n
abstract thought.

In lyric poetry and in romance our age has names second only to the
greatest; its researches into nature and history are at least equal to
those of any previous epoch; and, if it has not many great
philosophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most important
of all the sciences. This is the age of Sociology: its central
achievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspect
of thought colours the poetry, the romance, the literature, the art,
and the philosophy of the Victorian Age. Literature has been the
gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in
symmetry, in dignity, in grace.

The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature to
describe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we assign any
sacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the Queen has given any
special impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years,
nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual
evolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formative
influence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by
which it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of classification. And of
course an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey the
American writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date,
1837, is an arbitrary point, and a purely English point. Yet it is
curious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of the
English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of
the Queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the early
part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe,
and Cobbett, were gone. There were still living in 1837, Wordsworth,
Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss
Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers:--living,
it is true, but they had all produced their important work at some
earlier date. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson,
Browning, had begun to write, but were not generally known. The
principal English authors who belong equally to the Georgian and to the
Victorian Age are Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and
they are not quite in the very first rank in either age. It is a
significant fact that the reign of the Queen has produced, with
trifling exceptions, the wh