curious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of the
English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of
the Queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the early
part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe,
and Cobbett, were gone. There were still living in 1837, Wordsworth,
Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss
Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers:--living,
it is true, but they had all produced their important work at some
earlier date. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson,
Browning, had begun to write, but were not generally known. The
principal English authors who belong equally to the Georgian and to the
Victorian Age are Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and
they are not quite in the very first rank in either age. It is a
significant fact that the reign of the Queen has produced, with
trifling exceptions, the whole work of Tennyson, the Brownings,
Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope,
Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky,
Milman, Green, Maine, Matthew Arnold, Symonds, Rossetti, Swinburne,
Morris, John Morley, to say nothing of younger men who are still in
their prime and promise.

Widely as these differ among themselves, they have characters which
differentiate them from all men of the eighteenth century, and also
from the men of the era of Goethe and Scott. Can we imagine _Sartor
Resartus_ being published in the age of Johnson, or _In Memoriam_ in
that of Byron? How different a land is the Italy which Ruskin sees
from the Italy that Rogers knew! What a new world is that of the
Brontës and George Eliot beside that which was painted by Miss
Edgeworth and Miss Austen! In what things would Southey and John