tumble its note-books into a volume all in a heap. It has no
"standard," no "model," no "best writer"--and yet it has a curious
faculty for reviving every known form and imitating any style. It is
intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is afraid to
throw the least colour of imagination around its history. It has
consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts--but it has now no
single poet of the first rank. It has infinite romantic resources, and
an army of skilful novelists--and yet it has no single living writer
worthy to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century.
This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name
of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our
language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our
descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian
literature as a whole. In the meantime, it may be worth while for the
men and women of to-day, who are full of all the excellent work around
us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years
ago. As one who can remember much that was given to the world in a
former generation, I shall endeavour in these little sketches to mark
some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early Victorian
Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of the
imaginative kind.
It is now some time since the country of Shakespeare and of Milton has
been without its poet laureate, and to the non-poetical world the
absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the
question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry,
why not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate
in prose romance, whom should we choose?
The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in
poetry: that we have vast quantities of thoughtful work produced, an
army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a
very high average of merit--and yet so little of the very first rank.
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