Page:The Victorian Age in Literature.djvu/31

 with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt"—"We thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died"—"Oh God, that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap"—none can fail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase, a compactness and point which was well trained in lines like " A cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms." In France he would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a punster.

There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamour affected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbish direction; making men feel that great lords with long curls and whiskers were naturally the wits that led the world. But it affected England also negatively and by reaction; for it associated