Of Newman’s style it is as difficult to write as it would be to describe the dress of a gentleman we had met, who was so perfectly dressed that we paid no attention to his clothes.  His style is called transparent, because at first we are not conscious of his manner; and unobtrusive, because we never think of Newman himself, but only of the subject he is discussing.  He is like the best French prose writers in expressing his thought with such naturalness and apparent ease that, without thinking of style, we receive exactly the impression which he means to convey.  In his sermons and essays he is wonderfully simple and direct; in his controversial writings, gently ironical and satiric, and the satire is pervaded by a delicate humor; but when his feelings are aroused he speaks with poetic images and symbols, and his eloquence is like that of the Old Testament prophets.  Like Ruskin’s, his style is modeled largely on that of the Bible, but not even Ruskin equals him in the poetic beauty and melody of his sentences.  On the whole he comes nearer than any other of his age to our ideal of a perfect prose writer.

OTHER ESSAYISTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE.  We have selected the above five essayists, Macaulay, Carlyle, Arnold, Newman, and Ruskin, as representative writers of the Victorian Age; but there are many others who well repay our study.  Notable among these are John Addington Symonds, author of The Renaissance in Italy, undoubtedly his greatest work, and of many critical essays; Walter Pater, whose Appreciations and numerous other works mark him as one of our best literary critics; and Leslie Stephen, famous for his work on the monumental Dictionary of National Biography, and for his Hours in a Library, a series of impartial and excellent criticisms, brightened by the play of an original and delightful humor.

Among the most famous writers of the age are the scientists, Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, and Wallace,—­a wonderful group of men whose works, though they hardly belong to our present study, have exercised an incalculable influence on our life and literature.  Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), which apparently established the theory of evolution, was an epoch-making book.  It revolutionized not only our conceptions of natural history, but also our methods of thinking on all the problems of human society.  Those who would read a summary of the greatest scientific discovery of the age will find it in Wallace’s Darwinism,—­a most interesting book, written by the man who claims, with Darwin, the honor of first announcing the principle of evolution.  And, from a multitude of scientific works, we recommend also to the general reader Huxley’s Autobiography and his Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, partly because they are excellent expressions of the spirit and methods of science, and partly because Huxley as a writer is perhaps the clearest and the most readable of the scientists.