age of Keats and Lamb and that of Browning and Dickens was the amiable Bryan Waller

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

R. Monckton Milnes

enjoyed considerable popularity, and some of his songs, such as "Strangers

poems

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 in two volumes, commemorating the festivals of the Church, and Lyra

John Keble

From a Drawing by George Richmond

Innocentium, 1846, a children's garland of lyric thoughts. Each of these, but particularly the former, has enjoyed a great and a scarcely flagging popularity; of The Christian Year it is said that 200,000 copies were sold during Keble's lifetime. With all his sincerity and appositeness, Keble has scarcely secured a place among the poets. In the first heyday of its triumph, Wordsworth said of The Christian Year, "It is so good that, if it were mine, I would write it all over again," and this phrase indicates Keble's fatal want of intensity as a poet.

The one prose-writer who in years was the exact contemporary of these poets, but who was enjoying a universal popularity while the best

Charles Dickens

of them were still

obscure, the greatest
novelist since Scott,
the earliest, and in
some ways still the
most typical of Vic-
torian writers, was
CHARLES DICKENS.
English fiction had
been straying further
and further from the
peculiarly national
type of Ben Jonson
and Smollett-the
study, that is,
"humours," oddities,
extravagant peculiari-
ties of incident and
character-when the
publication of the
Pickwick Papers at
once revealed a new
writer of colossal
genius, and resusci-

of

tated that obsolete order of fiction. Here was evident not merely an extraordinary power of invention and bustle of movement, but a spirit of such boundless merriment as the literature of the world had never seen before. For more than thirty years, from the book-publication of Pickwick until his death, Dickens enjoyed a popularity greater than that of any other living writer. The world early made up its mind to laugh as soon as he spoke, and he therefore chose that his second novel, Oliver Twist, should be a study in melodramatic sentiment almost entirely

without humour. Nicholas Nickleby combined the comic and the sensational elements for the first time, and is still the type of Dickens's longer books, in which the strain of violent pathos or sinister mystery is incessantly relieved by farce, either

of incident or description. In this novel, too, the easy-going, old-fashioned air of Pickwick is abandoned in favour of a humanitarian attitude more in keeping with the access of puritanism which the new reign had brought with it, and from this time forth a certain sqeamishness in dealing with moral problems and a certain "gush of unreal sentiment obscured the finer qualities of the novelist's genius. The rose-coloured innocence of the Pinches, the pathetic deaths, to slow music, of Little Nell and Little Dombey, these are examples of a weakness which endeared Dickens to his enormous public, but which add nothing to his posthumous glory.

The peculiarity of the manner of Dickens is its excessive and minute consistency within certain arbitrary limits of belief. Realistic he usually is, real he is scarcely ever. He builds up, out of the storehouse of his memory, artificial conditions of

life, macrocosms swarming with human vitality, but not actuated by truly human instincts. Into one of these vivaria we gaze, at Dickens's bidding, and see it teeming with movement; he puts a microscope into our hands, and we watch, with excited attention, the perfectly consistent, if often strangely violent and grotesque adventures of the beings comprised in the world of his fancy. His vivacity, his versatility, his comic vigour are so extraordinary that our interest in the show never flags. We do not

inquire whether Mr. Toots and Joe Gargery are "possible" characters,

Charles Dickens

whether we and they move
and breathe in a common
atmosphere; we are per-
fectly satisfied with the
evolutions through which
their fascinating showman
puts them. But real imita-
tive vitality, such as the
characters of Fielding and
Jane Austen possess, the
enchanting marionettes of
Dickens never display: in
all but their oddities, they
are strangely incorporeal.
Dickens leads us rapidly
through the thronged mazes
of a fairyland, now comic,
now sentimental, now hor-
rific, of which
we know
him all the time to be the
creator, and it is merely.
part of his originality and
cleverness that he manages
to clothe these radically
phantasmal figures with the

richest motley robes of actual, humdrum, "realistic" observation.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was the second of the eight children of John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, employed in Portsmouth Dockyard, and Dickens was born at Landport, a suburb of Portsea, on the 7th of February 1812. From the age of four to that of nine he lived with his family at Chatham, a town and neighbourhood much identified with the novelist's writings. He became, as he afterwards said, "a writer when a mere baby, an actor always." In 1821 John Dickens, in reduced circumstances, removed with his family to London, and settled in Camden Town; a year later he was consigned to the debtors' prison, the Marshalsea. The eldest son, after some vague and picturesque years of distress-he was a packer for some time in a blacking warehouse-found employment as a solicitor's clerk in Gray's Inn. He taught himself shorthand, and in the last months of 1828 he became a reporter in Doctors' Commons, and later still for a newspaper. It was not until 1834 that he was at length appointed to the reporting staff of the Morning Chronicle. About the same time he began to adventure in literature with the papers afterwards reprinted in