beginning to give place to another. Within a few years--in most cases
within a few months--of Mr Arnold's installation, _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_ heralded fresh
forms of poetry which have not been superseded yet; _The Origin of
Species_ and _Essays and Reviews_ announced changed attitudes
of thought; the death of Macaulay removed the last writer who, modern
as he was in some ways, and popular, united popularity with a
distinctly eighteenth-century tone and tradition; the death of Leigh
Hunt removed the last save Landor (always and in all things an
outsider) of the great Romantic generation of the first third of the
century; _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ started a new kind of
novel.

The division which Mr Arnold, both by office and taste, was called to
lead in this newly levied army, was not far from being the most
important of all; and it was certainly that of all which required the
most thorough reformation of staff, _morale_,[3] and tactics. The
English literary criticism of 1830-1860, speaking in round numbers, is
curiously and to this day rather unintelligibly bad. There is, no
doubt, no set of matters in which it is less safe to generalise than
in matters literary, and this is by no means the only instance in
which the seemingly natural anticipation that a period of great
criticism will follow a period of great creation is falsified. But it
most certainly is falsified here. The criticism of the great Romantic
period of 1798-1830 was done for it by itself, and in some cases by
its greatest practitioners, not by its immediate successors. The
philosophic as well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous
if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the
massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed
intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this