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

Critics and Criticism in the 'Seventies 193or prose but who brought to the task of critical interpretationconceptions, not to say prepossessions, from otherspheres of study.The preoccupation of the decade with other than purelyliterary problems is illustrated by the first importantpublication falling within its limits which included workof fine critical quality. In 1871 Richard Holt Huttonissued in two volumes his Essays Theological and Literary.He was at this time forty-five years of age. Trained forthe Unitarian Ministry he had come under the influenceof F. W. Robertson and F. D. Maurice and had become aChurchman of their school. As co-editor with WalterBagehot of The National Review (1855-64) and withMeredith Townshend of The Spectator from 1861 onwardshe had full opportunity for the exercise of his journalisticand literary talents, but his interest in religious andphilosophical questions was always predominant. Hencein his critical papers, even when poets and poetry werehis theme, he was less concerned with aesthetic questionsthan with the writers' criticism of life.With the theological volume we are not here concerned,though anyone who wishes to appreciate fully Hutton'sstandpoint as a literary critic will profit by a knowledgeof such essays as 'Science and Theism', 'Popular Pantheism'and 'What is Revelation?'. The literary volumein its first form included a somewhat miscellaneousselection of subjects ranging from 'Goethe and his influence' and ' The Poetry of the Old Testament', by wayof some Romantic and Victorian poets, to George Eliotand Nathaniel Hawthorne. A number of these, thoughrevised, had appeared in periodicals and do not strictlybelong to our decade. But those on Browning and Cloughdeal with publications of 1869, and the enlarged editionof the essays in 1877 included two additions on the poetryof Matthew Arnold and Tennyson. This quartette ofB 13