I wish to indicate the nature of these effects, and to inquire how far Browning was anticipated by Wordsworth. Wordsworth was perhaps the chief representative of the Romantic School--the title given to the group of poets who dominated English Literature at the commencement of the nineteenth century. The spirit of the age to which their work gave expression was one of question and revolt, the spirit which found its most remarkable political expression in the French Revolution. Question of established beliefs, revolt against established rules and conventions, was the keynote of literary as well as of social and political life. The attitude of the Romantic School is indicated by its name. Romance is that element in literature which appeals to the sense of the marvellous in man, which awakens his capacity for wonder. In the eighteenth century, under the régime of Pope and the Classical School, wonder had been dead. It was an age of acceptance and submission; acceptance of certain definite conventions, submission to certain fixed rules. Correctness was more desired than imagination, and polish than originality. It was against the barren conventions and narrow outlook of the Classical School that Wordsworth and his fellows revolted. The spirit of wonder toward Nature and toward Man sprang into new life. My meaning will be illustrated by the following lines: A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more. They might have been written of Pope. What was the primrose to Wordsworth? To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. I do not wish, however, to talk to-night of Wordsworth's attitude towards Nature. It is with just two aspects of the Romantic Revolt that I have to deal, one relating to subject matter, the other to form. The poet's eye in Shakespeare's time Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. With Pope, poetry was confined mainly to man as he exists in society, and was largely concerned with satirizing social defects; Wordsworth dealt with men as human beings, as mysterious manifestations of the infinite, creatures trailing clouds of glory, coming we know not whence, going we know not whither. To him, as to Burns, rank and station were nothing. Any human being, however humble, was worthy to be the poet's theme. He claimed for the misfortunes of Lucy Gray or the miserable mother, the Idiot Boy or Peter Bell, the same consideration as Sophocles for the sorrows of OEdipus and the lofty line of Thebes. Gray, an eighteenth century poet in whom romantic tendencies are found, shows the same spirit in the _Elegy_ when he writes of the humble dead who lie beneath the soil: