Morley agree, except about books and pure English? Place Burke _On the
Sublime and Beautiful_ beside Ruskin's _Modern Painters_; compare the
_Stones of Venice_ with Eustace's _Classical Tour_; compare Carlyle's
_French Revolution_ with Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_; compare the _Book
of Snobs_ with Addison's _Spectator_; contrast _The Ring and the Book_
with Gray's _Elegy_ or Cowper's _Task_. What wholly different types,
ideas, aims! The age of Pope and Addison, of Johnson and Gibbon, clung
to symmetry, "the grand air," the "best models"; it cared much more for
books than for social reforms, and in the world of letters a classical
manner was valued far more than originality of ideas. And when we come
to a later age, what an irrepressible and stormy imagination do we
find! Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Landor,
revelled in romance and colour, in battle and phantasmagoria, in
tragedy, mystery, and legend. They boiled over with excitement, and
their visions were full of fight. The roar and fire of the great
revolutionary struggle filled men's brains with fierce and strange
dreams.

Our Victorian Age is as different from the Virgilian and Ciceronian
style of the age of Gray and Johnson, as it is from the resounding
torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social
earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our
literature; while, on the other hand, our practical and scientific
genius scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were
delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been
expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into
one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle's _French
Revolution_ is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is
history. Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on
various social abuses; and George Eliot's heart is ever with Darwin,