So much for poetry. The prose essay lay dormant from the time of Goldsmith until Charles Lamb and De Quincey appeared. Lamb’s Essays of Elia began in the London Magazine in 1825; and that is a good date to remember as the beginning of the revival of the essay. At almost the same time we have De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, with brilliant, impassioned prose; and during the next twenty-five years came Macaulay, the writer of oratorical prose, the splendid rhetorician and rhetorical painter of word pictures, and Carlyle, the apostle of work, the philosopher, the lecturer through the printed page, and last of all, Matthew Arnold and Ruskin, both critics--Ruskin by far the more brilliant and varied. WAVERLEY--1814. In the novel the first great date to remember in the nineteenth century is 1814--the year of the publication of Waverley. Between the Vicar of Wakefield and Waverley no great work of fiction appeared, though Jane Austen was writing her artistic little stories. But when Waverley was published every one felt that a new era was at hand. The book at once became immensely popular. It did for the novel what the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion had done for poetry--it introduced the romantic era in fiction. HUGO, DUMAS, BALZAC--1830. Scott held the field almost entirely to himself until 1830. In that year Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and Balzac, all three acknowledging the genius and power of Scott, appeared in France. Hugo and Dumas were professed romanticists; but Balzac was a realist, and advocated ideas that were not generally accepted by the critics till many years later, though the common people bought his books freely. It was Dickens who really made the realistic novel popular. The date to remember is 1835, the year in which Sketches by Boz appeared and Pickwick was begun. Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s first masterpiece, was published in 1848, and in 1858 George Eliot’s Adam Bede. Since 1860 the forward movement in English literature seems to have stopped, and such writers as George Meredith and Thomas Hardy appear rather as belated members of the older group than representatives of any new type. With these we must include Tolstoi, Turgenev, and Ibsen. In Stevenson, Kipling, and Barrie we undoubtedly have the beginning of a new literary movement, the importance of which it is impossible yet to estimate. AMERICAN LITERATURE. We have purposely omitted mention of the American authors, since they do not seem to fit into the movement of literary ideas in England. They are more simply and obviously artists, giving to the people what they can that they think the people will like, and each in his own way. IRVING--1820.