[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by
the spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far
deeper than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank
verse, which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of
Dickens's otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines,
a tendency (outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr.
Saintsbury admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden;
yet, on the other hand, it might be maintained, and would be
maintained by its French critics, that our English poetry has been
too apt to dispense with those prose qualities, which, though not the
indispensable qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of
all first-rate poetry--the qualities, namely, of orderly structure,
and such qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts. A
collection of specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of
exhibiting the achievement of prose excellences by it (in their
legitimate measure) is a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury.
It is the assertion, the development, the product of those very
different indispensable qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of
which the English is equal or superior to all other modern
literature--the native, sublime, and beautiful, but often wild and
irregular, imaginative power in English poetry from Chaucer to
Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals, in his Characteristics
of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted. That his book should
have found many readers we can well understand, in the light of the
excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone to the making of
it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold upon
contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
study of what belongs to the past. Beginning with an elaborate
notice of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he
never forgets that his subject is, after all, poetry. The followers