passion, a poetical technician familiar with every classic example and at the same time liberal in experiment; and just such a poet in his own measure was Matthew Arnold. Herrick, on the other hand, for all his parsonage, was the lyrist of fleeting beauty, of ghosts in the blossoming meadows, of exquisite and poignant moments, with no gospel but that with beauty loved comes beauty lost, a poet who used simple and established measures with perfect mastery and little questioning. And so again on his own scale such a poet was Swinburne. And yet in some essential respect Milton is of a kind with Herrick and Arnold of a kind with Swinburne far more clearly than is Milton with Arnold or Herrick with Swinburne. When the question of personal quality has been finally considered Milton and Herrick remain of the seventeenth century and Arnold and Swinburne of the nineteenth. The purpose of the present essay is to ascertain as far as possible what it is that distinguishes what we call the Victorian age in English poetry from the great ages that preceded it. In order to do this it will be necessary to consider the personal quality in several poets, but this will be done rather to discover the common spirit than to present a series of individual studies. Chapter II _Diction in English Poetry_ Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. The date is not an inconvenient one to set at the beginning of a study of the poetry of the age to which she gave her name. Shelley, Byron, and Keats were dead, Wordsworth’s most important work was finished, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett had made their first appearances in print, Matthew Arnold was at school, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina were children, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne had just been born. Walter Savage Landor, one of the strangest figures in our poetical literature, whose first poems had been published in 1795, was still at the prime of his genius, but the small body of his best work does not mark him very definitely as either Romantic or Victorian. There were a number of less famous but by no means inconsiderable poets whose work will call for notice as we proceed.