There was plenty of fantasticalness in practical matters in the English poets, too; but there undoubtedly is more practicality in their morality and their view of life than in those of the poets of other nations. There are a few more grains of sound sense in their works. They are, one and all, distinguished by a strong _desire for justice_. Wordsworth inherits it from Milton; Campbell, Byron, and Shelley feel it intuitively, and are ready in the strength of the feeling to defy the world. It plays no part, this feeling, in the life of Byron's great German predecessor, Goethe, or of his richly gifted French successor, De Musset. Neither of these ever summoned monarchs and governments before the tribunal of justice. But what is peculiarly English is, that this justice of which the Englishmen dream is not, like that which Schiller, for instance, worships, a cherished, preconceived idea, but a child of utility. To prove this let us take a poet as ethereally idealistic as Shelley, and we shall see that even his morality is as distinctly utilitarian as Bentham's and John Stuart Mill's. Here is a striking passage taken from the second chapter of his _Speculations on Morals_:--"If a man persists to inquire _why_ he ought to promote the happiness of mankind, he demands a mathematical or metaphysical reason for a moral action. The absurdity of this scepticism is less apparent, but not less real than the exacting a moral reason for a mathematical or physical fact." In the maxim, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," and in the profound, practical desire for justice, which is its psychological basis, we have the real point of departure of the Radicalism of English poetry during the period of the great European reaction. [1] Should you feel any touch of poetical glow We've a Scheme to suggest--Mr. Scott, you must know, Having quitted the Borders, to seek new renown Is coming, by long Quarto stages, to Town. And beginning with Rokeby (the job's sure to pay) Means to _do_ all the Gentlemen's Seats on the way. Now the Scheme is (though none of our hackneys can beat him) To start a fresh Poet through Highgate to meet him; Who, by means of quick proofs--no revises--long coaches, May do a few Villas, before Scott approaches. Moore: _Intercepted Letters_, No. 7. III THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND