I

Gray was fastidious, frugal in production, very anxious not to be considered a working author; Thomson was mild and indolent; Collins, a withdrawn nature, gathered up his work to keep it from the public, and passed soon into the shadow of madness. They were all men of subdued vitality, little disposed to insist publicly on the value of what was novel in their somewhat tentative work. But, when people come to the Victorian Romantics, people find them led by a man who was born to command. Before insomnia and chloral broke him down, Rossetti had, as hardly anyone else in our literature has had, that casual, compelling authority, that easy, dominating way with men which marks a supreme leader. Extremely Victorian as they, and especially Tennyson, may be in other respects, as Romantics they are pre-Victorian, Tennyson being a poet to whom Keats is a recent discovery, Browning one who has lately discovered Shelley.