en Mr. Beddoes, Mr.
Procter, and somebody else clubbed to publish Shelley's posthumous poems
at their own expense or at least guarantee, and justly objected to
paying for more than 250 copies, because more were not likely to be
sold. In these six and twenty years such an addition had been made to
English poetry as five times the space had not previously seen, as
perhaps was not far from equalling the glorious gains of a not very
different though somewhat longer space of time between the appearance of
the _Shepherd's Calendar_ and the death of Shakespeare.

But the sequel of this abnormally high tide is hardly less interesting
than itself. We generally expect at such moments in literature either a
decided falling off, or else a period of decent imitation, of "school
work." It would be absurd to say that there is no contrast, no falling
off, and no imitation in the group of poets noticed at the end of the
second chapter in this volume. But they are not utterly decadent, and
they are by no means purely or merely imitative. On the contrary, their
note is quite different from that of mere school work, and in a sort of
eccentric and spasmodic fashion they attain to singular excellence.
Hood, Praed, Macaulay, Taylor, Darley, Beddoes, Hartley Coleridge,
Horne, are not to Wordsworth or Coleridge, to Byron or to Shelley, what
the later so-called Elizabethan playwrights are to Jonson and Fletcher,
the later poets of the same time to Spenser and Donne. But they almost
all, perhaps all, seem forced to turn into some bye-way or backwater of
poetry, to be unable or unwilling to keep the crown of the causeway, the
flood of the tide. Hood and Praed--the former after actually attempting
great poetry, and coming nearer to it than some great poets come in
their first attempts--wander into the special borderland of humorous and
grotesque verse, achieving in different parts of it something not unlike
absolute and unsurpassed success. Beddoes, and to some extent Darley,
adopt fantastic varieties, grim in the former's hands, playful chiefly
in the latter's, but alike remote from everyday interests and broad
appeals; while the incomparable lyrics of Beddoes are of no special
time or school, their very Elizabethanism being somewhat delusive.
Taylor and Horne attempt the serious moral play with hardly any stage
purposes or possibilities, and Horne in _Orion_ tries an eccentric kind
of ethical or satirical epic. Macaulay--the most prominent of all,