was to arrive at full maturity only in the work of the great writers of the
following quarter century, who were to create the finest body of literature
which England had produced since the Elizabethan period. All the greatest
of these writers were poets, wholly or in part, and they fall roughly into
two groups: first, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert
Southey, and Walter Scott; and second, about twenty years younger, Lord
Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. This period of Romantic
Triumph, or of the lives of its authors, coincides in time, and not by mere
accident, with the period of the success of the French Revolution, the
prolonged struggle of England and all Europe against Napoleon (above, page
233), and the subsequent years when in Continental Europe despotic
government reasserted itself and sternly suppressed liberal hopes and
uprisings, while in England liberalism and democracy steadily and doggedly
gathered force until by the Reform Bill of 1832 political power was largely
transferred from the former small governing oligarchy to the middle class.
How all these events influenced literature we shall see as we proceed. The
beginning of the Romantic triumph is found, by general consent, in the
publication in 1798 of the little volume of 'Lyrical Ballads' which
contained the first significant poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Even during this its greatest period, however, Romanticism had for a time a
hard battle to fight, and a chief literary fact of the period was the
founding and continued success of the first two important English literary
and political quarterlies, 'The Edinburgh Review' and 'The Quarterly
Review,' which in general stood in literature for the conservative
eighteenth century tradition and violently attacked all, or almost all, the
Romantic poets. These quarterlies are sufficiently important to receive a
few words in passing. In the later eighteenth century there had been some
periodicals devoted to literary criticism, but they were mere
unauthoritative booksellers' organs, and it was left for the new reviews to