To summarize the whole field, English and American, we may say that the literature that we call standard began with Shakspere, three hundred years ago. The first work in that period was Spenser’s Faerie Queen, the second Shakspere’s plays. Chaucer, who wrote two hundred years earlier, we may look on as the forerunner, who prepared the way for the epoch which opened so brilliantly with Spenser and Shakspere. Passing over the names of Bacon and Milton, who belong to the seventeenth century, but stand apart from the literary movement or merely suggested what was to come long after, we find the Queen Anne essayists as the characteristic literary workers at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and on either side of them the poets of the Classic Age, of whom Pope was high priest, and the author of Robinson Crusoe, the despised teller of tales who was to be the forerunner of a literary movement greater than any we have yet seen. The Classic Age ended with Goldsmith, and the Romantic movement, first perceived in Burns, really took definite form as a movement in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Scott was the popularizer of the Romantic movement in both verse and prose. That movement reached its climax in 1830 in Hugo and Dumas. In that year Balzac inaugurated the realistic movement, whose forerunner was Jane Austen; but it is Dickens who, beginning in 1835, really made it as popular as Scott had made the Romantic movement by the Waverley novels. And while the Romantic movement was aristocratic, the Realistic movement, going back to the despised Robinson Crusoe, was highly democratic. In Tennyson we find a poet who made the romantic thought into works of art that the people could appreciate; and in Longfellow we see much the same thing done for the realistic poetry, though Walt Whitman, a very imperfect artist, is the high priest of the democratic idea in poetry. If we can only fix these dates and periods and dominant eras of thought in our minds, we shall have a framework in which we can fit all the varying phases of modern English literature. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 2: Goldsmith is a sort of link between the essayist and the novelist. He was almost equally eminent as novelist, essayist, and poet.] CHAPTER V. _THE BEST POETRY AND HOW TO READ IT._ The reading and enjoyment of poetry may be said to be a fine art. Certainly no one is likely to have a taste for poetry who does not cultivate it. Yet nothing is so characteristic of the person of culture, and nothing is so likely to produce true culture, as the reading and study of the best poetry.