Thus Crabbe, the precursor of whoever, Englishman, American, Frenchman, or Slav, has written of the sombre tragedies of the poor, was born in 1754. Blake, whose perfectly un-Augustan rhapsodies and mystic lyrics were made fashionable about 1870, was born in 1757, out of due time, for his best side is Elizabethan in quality. Burns, born in 1759, is as much at home in the nineteenth century as Tolstoï, while Godwin could not be more “advanced,” or Mary Wollstonecraft more of “a New Woman,” if the former belonged to our “Forward Liberals” and the latter perorated at congresses of her sex. The first twenty-five years of Miss Austen belong to the eighteenth century; yet, except for a certain “old-fashioned” primness of style, she is the first, and, beyond all doubt, the greatest of all nineteenth-century “realistic” novelists of domestic life. For, though a “realist,” she is a humorist, and the combination is almost unexampled. Your common realist is a gloomy thing, with no more sense of the comic than M. Zola. Of the new poets, revolutionary in metre and matter, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and Southey were born in 1770–1774; they were mature before the nineteenth century dawned. His northern home, among the hills and lakes, fitted Wordsworth to be the austere and mystical poet of nature and of man in relation to nature. Born a poet, his genius was determined by his environment, while his ardent sympathy with the Revolution at once turned his attention to the unregarded poor, and inspired his not wholly successful attempt to shake off the trammels of Augustan “poetic diction,” the survival of the Latinism of Boileau and Pope. Later, of course, Wordsworth became the Tory, the patriot, the Churchman, and the Stamp Collector. But his poetical creed he never consciously changed, though he often lapsed from it unconsciously. If Scott was to be a poet at all he was fated to be influenced by the New World, not in its emancipated ideas, but in its wistful return to the Old World of reivers, spearmen, claymores, goblin, ghost, and fairy. The Border ballads lulled his cradle and were the joy of his childhood and manhood. All tradition murmured to him her charms of Border and Highland legend; every ruined abbey and castle had its tale for him; to Ettrick and Yarrow he needed not to say, like Lady John Scott, “Have you no message for me?” He never had a touch of the Augustan horror of mountain and torrent, never a touch of the Augustan contempt of “Barbarism.” Walpole’s _Castle of Otranto_ and Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels of terror went to the molding of his genius, as the novels of Miss Edgeworth (born 1767) suggested fiction about the lives and manners of his own people. In his return to the past he came, like Lamb, on the Elizabethan drama, and, unlike Lamb, on the unpublished documents of the Tudor age, the age of desperate resistance to England. But Scott would never have been exactly the poet that he was if he had not heard “Christabel” recited.