shun comparison with the mighty Wizard of the North; partly, the analytic genius of our time so greatly exceeds its synthetic genius; and mainly, the range of our historical learning inclines us to restore the past by exact scholarship and not by fiction without authority.  George Eliot was so anxious to have her local colour accurate that she ended by becoming somewhat fatiguing.  Some day, no doubt, the genius of romance will return to this inexhaustible field with enthusiasm equal to Scott’s, with a knowledge far more accurate than his, and a spirit quite purged from political and social bias.

From the death of Scott in 1832 until 1894 are sixty-two years; and if we divide this period into equal parts at the year 1863 (it was the year of Thackeray’s death), we shall be struck with the fact that the purely literary product of the first period of thirty-one years (1832-1863) is superior to the purely literary product of the second period of thirty-one years (1863-1894).  The former period gives us all that was best of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, George Eliot, Kingsley, Disraeli, Dr. Arnold, Thirlwall, Grote, Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Mill, Froude, Layard, Kinglake, Ruskin.  The second period gave us in the main, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, G. H. Lewes, Maine, Leslie Stephen, John Morley, Matthew Arnold, Lecky, Freeman, Stubbs, Bryce, Green, Gardiner, Symonds, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne.  Poetry, romance, the critical, imaginative, and pictorial power, dominate the former period:  philosophy, science, politics, history are the real inspiration of the latter period.

The era since the death of Scott is essentially a scientific age, a sociologic age; and this is peculiarly visible in the second half of this era of sixty-two years.  About the middle of the period we see how the scientific and sociologic interest begins to over-shadow, if not to oust, the literary, poetic, and romantic interest.  Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859; and its effect on thought became marked within the next few years.  In 1862, Herbert Spencer commenced to issue his great encyclopaedic work, Synthetic Philosophy, still, we trust, to be completed after more than thirty years of devoted toil.  Darwin’s later books appeared about the same period, as did a large body of scientific works in popular form by Huxley, Tyndall, Wallace, Lewes, Lubbock, Tylor, and Clifford.  It is only needful here to refer to such scientific works as directly reacted on general literature.  About the same time the later speculations of Comte began to attract public attention in England, and the Positive Polity was translated in 1875.  Between the years 1860-1875, there grew up in England an absorbing interest in Social Philosophy, and a conviction that the idea of invariable law offered a solution of the progress of society.  Evolution as an idea was in the air, and it was applied to Man as much as to Nature.  It is no part of our present purpose to trace its growth from the scientific aspect.  It is enough to note how it acted and reacted on general literature.