ublic irregularly follows. The ordinary
unthinking man accepts the change with exhilaration, since in this
country the majority have always enjoyed seeing noses knocked off
statues. But if we are to rejoice in liberation from the bondage of the
Victorian Age we ought to know what those bonds were.

The phenomena of the decadence of an age are never similar to those of
its rise. This is a fact which is commonly overlooked by the opponents
of a particular section of social and intellectual history. In the
initial stages of a "period" we look for audacity, fire, freshness,
passion. We look for men of strong character who will hew a channel
along which the torrent of new ideals and subversive sentiments can
rush. But this violence cannot be expected to last, and it would lead to
anarchy if it did. Slowly the impetus of the stream diminishes, the
river widens, and its waters reach a point where there seems to be no
further movement in their expanse. No age contains in itself the
elements of endless progress; it starts in fury, and little by little
the force of it declines. Its decline is patent--but not until long
afterwards--in a deadening of effort, in a hardening of style. Dryden
leads on to Pope, Pope points down to Erasmus Darwin, after whom the
world can but reject the whole classical system. The hungry sheep of a
new generation look up and are not fed, and this is the vision which
seems to face us in the last adventures of the schools of yesterday.

But what is, or was, the Victorian Age? The world speaks glibly of it as
though it were a province of history no less exactly defined than the
career of a human being from birth to death; but in practice no one
seems in a hurry to mark out its frontiers. Indeed, to do so is an
intrepid act. If the attempt is to be made at all, then 1840, the year
of Queen Victoria's marriage with Prince Albert, may be suggested as the
starting-point, and 1890 (between the death-dates of Browning, Newman,
and Tennyson) as the year in which the Victorian Age is seen sinking
into the sands. Nothing could be vaguer, or more open to contention in
detail, than this delineation, but at all events it gives our
deliberations a frame. It excludes _Pickwick_, which is the typical
picture of English life under William IV., and _Sartor Resartus_, which
was the tossing of the bound giant in his sleep; but it includes the
two-volume Tennyson, "chiefly lyrical," the stir of the Corn Law
agitation, the Tr