blem of this curiously mingled nature, so open to malign interpretations, yet so attractive to all the enthusiasms, puzzled yet delighted the world as it revealed itself in the often grand and sometimes chaotic literary utterance, a style which was in reality the sublimated but most genuine style of a Scotch peasant of genius, full of reflections from the Hebrew eloquence of the Old Testament, and from that prodigious gigantic ancient German, which were perhaps the two things nearest to his own heroic old Saxon-Scotch. Perhaps it needs an acquaintance with that ponderous and solemn speech of the old shepherds and ploughmen, slow and grandiose in unintended solemnity, "such as grave livers do in Scotland use," to comprehend the naturalness and simplicity of Carlyle's often contorted and sometimes convulsive utterance. And it certainly requires a knowledge no longer at all general of the primitive moorland peasant of the beginning of the century to understand the fashion of a man, all astray among fine English literary folks in Queen Victoria's reign. These curious contradictions and incomprehensibilities will make him always a most interesting figure in literary history, even under the shade which has been thrown over his name, and nothing can impair the splendour of his contributions to literature. Such works as Sartor Resartus' stand detached like great poems from all surroundings, and are indeed more rare than the greatest of poems. It would be difficult to apportion to Carlyle his place in any literature. He stands apart like a great lonely peak in a world of mountains, not loftier perhaps than the great forms about him veiled in summer verdure or eternal snow-but more conspicuous in solitary grandeur,

with crags and precipices and heaven-pointing needles, sometimes resplendent in the glory of setting suns, sometimes clad in the greys and purples of distance, to which neither verdure nor snows will cling.

A very different apparition is that of the philosopher whose contact with Carlyle has afforded a curious anecdote to literary history, and a still more curious contrast between two men as unlike as any two that could be got together at random in any thoroughfare, though both so influential in their different ways and so remarkable. Everybody knows the tragic incident of the destruction of Carlyle's precious manuscript, the first volume of the French Revolution,' upon which all his hopes of fame and even of daily bread hung, by horrible misadventure or carelessness, in the hands of John Stuart Mill; and that memorable scene when the pair of penniless people in London, hearing suddenly of this tremendous misfortune, could not by more than a look communicate to each other their despair, so necessary was it to console the misery of the destroyer, who, "deadly pale," came to tell them of what had happened. What a curious picture! The culprit, rich and at his ease, to whom a hundred or even a thousand pounds was nothing, could that make up for this thing which was irremediable, pale and trembling, before that proud, passionate, eloquent, fiery pair, either of whom could have annihilated with desperate, vehement words any offender. What lava - torrents of indignation and despair ought to have covered him as he stood, turning him to a cinder! As a matter of fact, they were the consolers of his despair, not he of theirs. And everybody knows also the strange training of Mill as disclosed in his Autobio

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.

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. 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. Both 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

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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 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 humorous, 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.