ccording to custom, they have embodied and ensconced
themselves, have been treated with unexampled, certainly with
unsurpassed, thoroughness, and must now be near exhaustion; while it is
by no means clear that any fresh set is ready to take their place. It is
on this last point, no doubt, that the more sanguine prophets would like
to fight the battle, urging that new social ideas, and so forth, _are_
in possession of the ground. But this is not the field for that battle.

In dealing with what has been, with the secular hour that we have
actually and securely had, we are on far safer, if not on positively
safe ground. Here the sheaves are actually reaped and brought home; and
if the teller of them makes a mistake, his judgment, and his judgment
only, need be at fault. Not all ways of such telling are of equal value.
It may be tempting, for instance, but can hardly be very profitable, to
attempt to strike an exact balance between the production of the century
from 1780 to 1880 with that of the other great English literary century
from 1580 to 1680. Dear as the exercise is to some literary accountants,
there is perhaps no satisfactory system of book-keeping by which we can
really set the assets and the liabilities of the period from the
appearance of Spenser to the death of Browne against the assets and
liabilities of that from the appearance of Burns to the death of
Tennyson, and say which has the greater sum to its credit. Still more
vague and futile would it be to attempt to set with any exactness this
balance-sheet against that of the other great literary periods of other
countries, languages, and times. Here again, most emphatically, accuracy
of this kind is _not_ to be expected.

But what we can say with confidence and profit is that the nineteenth
century in England and English is of these great periods, and of the
greatest of them; that it has taken its place finally and certainly,
with a right never likely to be seriously challenged, and in a rank
never likely to be much surpassed.

The period which lisped its numbers in Burns and Blake and Cowper, which
broke out into full song with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron,
Shelley, and Keats, which, not to mention scores of minor singers, took
up the tale with Tennyson and Browning and passed it on to Arnold,
Rossetti, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne, need fear no comparisons in the
matter of poetry. In prose fiction, as we have seen, it stands alone. It
is almost a