very inartistic fashion. It is of less consequence that in the details of
fact Scott often commits errors, not only, like all historical novelists,
deliberately manipulating the order and details of the actual events to
suit his purposes, but also making frequent sheer mistakes. In 'Ivanhoe,'
for example, the picture of life in the twelfth century is altogether
incorrect and misleading. In all these matters scores of more
self-conscious later writers are superior to Scott, but mere correctness
counts for far less than genius.

When all is said, Scott remains the greatest historical novelist, and one
of the greatest creative forces, in world literature.

THE LAST GROUP OF ROMANTIC POETS. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott
had mostly ceased to produce poetry by 1815. The group of younger men, the
last out-and-out Romanticists, who succeeded them, writing chiefly from
about 1810 to 1825, in some respects contrast strongly with them. Byron and
Shelley were far more radically revolutionary; and Keats, in his poetry,
was devoted wholly to the pursuit and worship of beauty with no concern
either for a moral philosophy of life or for vigorous external adventure.
It is a striking fact also that these later men were all very short-lived;
they died at ages ranging only from twenty-six to thirty-six.

Lord Byron, 1788-1824. Byron (George Gordon Byron) expresses mainly the
spirit of individual revolt, revolt against all existing institutions and
standards. This was largely a matter of his own personal temperament, but
the influence of the time also had a share in it, the time when the
apparent failure of the French Revolution had thrown the pronounced
liberals back upon their own resources in bitter dissatisfaction with the
existing state of society. Byron was born in 1788. His father, the violent
and worthless descendant of a line of violent and worthless nobles, was