Victorian Literature Part 8

The Queen will have seen reputations blaze forth and flicker out ignominiously; she will have seen many a writer hailed for immortal to-day and forgotten to-morrow. She will have seen, however, a succession of writers, Browning and Tennyson, Carlyle and Ruskin, most notable of all, who in their impulse towards high ideals of human brotherhood, in their enthusiasm of humanity, have given us a literature without a parallel in history; and she will not be without a sense of gratification that that literature will go down the ages bearing the name of Victorian.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] "Autobiography" by John Stuart Mill (1869), pp. 232, 233.

[19] A contemporary epigram thus expressed the general feeling:

"For fifty years he listened at the door, And heard some scandal, but invented more.

This he wrote down; and statesmen, queens, and kings, Appear before us quite as common things.

Most now are dead; yet some few still remain To whom these 'Memoirs' give a needless pain; For though they laugh, and say "Tis only Greville,'

They wish him and his 'Memoirs' at the D--l."