The chronicle of English literature now becomes so congested with distinguished names that we must notice only the higher peaks. Classics beyond any question are the two great poets of rebellion who opened the modern period in the stricter sense of the word, Byron and Shelley. Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), was, as his title indicates, the aristocratic poet, yet owing to his critical revolt and his sympathy with rebels like the Greeks, he was ostracised by his own class (a generally immoral class, by the way), and his work has a tinge of melancholy. _Childe Harold_, _The Prisoner of Chillon_, and _Manfred_, his best works, are classics. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was almost equally aristocratic in origin, yet he became the prophet of the democratic and humanitarian movement. His _Prometheus Unbound_ is not only a magnificent expression of modern thought, but it is one of the greatest poems in literature from the purely artistic standpoint. While Byron remained romantic, Shelley, like Goethe, felt the spell of the Greek and Roman classics. Next to these, or even above them or next to Milton, some critics put William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the leading poet of the more conservative school (with Cowper and Southey). I doubt if many English readers now read his masterpiece, _The Excursion_, while thousands treasure the beautiful work of John Keats (1795-1821), whose classic, _Endymion_, Wordsworth patronizingly called a “pretty piece of paganism.” Keats never saw Greece, and had never left London when he wrote his wonderful poems of Greek legend and life (_Hyperion_, _Lamia, etc._). Of the British poets of the early nineteenth century, it is impossible, even in a list of classics, to ignore the _Ancient Mariner_, _Kubla Khan_, etc., of S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834), the _Lalla Rookh_ and _Irish Melodies_ of T. Moore (1779-1852), and the _Songs of Experience_ of that strange mystic-skeptic William Blake (1757-1827). Classics of the first order are the novels (if not some of the poems) of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), of the romantic school, and Charles Dickens of early date, one of the greatest of all masters of fiction. The novels of Thackeray (1811-63), would be put by many as classics of a secondary rank, and at least the autobiographical _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ of DeQuincey (1785-1859), is a classic: a unique expression of drug-inspired dreams and reveries.