f Wakefield, and developed by the wisdom of
Parkes and Grey. In distant lands, on stricken fields less famous but no
less perilous, Wellington's men were applying the lessons which they had
learnt in the Peninsula. On distant seas Nelson's ships were carrying
explorers equipped for the more peaceful task of scientific observation.
In this century the highest mountains, the deepest seas, the widest
stretches of desert were to reveal their secrets to the adventurers who
held the whole world for their playground or field of conquest.

And not only in the great expansion of empire abroad but in the growth
of knowledge at home and the application of it to civil life, there was
a field to employ all the vigour of a race capable of rising to its
opportunities. There is no need to remind this generation of such names
as Stephenson and Herschel, Darwin and Huxley, Faraday and Kelvin; they
are in no danger of being forgotten to-day. The men of letters take
relatively a less conspicuous place in the evolution of the Age; but the
force which they put into their writings, the wealth of their material,
the variety of their lives, and the contrasts of their work, endow the
annals of the nineteenth century with an absorbing interest. While
Tennyson for the most part stayed in his English homes, singing the
beauties of his native land, Browning was a sojourner in Italian palaces
and villas, studying men of many races and many times, exploring the
subtleties of the human heart. The pen of Dickens portrayed all classes
of society except, perhaps, that which Thackeray made his peculiar
field. The historians, too, furnish singular contrasts: the vehement
pugnacity of Freeman is a foil to the serene studiousness of Acton; the
erratic career of Froude to the concentration of Stubbs. The influence
exercised on their contemporaries by recluses such as Newman or Darwin
may be compared with the more worldly activities of Huxley and Samuel
Wilberforce. Often we see equally diverse elements in following the
course of a single life. In Matthew Arnold we wonder at the poet of
'The Strayed Reveller' coexisting with the zealous inspector of schools;
in William Morris we find it hard to reconcile the creative craftsman
with the fervent apostle of social discontent. Perhaps the most notable
case of this diversity is the long pilgrimage of Gladstone which led him
from the camp of the 'stern, unbending Tories' to the leadership of
Radicals and Home Rulers.