For each of the large number of works that Archdeacon Coxe produced, he has obtained a verdict of high excellence from judges fully competent to decide. He made several excursions to different countries with young members of the nobility as pupils, and in this way laid the foundation for his various works of travel. His chief publications are the following: Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Switzerland; Travels in Switzerland and in the Country of the Grisons; Travels in Russia, Poland, Sweden, and Denmark; Account of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and America; A Comparative View of the Russian Discoveries; Account of the Prisous and Hospitals in Russia, Sweden, and Denmark; Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole; Memoirs of John Duke of Marlborough; History of the House of Austria; Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon. Archdeacon Coxe pub lished also several large topographical works, besides some of a religious character. A set of his Historical Works and Travels was published in 24 vols., imperial 4to.

HENRY DAVID INGLIS, 1795-1835, a native of Edinburgh, travelled extensively in Europe, and embodied the results of his journeyings in a number of very entertaining and trustworthy sketches. The principal are: Journey through Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; Tour through Switzerland, etc.; The New Gil Blas; A Journey through Ireland.

CLAUDIUS JAMES RICH, 1787-1821, is one of that band of eminent scholars who by their researches have revealed to the world the longburied history of Babylon and Nineveh.

Rich was a native of France. He removed to England, when very young, and entered the East India service. By his linguistic talents he attracted the attention of Sir James Mackintosh, and subsequently became that gentleman's son-in-law. Rich was for five years the East India Company's Resident in Bagdad. His health failing, he resigned, and passed the remainder of his life in travels in Asia. He accumulated and also published important information concerning the regions about Babylon and Nineveh, which was turned to great account by Layard, Rawlinson, and other subsequent orientalists. Rich's works are A Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon, A Second Memoir of the same, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, and Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon. His collection of manuscripts has been placed in the British Museum.

MAJ. JAMES RENNELL, 1742-1830, a native of England, served under Clive in India, and was made Surveyor-General of Bengal. He travelled extensively in Asia and Africa, and gave to the world the results of his observations in several magnificent works. These, although superseded in part by the discoveries of recent travellers, still possess great historical value. The chief of them are Memoirs of a Map of Hindostan, where for the first time the Punjab (or five branches of the Indus) is accurately laid down, a Memoir of the Geography of Africa, The Geographical System of Herodotus, and Geographical Illustrations of the Anabasis.

THE present chapter embraces the time from 1830 to 1850. It includes the long period of tranquillity that ensued after the accession of Louis Philippe to the throne of France. It was a time of general peace and thrift throughout the world.

The writers of this period may be divided into six sections: 1. The Poets, beginning with Wordsworth; 2. Writers of Novels and Tales, beginning with Miss Mitford; 3. Writers on Literature, Politics, and Science, beginning with Sydney Smith; 4. Writers on Religion and Theology, beginning with Chalmers; 5. Writers on History, Biography, Antiquities, and Travel, beginning with Lingard; 6. Miscellaneous Writers, beginning with Arnold of Rugby.

I. THE POETS.

Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, had been contemporary with Coleridge and Southey and the other illustrious writers mentioned in the preceding chapter, and had risen to fame with them. But he continued steadily to rise after those stars had set, and during all the latter part of his course he reigned supreme in the poetical firmament, in solitary and unapproachable splendor. From 1840 to 1850

he was by general consent the first of living poets in England.

Early Career. The life of Wordsworth is, with a single exception, remarkably uneventful. His parents dying while he was young, he was sent to school at Penrith, and afterwards to Hawkshead, in Lancashire. Here he grew up a sharer in all the merry, boisterous sports of an English public school, but preserving a decided poetic individuality. He has bequeathed to us, in his posthumous work, The Prelude, a beautiful description of his school-boy life, and of the "gray-haired dame" with whom he lived. From school he went to Cambridge, where he took his degree of B. A. in 1791.

His Republicanism. - Before graduation, however, Wordsworth had visited France, then in the throes of the great Revolution, and had become intimately acquainted with some of the Girondists. The impression made upon the young poet by the scenes and characters of the Revolution was never to be effaced. He became for the time an ardent republican, so much so that he could not even sympathize with his country in her war upon France.

The Reaction. In time came the reaction, brought about by the crimes and anarchy of the Revolution itself, and Wordsworth turned back in righteous horror. But the original impression still remained. It had deepened the poet's sensibilities, and enkindled a strong, undying love of humanity; it had been the "storm-and-stress" period of an otherwise placid soul. The shock of disappointment had turned the poet into a philosopher, seeking to reconcile God's ways to the human understanding. Henceforth Wordsworth was to be the great preacher of honor gained only through trial, of self-discipline, of abiding trust in Divine wisdom. From this time on, the poet's life became one of tranquil meditation and composition.

Domestic Quiet. - From Raisley Calvert, an intimate friend and admirer of his genius, Wordsworth received a legacy, small in itself, but enough to satisfy his modest wants. His sister Dorothy-his other self-came to live with him. For a few years they lived in retirement at Racedown Lodge, Dorsetshire. Wordsworth had already published two poems, The Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches, which are not remarkable in themselves, but which already reveal the poet's characteristics.

Connection with Coleridge.-In 1797 Wordsworth removed to Alforden, to be near Coleridge, whose acquaintance he had made, and who was from the first an unhesitating believer in Wordsworth's genius. Out of this intercourse sprang the famous Lyrical Ballads published in 1798. The understanding was that Coleridge should "take up the supernatural and romantic," while Wordsworth undertook to “give the charm of novelty to the things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and by

directing to the loveliness and the wonders of the world around us." Accordingly, Coleridge produced The Ancient Mariner, and Wordsworth a number of short pieces, among them some of his very best, such as An Anecdote for Fathers, We are Seven, Lines written in Early Spring, Tintern Abbey. Others again, like the Idiot Boy, are unquestionably weak. Not only did the Lyrical Ballads meet with no favor; it was condemned in unmeasured terms by critics of high and low degree. Coleridge came off more lightly, but Wordsworth's share of the venture was denounced as the veriest "trash" and "twaddle."

But Wordsworth was a law unto himself. Apparently unruffled by severity and ridicule, he moved on in his self-appointed way. His circumstances grew easier by the payment of a long-standing debt owed to his father's estate. He married, in 1802, his cousin, Mary Hutchinson, by whom he had five children. After living for some years at Grasmere, and then at Allan Bank, he settled permanently, in 1813, at Rydal Mount, in Cumberland; and there calmly awaited the slow-coming verdict of the public.

The records of literature present scarcely another such instance of a poet's growing into supreme favor and repute in despite of determined opposition. At first Wordsworth had only the admiration of a few appreciative friends - Coleridge, De Quincey, Southey-and the almost adoration of his wife and sister. But slowly, year after year, prejudice was disarmed, ridicule was silenced, the circle of admirers grew larger, the popular understanding of the poet's genius was quickened. At his death, Wordsworth was not only the official poet-laureate, but the acknowledged monarch of English letters.

Wordsworth himself contributed nothing beyond his works towards bringing about this wonderful revolution in popular opinion. No poet probably ever went less out of his way to seek favor or notice, cared less for the thoughts and opinions of contemporaries, read less either for information or pleasure. What he gave to the world was elicited by close communion with nature in her myriad shapes and hues, or evolved little by little from the slow-working loom of his own imagination and meditation.

His Works. After publishing, in 1802, a second, and enlarged, edition of his Lyrical Ballads, he next gave to the world, in 1807, two volumes of Poems. In 1814, appeared The Excursion; in 1815, The White Doe of Rylstone; in 1819, Peter Bell; in 1820, The River Duddon; in 1820, Memorials of a Tour on the Continent; in 1835, Yarrow Revisited; in 1838, the book of Sonnets. The Prelude was published after his death, but it was begun as far back as 1789, and finished in 1805,

Wordsworth's position in English literature is now fully understood. He is preeminently the poet of the reflective imagination. He has not the passion of Byron or of Tennyson, or the myriad mind of Shakespeare. He has not the vigor of Milton, but he stands next to Milton in purity, sweetness, gravity of thought and style, and broad humanity. His demerit - the one that aroused at first such a storm of hostile criticism is that he often takes the fatal step from the sublime, or at least the imaginative, to the ridiculous.

A signal example of this defect is to be found in Peter Bell. The description of the potter is wonderfully artistic; in short, the character is a creation. But the concluding lines are simply puerile. That a hardened outlaw may be converted from the error of his ways no one denies. Only the artist must show us fully, step by step, how the change is wrought; and when he succeeds, we say that he has produced a masterpiece of psychological analysis. But to motive such a conversion through the instrumentality of a braying ass, and to dispose of the potter by saying that he

Forsook his crimes, renounced his folly,
And after ten months' melancholy

Became a good and honest man,

is simply an outrage upon common sense. Wordsworth seems at times to be wanting in the sense of the incongruous, and he is always wanting in true passion. While able to depict passionate characters, he fails to detect the subtle connection between motive and action, character and life.

With all his defects, however, Wordsworth is a great poet. He has ennobled the poetic style, and given to it philosophic depth: he has awakened a love for the lowly both in nature and in man; he has given a healthier tone to popular sentiment.

No two men ever differed more widely in personal character than Wordsworth and Dickens, the one serene, contemplative; the other bustling, eager, ostentatious. Yet the poet's exaltation of the lowly prepared the public for the folk-sketches of the great novelist.

Wordsworth's longer works are less read than his shorter pieces. The Excursion and The Prelude, abounding as they do in beautiful passages, are not so generally known and cherished as the little poems to Lucy, the Lines written in Early Spring, We are Seven, Resolution and Independence, the Sonnets, the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, and a hundred others which it would be superfluous to name.

The reader who wishes to form an idea of the slow and impeded growth of Wordsworth's popularity will do well to consult Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary. The diarist, who was from the first a devoted friend, never neglected an opportunity to do battle for the poet, and his record gives us a rare glimpse into the ways and workings of the literary world at that time.

CHRISTOPHER WORDSWORTH, D. D., 1774-1846, Master of Trinity, and brother of the poet, was educated at Cambridge, and held various appointments in the University and in the church, the most important being that of Master of Trinity, which he held from 1820 till 1841.

He published Six Letters on the Use of the Greek Article in the New Testament; Ecclesiastical Biography, 6 vols., Svo, a selection from various sources, with notes; Christian Institutes, 4 vols., 8vo, also a selection from the writings of eminent divines; Reasons for declining to subscribe to the Bible Society (several pamphlets); Who Wrote the Eikon Basilike? (several pamphlets.) Dr. Wordsworth maintained that the book was written by King Charles himself, and not by Bishop Gauden.

Bishop of St. An

CHARLES WORDSWORTH, D. C. L., 1806 drew's, Scotland, son of Christopher Wordsworth, and nephew of the poet, was born at Bocking, in Essex, and educated at Oxford, where he gained great distinction for classical scholarship.

Besides several Greek and Latin school-books, he has published, Christian Boyhood at a Public School, a Collection of Sermons and Lectures, delivered at Winchester College; History of the College of St. Mary Winton; A United Church of Scotland, England, and Ireland Advocated; Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible; Christian Instruction Preparatory to Confirmation and First Communion, etc. He became Bishop in 1852.

CHRISTOPHER WORDSWORTH, D. D., 1808

Bishop of Lincoln,

and also son of the preceding, was educated at Cambridge, where he won the highest honors for scholarship.