cience
and doubt and faith. Very remote from them on the other hand is the
backward-gazing mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived
(Rossetti from Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle age which
neither Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially and brokenly
understood. The last school, that to which Swinburne and Meredith with
all their differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity with
scarcely so much as a regret,

"We have said to the dream that caress'd and the dread that smote us,
Good-night and good-bye."

and turned with a new hope and exultation to the worship of our
immemorial mother the earth. In both of them, the note of enthusiasm for
political liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth after 1815, and was
too early extinguished with Shelley, was revived by the Italian
Revolution in splendour and fire.

(3)

As one gets nearer one's own time, a certain change comes insensibly
over one's literary studies. Literature comes more and more to mean
imaginative literature or writing about imaginative literature. The mass
of writing comes to be taken not as literature, but as argument or
information; we consider it purely from the point of view of its subject
matter. A comparison will make this at once clear. When a man reads
Bacon, he commonly regards himself as engaged in the study of English
literature; when he reads Darwin he is occupied in the study of natural
science. A reader of Bacon's time would have looked on him as we look on
Darwin now.

The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English
literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his
book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in
extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the
incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the
memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to
last. The main body of imaginative prose literature--the novel--is
treated of in the next chapter and here no attempt will be made to deal
with any but the admittedly greatest names. Nothing can be said, for
instance, of that fluent journalist and biased historian Macaulay, nor
of the mellifluousness of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or
Maurice; nor of the writings, admirable in their literary qualities of
purity and terseness, of Darwin or Huxley; nor of the culture and
apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, i