and old, are his to tell! The fifty how the succeeding age would years that are now accomplished make out to itself an image of this are to us more impersonal. The without the help of literature. great Lady who was, so to speak, How profoundly puzzled it would the Bride of fifty years ago, hav- be with many things upon which ing begun her reign in such early at present we rather plume ourbloom of youth, is fortunately selves! No doubt the next century scarcely yet to be called old, will be so much superior to ourthough experienced in her august selves in all the inventions of pracprofession beyond all competitors, tical science, that our attempts and learned in the course of events at railways, telegraphs, &c., will and all the hidden strings and amuse it as rudimentary efforts. mechanism of State which sway It will perhaps wonder, while rethe world, as perhaps only a cognising the energy of life which sovereign, who is never out of found expression in this network office, can be. But with that of intercommunication, how grown great sphere we have no preten- men should be so infantile in their sion to intermeddle. For all so adaptation of half-developed forces, great as Queen Victoria is, and for and how it was that the human all so splendid as is her kingdom, intellect so much vaunted should did there happen to fail in her not have leaped at once to the exrealm one little implement called tended use of these forces, which, a pen, the glory and the greatness mounted on our shoulders and seewould be dim to future ages, and ing over our heads, has become our grandsons who come after us easy to them. They will conwould but guess faintly at our template, we hope with admiration, strength and power, and of our certainly with wonder, our magniffamiliar features, and our human icent Houses of Parliament and ways, and how we succeeded to Courts of Law, grand buildings in our fathers, as they to us, would which to lodge the makers of our know nothing. The character of laws and the administrators therethe great, the meaning of the of, so majestic, so splendid—yet humble, the vesture and costume without the faintest stirring of of humanity, and all its records of an individual impulse, art whimsithe heart, depend absolutely upon cally aux prises with science, and that little implement. In the past knocking its head in blind obeages the man who stands up like dience to the rules of the past a mountain, or shines like a light against the necessities of the presacross the plains of oblivion, is ent, the comforts, only half-underthe man who has had a historian stood as our impertinent descendworthy of him. The annalists, ants will think, imperiously dethe minstrels, the story-tellers, are manded by an advancing civilito the past what the sovereign is sation. All these things our to the present the fountain of successors would have to puzzle honour. Without these there is out with much confusion, with no memorial. Without their suc- much merry-making, probably, cessors in the modern world, there over an age which thought itself would, beyond the limit of a gen- so wise and was so fatuous. eration, and often not even in that, how strangely then would loom be little mental appreciation and through the distance the great no fame. figures, growing dim and shadowy among the mists, indistinct, as of

It would be curious to inquire

And

that woman clothed with the sun Prior an (insignificant) ambasin the Revelations stretching out sador, the general mass of literary maternal arms, the sceptre of workers had no distinction (except mercy, the orb of justice over half the pillory now and then) any a world-or of that dim-eyed old more than they have now. Grub magician who is the favourite of Street was a place of evil fame all folk-lore, whose spells go so even when Johnson was autocrat, far to wreck the nations. And and had the privilege of being all this for want of the literary rude to the finest people in Lonperson whose office is but lightly don. And though literature has thought of by the generations, now become highly respectable, it though it is he only who has made has not come any nearer to those them known and comprehensible honours and rewards which show to each other from the beginning the public gratitude for public serof time. vices. We do not for our part see why there might not be a bit of ribbon, a cross of honour, for the literary man if he would like it (and no doubt he would like it), in the distributions of distinctions which will abound during this year. As it is, all that Great Britain ever awards to her instructors in literature is a pension on the Civil List, which some people consider as rather a concession to poverty than a title of honour. Lord Tennyson's peerage, to be sure, is a great exception: but peerages are prodigious prizes and a little alarming. Should her Majesty be disposed to admit her faithful servants of the year into the ranks of the Rewarded, we should with humility suggest a much milder decoration. As we do not, however, delude ourselves with the hope that our advice will be asked in the matter, we may take comfort on the other hand in the fact that the absence of such acknowledgments has never at any period done our robust literature any harm.

At the end of this long vista of fifty years, it will not be inappropriate to place before the reader a brief survey of those writers who will hereafter be known in universal history as of the age of Victoria. It is pleasant, and gives occasion to a graceful nomenclature, that so many of the greatest periods in our literary history should coincide with the reigns of female sovereigns. It is not, we fear, because these royal ladies have specially patronised the arts. The age of Anne was the one in which men of letters were most in the way of promotion; but that was not from the patronage of the Queen, or perhaps from any other reason but the natural fitness of things the statesmen of the period specially requiring aid, and the literary men of the period being, as it happened, capable of giving it in a marked and remarkable way. In our time no ode of Lord Tennyson or any other poet would be at all likely to affect the country as Addison's "Campaign" did; though Addison, in comparison with Lord Tennyson, is not to be named as a poet, and his work was turgid and artificial, held aloft only by the power of two or three fine lines. Even in that time, however, except that Addison was made an (indif ferent) Secretary or State, and

And we may add with all modesty that we do not think we need fear for the Victorian age in literature in comparison with most of its predecessors. Within her Majesty's reign is contained the beginning and the end of much great literary work. We do not propose

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to enter here into any discussion of the crowd of living authors whose place has not yet been ascertained by that calmer judgment which only comes when work is ended. Yet it would be impossible to review the literature of Queen Victoria's reign without referring to the two poets, still happily spared to us, who are its glory and its pride. We will avow, to begin with, a bold opinion. With every hope and prayer that Lord Tennyson and Mr Browning may live and enjoy life till they have reached the utmost possible bounds of living, we should support by all means in our power a Bill in Parliament which should ordain to those two poets silence for the remainder of their honoured days. Is it with this intention, we wonder, that so many poets, according to the wise regulations of Providence, have died young? that no bondage of repetition, no horrible compulsion of the expected, should wring from their lips songs no longer voluntary, utterances not demanded by nature, the result of a conventional necessity or of the mistaken desire to keep a place which requires from them no such effort? We are at liberty, at all events, to consider Tennyson and Browning as men who have accomplished their day's work, and to whom it is both permitted and desirable that they should repose upon their laurels. When the Queen came to the throne fifty years ago, Alfred for his fame. He has perhaps Tennyson was the youngest of the singers who had from the beginning of the century abounded in the land. To come after one of the greatest waves of poetical inspiration which England has ever known, while the music of Shelley's exquisite verse still lingered in the nation's ear, and Byron all aglow with fire and eloquence had left the flush of an early sunset

still on all the hills-while Wordsworth still stood like a mountainpeak unimpaired by years, though silent like that same mountain, and apt to quench lesser lights in his great shadow-was a terrible ordeal for a young poet; besides that, in the natural sequences of time, a pause has generally followed at the close of a great poetical epoch, giving time for the general public, not able for too much stimulation in this way, to draw breath. Notwithstanding al that was thus against him, there are many of the poems in the first collection of verses published by young Tennyson more than fifty years ago which remain among those which are now universally acknowledged as his finest utterances. Nothing in the Idylls of the King' is more beautiful than the poem which now occupies its fit place among them, and in which the first suggestion of that noble series is contained, the "Morte d'Arthur." Its new and strange music, conveying an accent of its own-a cadence unaccustomed, fine, pensive, penetrating — startled at first the general ear, and added to the force of that natural resistance with which we all make a stand against every new pretender to the rank of poet. But that opposition was factitious and short-lived and Tennyson's first publication forms an admirable and unmistakable foundation

never done anything finer in the profounder intellectual regions of poetry than the "Two Voices," nothing more vivid and splendid in its power of vision than the "Dream of Fair Women." His after-work has developed during the progress of these years into as noble and as pure a collection of poetry, we make bold to say, as belongs to any English name.