Thus this epoch ushered in a new literature, amid new hopes for human progress, at a time when science seemed to be miraculously transforming the very conditions of existence, as well as indefinitely extending the bounds of human knowledge.

Any attempt to gain a comprehensive view of the literary period thus begun, presents almost insurmount able difficulties, even if it were possible within our present limits. The period has been one of immense literary productiveness; and our attention is distracted and our judgment confused by the vast number of writers, so near to us that it is impossible for us to see them in any proper perspective. We will select a few representative writers from the many whose names are familiar to us, and try to learn something of them and of their relation to their time.

Thomas Bab

The practical and prosperous temper of an England that fifty years ago seemed entering on a period of solid comfort and prosperity, is admirably repington Macaulay. resented by the brilliant essayist and historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859). From his first publication, an essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review, 1825, Macaulay's career was one of unbroken and well deserved success. He was successful as statesman and as author. He was courted and admired in the most distinguished circles, and his extensive reading, phenomenal memory, and brilliant conversation helped to make him a social and literary leader. He thoroughly enjoyed the world and the age in which he found himself, finding it full of substantial comforts and a sensible and rational progress. To his shrewd and practical intelligence the spiritual alternations, the mysterious raptures and despairs of finer and more ethereal natures, must have been wholly unintelligible. He felt, to use his own oft-quoted phrase, that "an acre in Middlesex is better

than a principality in Utopia." But if Macaulay, like the vast majority of men, was too prone to regard the best things of life as capable of exact statement in the tables of statistics, his work has a positive and enduring value. His essays dealt with many subjects in history and literature. The impetuous rush and eloquence of their style, their picturesqueness, fascination, and sparkling antithesis, won for them innumerable readers. Thousands found in them information which they would never have gained if presented in a longer and less attractive form, and Macaulay thus became to the widening reading public the great popular educator of his time. Addison had declared that he would bring philosophy out of the closet and make it dwell in clubs and coffeehouses; Macaulay announced, before publishing his History of England, that he would write a history which should take the place of the last new novel on every lady's table. And both men kept their word.

Thomas Carlyle.

The attitude towards life and his own age of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a widely different one. Life to him was a matter of grim and tragic earnest, and so far from yielding himself to any easy enjoyment of it, Carlyle rather seems to cry out to a faithless and blinded generation as some stern prophet of the desert. "Woe unto them," he declares in his essay on Scott, "woe unto them that are at ease in Zion." Thomas Carlyle was the son of a shrewd, hard working stone mason of strong convictions and great uprightness of character. The Carlyle family is described by one of the neighbors as "pithy, bitter-speakin' bodies, and awfu' fechters," while according to Carlyle himself they were remarkable for "their brotherly affection and coherence, for their hard sayings and hard strikings."* Thomas Carlyle was the true descendant of this sterling

* Carlyle's "Reminiscenses," p. 35.

and granite stock. He was a conscientious and tireless worker; in spite of a vein of harshness, in his strength, his earnestness, his sincerity, his profound tenderness, rare and beautiful nature. His early and enthusiastic study of German literature and philosophy exercised a profound influence upon his views, and even affected his style of writing, which is powerful, but eccentric in the extreme. His early works testify to the direction of his studies, his earliest being a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1824), and his second a Life of Schiller (1825). In 1833 his Sartor Resartus began to appear in Fraser's Magazine. This characteristic book, with its grim humor, abruptness, and grotesqueness, broken by overpowering torrents of eloquence, found at first but few readers among a bewildered or indifferent public. It contains, however, the germ of Carlyle's philosophy, and many of his after works, such as The French Revolution, the lectures on Heroes and Hero Worship, or The Life and Letters of Cromwell, are but elaborate illustrations of the theory of history laid down in this earlier book.

Carlyle represents in all its intensity, and with a touch of natural exaggeration, the reactionary protest against the shallowness and shams of the eighteenth century. His test of a man is, “Is he sincere?" Unlike Macaulay, he had no enthusiasm for the advance of science or of democracy; his view of life was profoundly ideal and religious. He distrusted science, declaring, "We have forgot the divineness in these laboratories of ours"; he distrusted material prosperity, writing in Sartor Resartus, "Not what I have but what I do is my kingdom." One great thing that he did was to make men see something divine and wonderful in things which before had seemed commonplace.

As a writer, Carlyle stands alone. His style has been

imitated, but never with more than very partial success. In spite, or perhaps because, of his many peculiarities, many of his prose passages rank with the greatest in the literature, and his French Revolution must remain one of the most vivid and impassioned of prose poems.

John Ruskin.

The era has produced another great master of prose in the art critic and reformer, John Ruskin (1819-). Ruskin, when just out of Oxford, rose to sudden distinction by his Modern Painters (vol. i. 1843). This work, begun in defense of Turner, a great but then little appreciated landscape painter, far outgrew the limits of its original design. Whatever may be its value as a treatise on art, its elaborate and poetic beauty of style give it a high place in literature. By numerous other works Ruskin has proved himself one of the great modern masters of English prose. In the truth and beauty of his descriptions of nature, he has expressed the same exquisite perception of the life of the world about us which colors our poetry, and which is one of the distinctions of our modern literature. Ruskin, like Carlyle, has denounced the money-making and material tendencies of latter-day England. This industrial age, with its factories, railroads, and telegraphs, has called forth some of his fiercest arraignments, and he has dwelt much on the ugliness which it has brought into life. Such writers as Macaulay, Carlyle, and Ruskin make us realize the greatness of our modern literature in the sphere of prose. These men, with Cardinal Newman and two writers of an earlier generation, the essayist, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), and Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), entitle us to say, that while in poetry modern England has fallen behind the greatest achievements of her past, in the art of prose writing she has certainly equaled, and probably surpassed, the productions of any former period.

The Growth of the Novel.

In no direction has this development of prose been more remarkable than in that of the novel, the distinctive literary form of the modern world. Since the publication of Richardson's Pamela in 1740, the range of the novel has immensely broadened, and its importance as a recognized factor in our intellectual and social life has surprisingly increased. William Godwin (1756-1836) employed the novel as a vehicle of opinion. His Caleb Williams (1794) was one of the earliest of these novels with a purpose, of which there are so many examples in later fiction. Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849), the author of Castle Rackrent, The Absentee, Helen, and other novels, has been called the creator of the novel of national manners. By her pictures of Irish life she did somewhat the same service for that country that Scott was soon to perform for his beloved Scotland; she gave it a place in literature. Shortly before Scott began to create the historical novel, Jane Austen (1775-1817) began her finished and exquisite pictures of the daily domestic life of middle-class England, in Sense and Sensibility (1811). In these novels the ordinary aspects of life are depicted with the minuteness and fidelity of the miniature painter, yet their charming and unfailing art saves the ordinary from becoming tiresome or commonplace. Miss Austen has found worthy successors, but no superiors in her chosen field. The Cranford of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1866) is a masterly study of the little world of English provincial life, as are the Chronicles of Carlingford of Margaret Oliphant (1820-). Mrs. Gaskell is further remembered for work of a more tragic and powerful order than the quaint and pathetic humor of Cranford. Her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), laid bare before the reading world the obscure life and struggles of the poor who toiled in the great manufactories of Manchester. Perhaps the