form and imitating any style.  It is intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is afraid to throw the least colour of imagination around its history.  It has consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts—­but it has now no single poet of the first rank.  It has infinite romantic resources, and an army of skilful novelists—­and yet it has no single living writer worthy to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century.

This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian literature as a whole.  In the meantime, it may be worth while for the men and women of to-day, who are full of all the excellent work around us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years ago.  As one who can remember much that was given to the world in a former generation, I shall endeavour in these little sketches to mark some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early Victorian Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of the imaginative kind.

It is now some time since the country of Shakespeare and of Milton has been without its poet laureate, and to the non-poetical world the absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible.  Nay, the question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry, why not a laureate also in prose romance?  And if there were a laureate in prose romance, whom should we choose?

The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in poetry:  that we have vast quantities of thoughtful work produced, an army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a very high average of merit—­and yet so little of the very first rank.  For the first time in the present century, English literature is without a single living novelist of world-wide reputation.  The nineteenth century opened with Castle Rackrent and the admirably original tales of Maria Edgeworth.  Jane Austen followed in the same field.  And since Waverley appeared, in 1814, we have had a succession of fine romances in unbroken line.  Fenimore Cooper’s work is nearly contemporary with the best of Scott’s.  At Sir Walter’s death Bulwer-Lytton was in full career.  And Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all at their best nearly together.  During the last twenty years or so of this splendid period they had been joined by George Eliot; and of the whole band Anthony Trollope was the survivor.  With him our language lost the last of those companions of the fireside in mansion and cottage whose names are household words, whose books are in every hand, where the English tongue is heard.