ot, in the ultimate
reckoning, do anything in particular: but he was a figure; rather as
Oscar Wilde was later a figure. You could not have the Victorian Age
without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his
dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere
polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round
interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic
swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real
touchstone of the time. It is noticeable about him that he is always
turning up everywhere and that he brings other people out, generally in
a hostile spirit. His Byronic and almost Oriental ostentation was used
by the young Thackeray as something on which to sharpen his new razor of
Victorian common sense. His pose as a dilettante satirist inflamed the
execrable temper of Tennyson, and led to those lively comparisons to a
bandbox and a lion in curlpapers. He interposed the glove of warning and
the tear of sensibility between us and the proper ending of _Great
Expectations_. Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming
comedies about _The Caxtons_ and _Kenelm Chillingly_; none of his other
works have a high literary importance now, with the possible exception
of _A Strange Story_; but his _Coming Race_ is historically interesting
as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a
weapon of the Socialists. Lastly, there was an element indefinable about
Lytton, which often is in adventurers; which amounts to a suspicion that
there was something in him after all. It rang out of him when he said to
the hesitating Crimean Parliament: "Destroy your Government and save
your army."

With the next phase of Victorian fiction we enter a new world; the
later, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some ways
weaker world in which we live to-day. The subtle and sad change that
was passing like twilight across the English brain at this time is very
well expressed in the fact that men have come to mention the great name
of Meredith in the same breath as Mr. Thomas Hardy. Both writers,
doubtless, disagreed with the orthodox religion of the ordinary English
village. Most of us have disagreed with that religion until we made the
simple discovery that it does not exist. But in any age where ideas
could be even feebly disentangled from each other, it would have been
evident at once that Meredith a