R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

98 John Drinkwatershould readily remember, survived in its vigour until theexquisite but more tenuous manifestations of the 'ninetiesand the Yellow Book. In the 'seventies the poets of VigoStreet were at school, and the Victorian supremacy hadnot yet begun to dwindle. Or so we should be likely toassert without reference to the book. But we should beinexact in doing so. Let us take our bearings.In 1870, the Romantic Age, dimly surviving in theaged Wordsworth, who died in 1850, had passed intomemory. Keats and Byron and Shelley were as far awayfrom the poetic realities of the time as are Morris andSwinburne from those of our own. But a great deal morehad happened than that. We find, surely with some surprise,that by 1870 the great Victorians had themselvescome to the full assertion of their powers, and werealready in the enjoyment of reputations that their laterwork would not enlarge. Forty years had passed sincethe publication of Tennyson's first book, and in 1850 InMemoriam, following the Poems of 1842 and The Princess,established a fame that by 1870 was acknowledged by apublic such as in numbers and authority has seldom beenclaimed by any poet. Nothing that Tennyson publishedafter that date, while much of it is of high excellence,widened his appeal or enlarged the merit of his work.Similarly, Robert Browning, with a less popular following,had brought nearly forty years of poetic productionto a splendid crowning achievement in 1869 with thepublication of The Ring and the Book. HenceforwardBalaustion and Hohenstiel-Schwangau and Fifine andFerishtah and the rest of them were to carry that unrestingpsychological ardour into a rich old age, but theywere hardly to prove Browning a greater poet than hewas known to be by 1870. At that date, too, MatthewArnold's Strayed Reveller, his Empedocles, and his threevolumes of Poems had for some years been before a public