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

100 John Drinkwater'seventies and after was usually of an exquisite tenderness,it cannot be said to have materially enlarged theVictorian achievement as a whole.While, therefore, it may be conceded that several ofthese poets did a certain amount of work that was worthyof themselves after 1870, it can hardly be said of any oneof them that his death at that date would seriously haveimpaired his reputation. And we may go beyond that andassert that if from 1870 the major voices of Victorianpoetry had been silent, the achievement and significanceof that poetry would have remained very much whatit is.Before leaving this tabulation, it may be worth whileto consider briefly the case of those lesser poets who madesome striking contribution of their own to the poetic ageof which those larger figures were the leaders. That fantasticfellow and notable poet, Richard Hengist Home,had published his remarkable 'farthing epic' Orion in1843. Newman's Dream of Gerontius appeared in 1866,and William Cory's Ionica in 1858. William Barnes in1863 had completed the series of poems in Dorset dialectwhich he had begun to publish in the 'forties; and RobertStephen Hawker, the Cornish poet, had been born as farback as 1803. The voluble but highly talented AlexanderSmith had published his last book of verse in 1861, andtwo years later Jean Ingelow had scored a great and notunmerited popular success with her Poems, Fitzgerald'sOmar, though little noted at first, had appeared in 1859.F. W. H. Myers's Saint Paul (1867) was a characteristicexample of the current religious fervour expressing itselfin ardent but somewhat nebulous verse. These poets, ina large variety of mood, completed the Victorian harmony,and they too, as we see, had put forth their representativework by 1870. It may be added that GeorgeMeredith's Modern Love had been published in 1862, and