ngland; Newman, essayist and
theologian, who is noted for clear style, acute thought, and
argumentative power; Carlyle, who awoke in his generation a desire for
greater achievement, and who championed the spiritual interpretation
of life in philosophy and history; Ruskin, the apostle of the
beautiful and of more ideal relations in social life; the essayist
Pater, whose prose is tinged with poetic color and mystic thought;
Arnold, the great analytical critic; Dickens, educational and social
reformer, whose novels deal chiefly with the lower classes; Thackeray,
whose fiction is not surpassed in keen, satiric analysis of the upper
classes of society; George Eliot, whose realistic stories of
middle-class life show the influence of science in her conception of
character as an orderly ethical growth; Stevenson, an artist in style,
writer of romances, essays, and poems for children; Meredith, subtle
novelist, distinguished for his comic spirit and portrayal of male
egotism; Hardy, realistic novelist of the lowly life of Wessex;
Kipling, whose _Jungle Books_ are an original creation, and whose
short stories surpass those of all other contemporaries.

In poetry, the age is best represented by five men; namely, Arnold,
who voices the feeling of doubt and unrest; Browning, who, by his
optimistic philosophy, leads to impregnable heights of faith, who
analyzes emotions and notes the development of souls as they struggle
against opposition from within and without, until they reach moments
of supreme victory or defeat; Tennyson, whose careful art mirrors in
beautiful verse much of the thought of the age, the influence of
science, the unrest, the desire to know the problems of the future, as
well as to steal occasional glances at beauty for its own sake;
Swinburne, the greatest artist since Milton in the technique of verse;
and Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, whose ballads sing of
her soldiers and sailors, and whose lyrics proclaim the Anglo-Saxon
faith and joy in working.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

Walker's _Essentials in English History_, Cheney's _A Short History of
England_, McCarthy's _History of Our Own Times_, Cheney's _Industrial
and Social History of England_, Traill's _Social England_, VI.

LITERARY

_The Cambridge History of English Literature_.

Walker's _The Literature of the Victorian Era_.

Magnus's _English Literature in the Nineteenth Century_.

Saintsbury's _A History of English