liament of 1832 was itself the reaction after the furious
upheaval caused by the Revolution of 1789, and it heralded the social
and legislative revolution of the last sixty years. It was the era
when the steam-power and railway system was founded, and the vast
industrial development which went with it. The last sixty years have
witnessed a profound material revolution in English life; and the
reaction on our literature has been deep and wide.

The most obvious and superficial change in literature is the extreme
diversity of its form. There is no standard now, no conventional type,
no good "model." It is an age of "Go-as-you-please," and of _tous les
genres sont bons, surtout le genre ennuyeux_. In almost any age of
English literature, or indeed of any other literature, an experienced
critic can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse.
There is in them an unmistakeable _Zeit-Geist_ in phraseology and form.
The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for
the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet
reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison
to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De
Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler,
easier tone of the well-bred _causeur_, as free from classical
mannerism as it was free from subtle mechanism or epigrammatic
brilliance. Down to about the death of Scott and Coleridge, almost any
page of English prose or verse could be certainly attributed to its
proper generation by the mark of its style alone.

The Victorian literature presents a dozen styles, every man speaking
out what is in him, in the phrases he likes best. Our _Zeit-Geist_
flashes all across the heavens at once. Let us place a page from
_Sartor Resartus_ beside a page from Macaulay's _History of England_,
or either beside a page from Arnold's _Literature and Dogma_ or one
from the _Stones of Venice_. Here are four typical styles in prose,
each of which has been much admired and imitated; yet they differ as
widely as Shelley from Ovid, or Tennyson from Pope. Again, for verse,
contrast _Paracelsus_ with _The Princess_--poems written about the same
time by friends and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with
one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's _Songs and Sonnets_ with
Matthew Arnold's _Obermann_; Rudyard Kipling's _Ballads_ with _The
Light of Asia_. Have they any