The Victorian literature presents a dozen styles, every man speaking
out what is in him, in the phrases he likes best. Our _Zeit-Geist_
flashes all across the heavens at once. Let us place a page from
_Sartor Resartus_ beside a page from Macaulay's _History of England_,
or either beside a page from Arnold's _Literature and Dogma_ or one
from the _Stones of Venice_. Here are four typical styles in prose,
each of which has been much admired and imitated; yet they differ as
widely as Shelley from Ovid, or Tennyson from Pope. Again, for verse,
contrast _Paracelsus_ with _The Princess_--poems written about the same
time by friends and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with
one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's _Songs and Sonnets_ with
Matthew Arnold's _Obermann_; Rudyard Kipling's _Ballads_ with _The
Light of Asia_. Have they any common standard of form, any type of
metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a "model," but
no one denies that the _French Revolution_ and _Hero-Worship_, at least
in certain passages, display a mastery over language as splendid as
anything in our prose literature. Exactly the same might be said also
of _Esmond_, and again of _Silas Marner_, and again of the _Seven Lamps
of Architecture_. Yet all of these differ as widely as one style can
differ from another. _Fifine at the Fair_, and _The Angel in the
House_, have each fervent admirers. No! there is no recognised "model"
either in verse or in prose.

In truth, we have now both in prose and in verse strongly-contrasted
types, each of which commands admiration and following. Both in prose
and verse we have one type which has carried subtle finish and a purism
studied almost to the point of "preciousness," alongside of another
type which crowds its effects without regard to tone and harmony, and
by its side a third type which trots along breathless in its
shirt-sleeves. Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ has that exquisite polish of