thus the object of greater interest and excitement to its readers, than anything which had been written in the previous ages.  It is the direct result of this extension of romanticism that the novel became the characteristic means of literary expression of the time, and that Browning, the poet who more than all others represents the essential spirit of his age, should have been as it were, a novelist in verse.  Only one other literary form, indeed, could have ministered adequately to this awakened interest, but by some luck not easy to understand, the drama, which might have done with greater economy and directness the work the novel had to do, remained outside the main stream of literary activity.  To the drama at last it would seem that we are returning, and it may be that in the future the direct representation of the clash of human life which is still mainly in the hands of our novelists, may come back to its own domain.

The Victorian age then added humanity to nature and art as the subject-matter of literature.  But it went further than that.  For the first time since the Renaissance, came an era which was conscious of itself as an epoch in the history of mankind, and confident of its mission.  The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revolutionized cosmography, and altered the face of the physical world.  The nineteenth century, by the discoveries of its men of science, and by the remarkable and rapid succession of inventions which revolutionized the outward face of life, made hardly less alteration in accepted ways of thinking.  The evolutionary theory, which had been in the air since Goethe, and to which Darwin was able to give an incontrovertible basis of scientific fact, profoundly influenced man’s attitude to nature and to religion.  Physical as apart from natural science made scarcely less advance, and instead of a world created in some fixed moment of time, on which had been placed by some outward agency all the forms and shapes of nature that we know, came the conception of a planet congealing out of a nebula, and of some lower, simpler and primeval form of life multiplying and diversifying itself through succeeding stages of development to form both the animal and the vegetable world.  This conception not only enormously excited and stimulated thought, but it gave thinkers a strange sense of confidence and certainty not possessed by the age before.  Everything seemed plain to them; they were heirs of all the ages.  Their doubts were as certain as their faith.

“There lives more faith in honest doubt
 Believe me than in half the creeds.”

said Tennyson; “honest doubt,” hugged with all the certainty of a revelation, is the creed of most of his philosophical poetry, and what is more to the point was the creed of the masses that were beginning to think for themselves, to whose awakening interest his work so strongly appealed.  There were no doubt, literary side-currents.  Disraeli survived to show that there were still young men who