In one of Tennyson's earlier letters is the following passage, with reference to something written at the time in _Philip van Artevelde_:
'He does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart, and a new pulse, and so we are kept going. Blessed be those who grease the wheels of the old world.'
This is the large-hearted, far-seeing judgment of one who could survey the whole line and evolutionary succession of English verse, being himself destined to close the long list of nineteenth-century poets, which was opened by Byron and his contemporaries. The time has surely now come when we may leave discussing Byron as a social outlaw, and cease groping after more evidence of his misdeeds. The office of true criticism is to show that he made so powerful an impression on our literature as to win for himself permanent rank in its annals, and that his work, with all its shortcomings, does yet mark and illustrate an important stage in the connected development of our English poetry.
[24] _The Works of Lord Byron: a New, Revised, and Enlarged Edition._--'Letters and Journals.' Edited by Rowland E. Prothero, M. A. 'Poetry.' Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, M. A. London, John Murray, 1898.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1900.
[26] _The Deformed Transformed_ (part I. scene i.).
Mr. Leslie Stephen combines the faculty of acute and searching criticism with a style that is singularly clear, incisive, and exact. His wide knowledge of English literature, and the close study which he has given to the history of English opinions and controversies, speculative, political, and economical, have enabled him to survey an extensive field, to trace the lines of origin and development, to disentangle complicated ideas, and to summarise conclusions in a masterly manner. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since he published his work on _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, and his present book on the Utilitarians continues, and indeed brings down to our own time, a similar investigation of the course of certain views, principles, and doctrines which had taken their shape in England and France during the period preceding the French Revolution, and which profoundly influenced political discussion throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. But on this occasion Mr. Stephen's inquiry does not range over the whole area thus laid open, though his subject compels him to make several excursions into the general region of philosophical and political disputation. His main purpose is to relate the history of a creed propagated by a group of remarkable men, who took hold of some prominent theories and doctrines generated by the rationalism of the preceding century, and endeavoured to make them the basis and framework of a system for improving the condition of the English people. Their immediate object was to abolish intolerable abuses of power by the governing classes, and radically to reform on scientific principles the haphazard blundering administration which was assumed to be the source of all evil. Mr. Stephen describes and explains, in short, the rise, progress, and decay of Utilitarianism.