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in every way. Its beginning and its ending, its causes and its effects, still largely escape us. Four years saw the premature extinction of the three young leaders. Keats died in 1820; Shelley in '22; Byron in '24. Coleridge and Scott did not follow till '30 and '32, and Wordsworth dragged on up to 1850. But we must not forget that all Wordsworth's best work was done before his fortieth year—say, in the decade of 1798 to 1808—and the same is even more definitely true of Coleridge. If we except the purely literary criticism of the latter, little, very little that either of them did in their later years counts in any final estimate we may form of them. The fact is that their influence was all this time mostly for evil. The one in the realms of poetry, the other in those of thought, helped only too well to produce a hopeless intellectual lethargy. The young men of intelligence pointed to Coleridge and said: 'Here is a man who admittedly has produced some exquisite poetry, is the very first of literary critics, has a supreme culture' (as culture went in those days), 'has scaled all the heights and sounded all the depths of philosophic endeavour—and he stands there with a shining face and tells you he is ready to die for—the Church of England of 1830!' Reaction of this sort was indeed to have the day in every department of the national life for twenty years to