or for evil, our literature is now
absorbed in the urgent social problem, and is become but an instrument
in the vast field of Sociology--the science of Society.

This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life,
the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special
character of modern literature. Literature is no longer "bookish"--but
practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life--but it is a
dispersive, analytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most
fastidious taste in form--but it often flings the critical spirit aside
in its passion for doing, in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It
is industrious, full of learning and research--but it regards its
learning as an instrument of influence, not as an end of thought. It
can work up a poem or an essay, as carefully as Mieris or Breughel
polished a cabinet picture--and it can "tear a passion to tatters," or
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
abse