graphy, and the amiable, benevolent, gentle nature of the man thus twisted and tortured out of humanity, and how he took refuge in woman-worship and learned a wistful hope in immortality out of the intolerable pang of bereavement. His great work on 'Logic' is another of the books which make a distinct epoch and new beginning; and we perhaps can scarcely estimate how much the general public has derived its present conceptions of individual right and social responsibility from the famous Essay on Liberty,' which has stimulated so many minds, and grown into the common code so completely that thousands recognise its tenets as born with their birth, without any consciousness from whence they came. His other works on Political Economy, the Utilitarian system, and other cognate subjects, are all important and interesting. These were hereditary tenets and occupations, for he was brought up under the shadow of Jeremy Bentham, and was in a great degree the expositor and prophet of his father James Mill, another stern Scotch dogmatist and theorist, into whose immovable mould the gentler, more sensitive, and impressionable nature of the son was compressed with. very curious effects. The strange little book on the Subjection of Woman' belongs to a very different phase of his character, to the much-repressed emotional side, which only got vent under the feminine influence which to him seemed all but divine in the latter part of his life. His books, excepting the highly popular Essay on Liberty,' are chiefly for the student; and have had an immense influence upon the teaching of Mental Science; but the image of the man as revealed in his own story is of the greatest interest to all.

6

The philosophers who have followed Mill in this field—his contemporaries, yet successors are too many and too important to be dealt with here. Mr Herbert Spencer, who is a host in himself, is fortunately still with us; and so are, a band almost uncountable, the school of English writers, many of them most accomplished and eloquent, to whom the philosophy of Comte is more attractive that that of the Gospel. There have never perhaps been so many attractive and charming unbelievers in the field; yet we do not entertain the apprehensions expressed by many for the permanence of the older faith.

It is difficult to dissociate the two men above considered, Carlyle and Mill, in their very different developments, from their productions; but when we turn to Charles Darwin, who perhaps is the most influential of all the scientific writers of our epoch, we associate no personality with his work, and feel no temptation to inquire what manner of man he was. This is one drawback which attaches to wealth, comfort, and a quiet life, that there is little attraction for human sympathy in them. But the importance of Darwin in the literary and scientific history of his time is not to be mistaken. His works have been read according to a very usual formula not so applicable now as in former days-like novels. It would perhaps be a truer form of applause to say of a successful novel that it has been read like Darwin. His works have been discussed in every drawing-room as well as studied in every scientific retirement; but this, we are disposed to believe, as has been the case with many other of the scientific works of the period, rather because of the lucidity and interest of the style and the manner of putting

the interest it has aroused among readers of all classes, is one of the most striking facts in our halfcentury. We are disposed to believe, as we have already said, that in a great many cases its effect is one of a purely literary kind, and largely dependent upon the remarkable excellence as writers of the chief expounders of the new theories, whole writings are rarely dull, often full of epigram and wit, and graces of the imaginationgifts and qualities which are new to the exponents of abstract science. Never before perhaps has philosophy, concerned with such fundamental matters, found for itself so attractive a form, or spoken with a voice so harmonious and adapted to charm and enthral. An age full of mental curiosity, and delighted, as all the generations are, with everything that is new, would be stoical indeed if it could shut its ears to the voice of the charmer when it charms so wisely. It is less easy here, as in other regions of literature, to deal with the work of living authors than with those which are rounded into completeness by death; but the names which we have already mentioned of Huxley and Tyndall may stand as the greatest representatives of those contemporary writers who give unquestionable brilliancy of style and a fine force of rhetoric, often of eloquence, to the support of the new philosophy of Nature.

It is with a little relief that we escape from the consideration of matters which we find too high for us, to another more familiar branch of literature which has had the most wonderful growth and development in Queen Victoria's reign. In whatever way we may be surpassed by our predecessors, no age that has gone before us is likely to challenge the importance

of these fifty years in the development of Fiction. This age has seen at least three novelists of the highest rank develop and conclude their work. Dickens had indeed begun the publication of Pickwick,' which has not yielded in popularity to any of his books, when her Majesty ascended the throne, and Thackeray was already making essays which it is impossible to divine why, since his great rival's fortune had at once been made by the Sketches by Boz'— did not at once open to him the doors of literary triumph. these great writers belong, however, by every law to Queen Victoria's reign. They were so exactly contemporary in age, in production, and ultimately in fame, that it is almost impossible not to place them more or less in competition with each other; and there was in their day a very marked division between the partisans of Dickens and those of Thackeray. The former had most simple-minded readers on his side. He had the world of the bourgeoisie-a word which we cannot attempt to translate-entirely for him. The strongly formed impression that Thackeray was a cynic, that he attributed ignoble motives even to good actions, and laughed, even though the laugh might be kind, at humble virtue, and found no goodness without alloy, sounds strange now when we remember that it is the creator of Colonel Newcome, of Mrs Pendennis, and of Esmond, of whom these things were said. But it was the general belief, and one to which perhaps

Vanity Fair,' with all its wonderful wealth of human character, gave some countenance: and this as much as anything perhaps made him somewhat doubted and feared by that gentle public which wept over little Nell, and found pathos in the story of Smike-which was

never the public of the critic, yet was that to which Dickens owed much of his first appearance. Curiously enough, as has been remarked elsewhere, it is this sentimental side of him his sugary domesticities, his Tiny Tims, his gushing showmen and acrobats which seems to have impressed our neighbours in France, and originated among them what might almost be called a Dickens school. But in his own world of humorous delineation — that to which the groups of Wellers, Gamps, the imimitable figures of Micawber and Dick Swiveller, of Mark Tapley and Peggotty, and a hundred more belong-Dickens stands above all competition. These are not illustrations of ordinary humanity, persons whom we might encounter any day, according to the formula by which we applaud other studies of life and manners. Rarely have any of us the good fortune to meet with Mr Micawber, and Sam Weller is as pure fiction as Figaro; but the delightful exaggeration and tenderly absurd ideality make a being more real than any portrait. The Cockney clerk is not a personage on the face of him who attracts the imaginative spectator; but over Dick in his dismal office, gravely respectful of his Marchioness, who has not laughed and cried? Mr Micawber, in his gentility, his certainty of something turning up, his shabbiness, his light-heartedness, and all the illusions which are so real to him, is worth a thousand respectable literary impersonations of better men. There are very few creations of poetry or fiction whom we should be less willing to give up. He is always a delight, with his wife, who never will be separated from Mr Micawber, whatever her family may do or say, and all their shifts, and their fine convictions of ultimate

prosperity, and even his gaiters, and his collars, and his eyeglass, and his jaunty air. Mrs Gamp is almost, if possible, a more perfect creation, though nothing could make her dear to us like Mr Micawber. The extraordinary power with which Dickens threw himself into the confused brain of a woman of this class, following out the queer sequence of thoughts, the droll little thread of fanciful invention in the person of that familiar spirit Mrs Harris, her dæmon, and the author of some of her best sayings, with all the peculiar lights that fall upon society and general human affairs from her professional lantern, is greater than if the subject had been more congenial. Pickwick,' Nicholas Nickleby,' Martin Chuzzlewit,' David Copperfield,' are works which, in their way, are not to be surpassed, and which contain, with a great deal of mannerism, much stilted writing, and many melodramatic incidents of a very inferior character, such whimsical creations, and ever hu- . morous, ever entertaining embodiments of character, as any age might be proud to have produced. The latter works, we think, stand on a lower level, but still contain enough to make the fortune of a dozen writers. And though we do not allow Dickens's pathetic scenes, though he evidently liked them much himself, any particular excellence, yet the narrative of the childhood of David Copperfield, and his boyish miseries, and the journey to his aunt's house, is almost as good in its reflection of childish pain and suffering as could be; and the humour of his boyish courtship, and a great part of the episode of Dora, is delightful. It is, however, upon such creations as Micawber that the supremacy of Dickens's genius rests.

Thackeray's humour is far more pervasive, delicate, and human. His mind was a much more highly cultivated mind, and free from those associations and deprivations which make Dickens always at his least best (to use no stronger words) in the society of ladies and gentlemen. Thackeray was perfectly at home there, and required nothing extraordinary, no eccentricity nor absurdity of circumstance, to open up to him all that was humorous and strange in human life. He needed no more than a handful of the most ordinary figures, going about the most usual occupations, to find comedy and tragedy and all those intricacies of motive and feeling which make human creatures pitiful and laughable, and yet sometimes sublime and great. He preferred, perhaps, to show them in the former light, to turn them outside in, and reveal what they were thinking at the moment of their first appearance, and to open out with the grin of a delighted discoverer those pretences in which they had wrapped themselves about. But when he encountered among the creations of his genius (for it was Thackeray, we think, who was the first to say that the men and women in a book had a will of their own, and developed themselves, instead of allowing themselves to be manipulated, as the world believes, by the hand of their maker) one who was of nobler mettle, what a perfect tenderhearted gentleman, what an ideal man it was who rose under this cynic's touch! Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome are men to ennoble a generation. He who professed to write a novel without a hero because the being was impracticable, produced these two at least, to prove how completely and with what supreme naturalness and truth the thing was to be done. He has not been so happy

in his women, perhaps because his imagination did not require so much for the feminine ideal; but his work throughout is so perfect, his characters so living, with such distinctness of atmosphere about them, crowded though every scene is, that this point of weakness tells the less. It is only the ideal women who are weak. Becky the inimitable, whom amid all her wrongdoings we cannot succeed in disliking, the wonderful old Lady Kew, Beatrix Esmond in her splendid youth and in her frightful age, are amazing in their force and vivid power.

These two great humorists, fictionists, creators, to whom it is scarcely just to give the commoner title of novelists, since their art was something distinct from the craft of the raconteur, were perhaps the most perfect artists of any who have arisen in this age.

The great female writer of the Victorian period is equally remarkable, perhaps even more so, as being the only woman who has yet attained the highest place in literature. The position of George Eliot is unique. Her books have been the object of a kind of worship, as she herself was while she lived; but that of its very nature is evanescent, and they have now to stand before a more difficult tribunal-a tribunal which has not yet given forth its last word on the subject. We, however, who are of her generation, have little doubt that the verdict will remain unchanged, at least in respect to her earlier works. The very first of these, produced without any previous indication of power in the maturity of her years, affected the world at once to enthusiasm, and she never struck a stronger or a deeper note than in the simple story of Amos, or rather of Milly Barton, the poor curate's mild and lovely wife, the