cially mark his character as such; as, his "Essay on Translating Homer," his "Essays in Criticism," "The Study of Celtic Literature," "Culture and Anarchy," and "Discourses in America," in each of which he often recurs to his favorite literary theories. He never allows the reader to lose sight of the fact that the critic must be a thoroughly informed man, and that criticism, rightly viewed, is a high and serious function. It is only in the sphere of theological discussion that he belies any of these essential principles and evinces both mental and literary narrowness. It is not in "Literature and Dogma" and "God and the Bible," but in the study of poetry and prose, that this British censor finds his proper province.

To cite the names of his contemporaries and successors would be, in a sense, to pass in review the entire content of later Victorian letters, emphasizing such names as Ruskin, Landor, Carlyle, and Pater. Mention has been made of the relation of the earlier modern school to the rise of the Edinburgh and similar Reviews as organs of critical opinions. It is significant that in the later school the same kind of criticism appears, and we note the beginning of the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, and the Nineteenth Century, while it is

not aside from truth to say that English literary criticism has marked steady progress since Coleridge and Arnold, down to the contemporary work of Morley and Dowden and Bagehot. The optimistic spirit with which Shelley closes his "Defense of Poetry" may well characterize the literary student as he sits down to a candid examination of our critical development as the twentieth century opens up before him.

V

BRITISH POET LAUREATES

It is, of course, natural to look outside of England and to a period prior to the establishment of English literature as national for the origin and earliest bestowals of this historic literary honor of the laureateship. As has been said, "The custom of crowning poets is as ancient as poetry itself," to which it may be added that the custom of honoring authors in prose or verse, or those distinguished in general letters or in some particular branch of scholarship and liberal learning, is as old as literature and education. Hence, it is appropriate to find the earlier and later institution of such honors connected with the universities of Europe, "France being the only country in Mediaeval Europe in which the title was not known." As far back as the thirteenth century, Bachelors and Doctors on receiving their degrees and titles from the universities were crowned with the laurel, this custom still obtaining in Europe. As Morley tells us, "Tradition of the Middle Ages

held that Vergil, Horace, and Statius had been so crowned, and that it was a custom dropped out of use by decay of the Roman Empire, but which had been revived in the thirteenth century." It was at this era, in connection with the revival of learning and literature in Southern Europe, and at the time of Petrarch, more particularly, that the more modern type of this honor was instituted in the person of Petrarch himself, "who first gave life to the office of Poet Laureate." It is highly significant that the state and the university were both represented in this bestowal, the Roman Senate summoning Petrarch to Rome, in September, 1340, and the Chancellor of the University of Paris summoning him to Paris, at the same time, to be publicly crowned. It is thus a matter of record that this great Italian author, after submitting himself to a rigid public trial before King Robert of Naples, was solemnly crowned Poeta Laureatus by the king, April 8, 1341. The honor was a tribute to him both as a poet and an historian, and he became thereby a citizen of Rome. At no period since that date has the honor been more worthily bestowed nor has it ever been attended with more fitting and impressive ceremony. It is probably to this imposing and merited cor

onation that Chaucer refers in his Prologue to the

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Clerk's Tale," as he writes:

"Fraunces Petrarck, the laureat poete,

Hightè [was called] this clerk, whos rethorique swete Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie."

The wide scope of the office and honor is indicated as we read the language of the gift" granting him, in the poetic as well as in the historic art, and generally in whatever relates to the said arts, the free and entire power of reading, disputing and interpreting all ancient books, to make new ones, and compose poems, which, God assisting, shall endure from age to age." Such conditions as these are a credit alike to the Roman Senate and King Robert of Naples, to the poet himself and the age in which he lived. We are now prepared to note the rise and history of this office as obtaining in England proper. Here, as on the Continent, the civil and the literary are alike represented. The honor is, in one sense, a political one, as conferred by the king or queen, and a literary and an educational one, as connected with the universities. As it seems, the laurel was first given by the English universities to students excelling in rhetoric and poetics. As one states it, "The king's laureate was simply a graduated