admirers would like us to think: "the chief obstacle to the sustained reading of Chatterton", observes Mr. Seccombe, "is due to the monotony of his images and his fondness for grandiose terms and epithets-what Scott call his "tendency to mount the fatal and easily recognized car of the son of Fingal'". Yet, as the Encylopaedia Britannica critic says, "the best of his numerous productions, both in prose and verse, require no allowance to be made for the immature years of their author, when comparing him with the ablest of his contemporaries". His superior work has been critiscised by Mr. Seccombe thus:-"In his use of proper names and his power of metric modulation Chat- = terton may well claim to have been a pioneer who suggested much that Coleridge only brought to a full fruition. Nor can it be denied that there is a genuine lyric fire, a poetic energy, and above all an intensity, remote from his contemporaries [from whom we must, however, except Smart] and suggestive... of Shelley and Keats. A typical exemple of the wonderful appeal of Chatterton's rhythm is in the fine song adressed to William the Conqueror by the minstrel, invoking his mercy:

'With pacing step the lion moves along,
William his iron-woven bow he bends;
With might like to the rolling thunder strong,
The lion in a roar his sprite forthsends:
Go slay the lion in his blood-stained den,
But be thy arrow dry from blood of other men.
Swift from the thicket starts the stag away,
The couraciers as swift do after fly.

He leapeth high, he stands, he keeps at bay,
But meets the arrow, and eftsoons must die.
Forslayen at thy feet let wild beasts die,

Let thy shafts drink their blood, yet do not brethren slay".

The outstanding merits of Chatterton, then, are his glowing imagination, his naturalness, his directness, his spontaneous fervour, his verbal richness and his fluent versification. These qualities were recognised by later poets: "Chatterton's genius and his tragic death are commemorated by Shelley in Adonais', by Wordsworth in 'Resolution and Independance", by Coleridge in A Monody on the Death of Chatterton', by D. G. Rossetti ins Five English Poets', and John Keats inscribed 'Endymion' "to the memory of Thomas Chatterton" (the anonymous critic in the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Those names represent the sphere of Chatterton's influence on English poetry; very little trace of his work will be found in verse written during the years 1777-1798, so that his extrinsic significance for early Romanticism falls far short of that exercised by Thomson, Gray, Percy and Ossian. Nevertheless he stands preeminent among those Mediaevalists who can be regarded as original poets.

With him, Mediaevalism received its most artistic expression in the pre-1798 period: his later influence on English verse surpasses that of Macpherson and goes close to equalling that of the "Reliques”. Moreover, the "Mediaeval" poems of Coleridge and Keats follow much in the line indicated by the author of the "Rowley" productions.

CHAPTER 7

"REMNANTS".

I.

Pre-1798 Poetry of Mainly-Nineteenth-Century Writers.

In a late preface, Joanna Baillie wrote concerning her first volume, "Fugitive Verses", issued in 1790: "...published by me anonymously..., but not noticed by the public, or circulated in any considerable degree... A review, of those days, had spoken of it encouragingly, and the chief commendation bestowed was, that it contained true unsophisticated representations of Nature".

The poems descriptive of Nature (especially "A Winter's Day", "A. Summer's Day") reveal the influence of Thomson, as e. g. in the passage wherein we "mark the dawning of a Winter day" :

The morning vapour rests upon the heights,
Lurid and red, while growing gradual shades
Of pale and sickly light spread o'er the sky.
Then slowly from behind the southern hills
Enlarged and ruddy comes the rising sun,
Shooting athwart the hoary waste his beams
That gild the brow of every ridgy bank,
And deepen every valley with a shade,
The crusted window of each scatter'd cot,
The icicles that fringe the thatched roof,
The new-swept slide upon the frozen pool,
All keenly glance, new kindled with his rays.

The "Night Scenes of Other Times", however, shows the poetess considerably influenced by "Gothic" themes-probably by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron". In Part I, the maiden, Margaret, goes to meet her lover; he delays, but at last his ghost appears and announ

ces that he has been murdered; asked if she wishes to join him, she says "Yes" and dies. (The atmosphère is wild and impressive, and Nature plays a graphic part.) In Part II, the murdered man visits his murderer, whose life has been, and afterwards continues to be, most wretched. (The ghost-element becomes thoroughly "Gothic".) In the last Part, Margaret's father mourns her loss and, imagining he hears her playing on the harp, prepares for death. (Here, we find the element of pathos, a pathos effective and kept withing artistic bounds.)

In the "Address to the Muses" Joanna Baillie indicates that, while she still retained something of classic dogma, she held essentially the creed of the full-blooded Romantics :

Ye are the spirits who preside

In earth and air and ocean wide,
In rushing flood and crackling fire,
In horror dread and tumult dire,

In stilly calm and stormy wind,

And rule the answering changes in the human mind!

In the four "Farewell" poems, we see that she was thus early fitting herself to write the " Plays on the Passions"; but more interesting to us is the graphic picture, included in "Thunder", of a storm on land :

From nearer clouds bright burst more vivid gleams,

As instantly in closing darkness lost;

Pale sheeted flashes cross the wide expanse,
While over boggy moor, or swampy plain,
A streaming cataract of flame appears,
To meet a nether fire from earth cast up,
Commingling terribly; appalling gloom.
Succeeds, and lo! the rifted centre pours
A general blaze, and from the war of clouds,
Red, writhing, falls the embodied bolt of heaven.
Then swells the rolling peal, full, deep'ning, grand,
And in its strength lifts the tremendous roar,
With mingled discord, rattling, hissing, growling:
Crashing like rocky fragments downward hurl'd,
Like the upbreaking of a ruin'd world,

In awful majesty the explosion bursts

Wide and astounding o'er the trembling land.

Like Joanna Baillie in "Fugitive Verses", Wordsworth early indicated his moral attitude towards Nature. He pu

blished in 1793 his "Descriptive Sketches", which bear the mark of Thomson's "Seasons". This poem generally appears in its revised, much improved version, and in this form it contains some good lines; but in its original version it was, like "The Evening Walk" (published the same year), poor stuff. In 1795-6 Wordsworth composed, though he did not issue till much later, his tragedy "The Borderers", which displayed considerable power, but rather neglected theatrical fitness and was pitched on too high an emotional plane.

Different at many points from Wordsworth, Samuel Rogers had published as early as 1786 his "Ode to Superstition, and other Poems" and in 1792 the "Pleasures of Memory". Of the pieces in the 1786 volume, Edward Bell acutely wrote: "They contain distinct evidence of [Rogers'] admiration for Gray's poems. The "Ode to Superstition", for instance, in respect to diction, rhythm, and the use of personification may be compared with The Bard'; and... "The Sailor' is in the same metre as the celebrated 'Elegy'...; but at the same time there is a total absence of anything like plagiarism either of ideas or expressions". The "Ode to Superstition" ought, moreover, to be compared with Collins' Ode on superstitions in the Highlands. "The Pleasures of Memory", written in heroic couplets, has little outline, the poet rambling about rather haphazardly in the demesnes of Memory; the whole poem is quiet and restrained, carefully composed in a mechanical way, but tame; we wish that it contained more such phrases as "the fairy haunts of longlost hours" !

Rogers was an amiable man; Landor was not, though we would fail to surmise irritability from his verse. His first notable production appeared in 1798; but three years previously he had published "The Poems of Walter Savage Landor", a small volume, most of which was repolished and included in later works. The poetry of this early volume was tentative and of mediocre worth, possibly because its author at this period tended to imitate Milton overmuch, as Dr William Bradley clearly proves in his study, "The Early Poems of Walter Savage Landor"; in any case, this 1795 publication gave little anticipation of "Gebir" and all the later work.

Likewise, Southey's "Joan of Arc", which, composed in 1793 and published three years later, expressed, in immature verse and with little technique, a great enthusiasm for the