From the death of Scott in 1832 until 1894 are sixty-two years; and if
we divide this period into equal parts at the year 1863 (it was the
year of Thackeray's death), we shall be struck with the fact that the
purely literary product of the first period of thirty-one years
(1832-1863) is superior to the purely literary product of the second
period of thirty-one years (1863-1894). The former period gives us all
that was best of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens,
Bulwer, the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, George Eliot, Kingsley,
Disraeli, Dr. Arnold, Thirlwall, Grote, Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Mill,
Froude, Layard, Kinglake, Ruskin. The second period gave us in the
main, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, G. H. Lewes, Maine, Leslie Stephen, John
Morley, Matthew Arnold, Lecky, Freeman, Stubbs, Bryce, Green, Gardiner,
Symonds, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne. Poetry, romance, the critical,
imaginative, and pictorial power, dominate the former period:
philosophy, science, politics, history are the real inspiration of the
latter period.

The era since the death of Scott is essentially a scientific age, a
sociologic age; and this is peculiarly visible in the second half of
this era of sixty-two years. About the middle of the period we see how
the scientific and sociologic interest begins to over-shadow, if not to
oust, the literary, poetic, and romantic interest. Darwin's _Origin of
Species_ was published in 1859; and its effect on thought became marked
within the next few years. In 1862, Herbert Spencer commenced to issue
his great encyclopaedic work, _Synthetic Philosophy_, still, we trust,
to be completed after more than thirty years of devoted toil. Darwin's
later books appeared about the same period, as did a large body of
scientific works in popular form by Huxley, Tyndall, Wallace, Lewes,
Lubbock, Tylor, and Clifford. It is only needful here to refer to such
scientific works as directly reacted on general literature. About the