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The soil was fertile, but no free laborer could live on it and compete with slave labor, on which all agriculture, all industry, all prosperity, in the South depended. The two sections of the country at the end of the period 1840-1860 were thus more unlike than ever.
Let us only indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following sins of English criticism between 1840-1860, the slow and reluctant acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal to give Browning, even after Bells and Pomegranates, a fair hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of erratic genius like Lavengro; the ignoring of work of such combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as The Defence of Guenevere and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam.
When Rokeby came out, contemporaneously with the Giaour, the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge ran races to catch the first copies, and laid bets as to which of the rivals would win. During the anti-Byronic fever of 1840-1860 they were perpetually contrasted as the representatives of the manly and the morbid schools. A later sentimentalism has affected to despise the work of both.
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