Rome and Catholicism. His Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion (1836) belong to this period. After being made bishop of Melipotamus, in partibus infidelium, and acting as coadjutor to Bishop Walsh of the Midland district for several years, Wiseman was nominated, on the restoration of the English hierarchy in 1850, archbishop of Westminster and metropolitan, and received the cardinal's hat. He met with firmness and good-temper the storm which the publication of his celebrated letter from the Flaminian Gate' caused to burst forth. His literary gift did not slumber during the fifteen remaining years of his life, notwithstanding the heavy labour and responsibility resting upon him. In Fabiola, a Tale of the Catacombs (1855), we meet all the points which constitute excellence in a historical novel. His Recollections of the Last Four Popes1 (1858) will some day become an English classic.

Between 1840 and 1845 Wiseman contributed many luminous and powerful articles to the 'Dublin Review' on questions which came up for discussion in the Tractarian controversy,with what effect on the mind of Dr. Newman he has himself declared in the Apologia and elsewhere.

35. Thomas Babington Macaulay, son of Zachary Macaulay, a noted abolitionist, and of the daughter of an English quaker, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Bred to the bar, he passed early into the political arena; but he found that the want of a settled independence was injurious to him; he wished also to make a provision for his family; and in spite of the charms of London society, in which he-perhaps the most brilliant talker of our day-was so well fitted to excel, he accepted a seat in the Council of India, and resided at Calcutta between 1833 and 1838. Returning then to England with a competent fortune, he was returned to the House of Commons as member for Edinburgh, and joined the ministry of Lord Melbourne, as Secretary for War, in 1839. His spirited Lays of Rome appeared in 1842. Before and after this date he was a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Review,' and his articles, collected and republished in 1843, under the name of Essays, have ever since enjoyed, in a most marked degree, the favour of the reading public. Of Macaulay's History of England the first two volumes appeared in 1848; the third and fourth in 1855; the fifth volume was published soon after his death in 1859. For this work also the demand has been, and is, immense both in England and America. Macaulay is an incomparable master of the historic style; and

1 Extract Book, art. 210.

it may be safely asserted that no person of average faculties, who once began to read a volume of his History, ever felt tempted to lay it aside.

36. The profound and original thoughts of Thomas Carlyle, expressed in a style all his own, which seemed to pierce through the outward shows and wrappings of things, and to promise access to an inner kernel of healing truth, influenced powerfully nearly all earnest English minds in the middle portion of the century. He seemed to take his stand like a Hebrew prophet; the 'hero' was to bring salvation to all and to each; to recognise, honour, and exalt him was the only wisdom for smaller men. This teaching has now become much discredited ; Carlyle's own record of his own life shows him to have been, though essentially tender-hearted and generous, yet defective in charity and humility, and wanting in self-control; and the older ideals which he misprized, even if they have not begun to reassert their power, are felt to be none the weaker and none the worse for his rejection of them.

His History of the French Revolution (1837), Letters and Speeches of Cromwell (1845), and Life of Friedrich II. (1860), are solid contributions to our historical literature. Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero- Worship, Past and Present, Chartism, and Latter-Day Pamphlets, embody the teaching which this wild genius was, or thought himself, commissioned to deliver to mankind.

37. John Henry Cardinal Newman, the son of a gentleman who was a member of a London banking firm, received his early teaching either at home or in a private school near London, and thence passed to Trinity College, Oxford. Elected a fellow of Oriel, he became vicar of St. Mary's, the University church, in 1828, and between that date and 1845 preached his Parochial Sermons. As Vice-Principal of Alban Hall, under Whately as Principal, he for several years enjoyed the friendship, and profited by the stimulating conversation, of that remarkable man. But no form of Liberalism contented him; the mutual toleration of sectaries had no charms for him; the essential oneness and permanence of the original type of Christianity rose clearly before his mind ;-and this doctrine, together with those of the unity of the Church, the necessity of sacraments, and the regular descent and devolution of spiritual authority upon the lawful successors of the Apostles in every age, so possessed his mind that, in concert with a number of likeminded men, nearly all of whom belonged to Oxford, he carried on, from 1833 to 1844, the famous series of Tracts for the Times, in which these principles were expounded. Recognising

in due time the Roman communion as the natural home of such convictions and aspirations, Dr. Newman was in 1845 received into the Catholic Church by Father Dominick, the provincial of the English Passionists. He joined the congregation of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, and founded an oratory at Edgbaston, near Birmingham, where he has since chiefly resided. For all the ordinary purposes of prose style, Dr. Newman's manner of expression, considered as a singularly direct and lucid medium of thought, has probably never been surpassed. In 1846 appeared his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, a masterly treatise in which he distinguishes that 'profectus,' or wholesome growth, which Vincent of Lerins admitted must be a characteristic of true doctrine, from the misgrowths which tend to destroy the original life of the germ. Cardinal Newman has tried his hand at fiction in three different forms, Loss and Gain, or the Story of a Convert (1848), Callista: a Tale of the Third Century, and The Dream of Gerontius, a poem. Among his other writings the most important seem to be these: The Arians of the Fourth Century, the Lectures on the History of the Turks, Discourses on the Nature of Universities (1854), The Office and Work of Universities (1856), his Apologia pro Vita sud (1864), commenced as a reply to Mr. Kingsley, his Poems (1868), The Grammar of Assent (1870), and several volumes of Sermons and Essays. Of late years Cardinal Newman has sanctioned the collection and republication-in some cases with corrective notes-of nearly all his earlier writings.

CRITICAL SECTION.

CHAPTER I.

POETRY.

Definition of Literature-Classification of Poetical
Compositions.

1. ENGLISH LITERATURE is now to be considered under that which is its most natural and legitimate arrangement; that arrangement, namely, of which the principle is, not sequence in time, but affinity in subject; and which aims, by comparing together works of the same kind, to arrive, with greater ease and certainty than is possible by the chronological method, at a just estimate of their relative merits. To effect this critical aim it is evident that a classification of the works which compose a literature is an essential prerequisite. This we shall now proceed to do. With the critical process, for which the proposed classification is to serve as the foundation, we shall, in the present work, be able to make but scanty progress. portions of it we shall attempt, with the view rather of illustrating the conveniences of the method than of seriously undertaking to fill in the vast outline which will be furnished by the classification.

Some

First of all, what is literature? In the most extended sense of the word, it may be taken for the whole written thought of man; and in the same acceptation a national literature is the whole written thought of a particular nation. But this definition is too wide for our present purpose; it would include such books as Fearne on Contingent Remainders, and such periodicals as the Lancet or the Shipping Gazette. If the student of literature were called upon to examine the stores of thought and knowledge which the different professions have collected and published, each for the use of its own members, his task would be

endless. We must abstract, therefore, all works addressed, owing to the speciality of their subject-matter, to particular classes of men; e.g., law books, medical books, works on moral theology, rubrical works, &c.-in short, all strictly professional literature. Again, the above definition would include all scientific works, which would be practically inconvenient, and would tend to obscure the really marked distinction that exists between literature and science. We must further abstract, therefore, all works in which the words are used as ciphers or signs for the purpose of communicating objective truth, not as organs of the writer's personality. All strictly scientific works are thus excluded. In popularised science, exemplified by such books as the Architecture of the Heavens, or the Vestiges of the Natural History of the Creation, the personal element comes into play; such books are, therefore, rightly classed as literature. What remains after these deductions is literature in the strict or narrower sense; that is, the assemblage of those works which are neither addressed to particular classes, nor use words merely as the sign of things, but which, treating of subjects that interest man as man, and using words as the vehicles and exponents of thoughts, appeal to the general human intellect and to the common human heart.

2. Literature, thus defined, may be divided into-
(1) Poetry.

(2) Prose writings.

For the present, we shall confine our attention to poetry. The subject is so vast as not to be easily manageable, and many of the different kinds slide into each other by such insensible gradations that any classification must be to a certain extent arbitrary; still the following division may, perhaps, be found useful. Poetry may be classed under eleven designations1. Epic, 2. Dramatic, 3. Heroic, 4. Narrative, 5. Didactic, 6. Satirical and Humorous, 7. Descriptive and Pastoral, 8. Lyrical (including ballads and sonnets), 9. Elegiac, 10. Epistles, 11. Miscellaneous Poems; the latter class including all those pieces-very numerous in modern times-which cannot be conveniently referred to any of the former heads, but which we shall endeavour further to subdivide upon some rational principle.

Epic Poetry-Paradise Lost'; Minor Epic Poems.

3. The epic poem has ever been regarded as in its nature the most noble of all poetic performances. Its essential properties were laid down by Aristotle in the 'Poetics' more than