Macaulay's Life of Samuel Johnson, with a Selection from his Essay on Johnson

Wordsworth and Coleridge published the first of the Lyrical Ballads, which included The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Like Burns, yet in a way entirely his own, Wordsworth was the poet of Natur

r books than for social reforms, more for manner than for matter, came Scott, Byr

his lifetime came practically all of the best work of Miss Austen, Scott, Cooper, Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the B

n, and Carlyle. In Memoriam and Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese w

mind" and "the endless wildernesses of dull, flat, prosaic twaddle." Although he read an infinite variety of contemporary literature he said he would not attempt to dissect works of imagination. In 1838, when Napier wished him to review Lockhart's Life of Scott for the Edinburgh Review, he replied that he enjoyed many of Scott's performances as keenly as anybody, but that many could criticise them far better. He added: "Surely it would be desirable that some person who knew Sir Walter, who had at least seen him and spoken with him, should be charged with this article. Many people are living who had a most

et at the True, the Real, Macaulay, who was reasonably satisfied with the past and the present, and hopeful of the future, was sifting from his vast treasury of information about the past what he believed to be s