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The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎43r] (90/244)

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The record is made up of 1 volume (120 folios). It was created in Apr 1892. It was written in English. The original is part of the British Library: India Office The department of the British Government to which the Government of India reported between 1858 and 1947. The successor to the Court of Directors. Records and Private Papers Documents collected in a private capacity. .

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1892 LORDLYT TON'S RANK
tliat the grave lias closed over all contentious matters in his public
career, I anticipate a wiser and less partial judgment of his poetic
work. Each year as it goes by will withdraw him politically further
from our gaze and bring him as a poet nearer to us. Then we may
expect to see him take the high rank he deserves.
My estimate of what this rank will be is that, as a lyric poet, the
position given him will be next, among his contemporaries after
Tennyson, Swinburne, and Eossetti. He has neither Tennyson's full
perfection of lyric style nor Swinburne's wealth of musical rhetoric.
Eossetti I personally should place before any of them as master of the
purest English perhaps in our literature, but it is doubtful whether,
his masterpieces being nearly all in sonnet form, the consensus of
criticism will give him so high a place. Apart from these three I
see no contemporary who is likely to be placed as Lytton's equal.
Not Browning, with his tortuous method of thought and disjointed
diction; not Mathew Arnold, with his intellectual melodies always a
little flat in the rendering; hardly even William Morris, great singer
though he be, in the purely lyrical field. Lytton's lyrical style is
brilliant, direct, personal, and essentially modem. It treats of nine
teenth-century things in a nineteenth-century way, and this, I ven
ture to think, will be held in the twentieth century a permanent and
pre-eminent merit. Archaisms and reproductions of other ages
and modes of thought please the generation for which they are
written more than those which come after, and what we ask most
of the poetry of the past is that it should be true to the genius
of its own time and its own people. This quality cannot fail to
be valued in Lord Lytton's verse when the Victorian age is finally
reviewed.
Dramatically, and in our English dearth of dramatic power. Lord
Lytton, too, ranks high. Compared with contemporary French poets,
with Hugo, or Musset, or Coppee, I should not, of course, claim for In'm
a place in the first line ; Browning alone of our metrical play-writers
could pretend to this ; but Orval is a noble dramatic poem, as, in its
classic way, is Glytemnestra, while the dramatic element in
and Characters and in The Wanderer is more strongly marked than
in any modern English writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. . Browning and perhaps Henry Taylor
only excepted. As a novellist in verse, Lytton stands absolutely alone.
Lucile is the most brilliant piece of light narrative since
and Glenaveril the most splendid failure. Nor in his philosophy, the
philosophy of the man of the world, is Lytton to be approached by the
writers of our day. His Fables in in two volumes, are a mine
of latter-day wisdom, as will be, when it is published, his
Poppy, a political satire which he considered his masterpiece, and
left behind him finished, the concentrated result of his experience of
mankind.
E R 2

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Content

The file contains a copy of the journal The Nineteenth Century. A pencil note on the cover of the journal, in the hand of Lady Pelly, indicates that Lewis Pelly was being read an article from this journal on Easter Sunday five days before he died.

The article he and his wife were reading has been marked on the cover 'Prospects of Marriage for Women, by Miss Clara E Collet' which appears on folios 24-31.

A second annotation, written by Sir William Henry Rhodes Green, gives the date of Lewis Pelly's death and is provided as context to Lady Pelly's comments.

Extent and format
1 volume (120 folios)
Physical characteristics

The journal contains one set of foliation and three sets of original pagination.

The principal foliation for this volume appears in the top right hand corner of the recto The front of a sheet of paper or leaf, often abbreviated to 'r'. of each folio, using a pencil number enclosed with a circle.

The three sets of original printed pagination that appear are as follows:

The advertisments at the front of the journal are paginated as i-xxxii; the articles themselves are paginated as 525-712; and the Sampson Low, Marston & Company publications list at the rear of the journal has been paginated as 1-8.

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English in Latin script
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The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎43r] (90/244), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, Mss Eur F126/28, in Qatar Digital Library <https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100023318122.0x00005b> [accessed 28 March 2024]

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