e of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces.
Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1871.

[Illustration: Southey, Scott, Coleridge, Macaulay.]

CHAPTER VIII.

FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME.

1832-1893.

The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to
enable the critic to pronounce a final judgment, or the literary
historian to get a true perspective. Many of the principal writers of
the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few
years. This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the
consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders
of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of
fashion and taste, to remain representatives of their generation. As
regards _form_, the most striking fact in the history of the period
under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature
of prose fiction, of the novel of real life. The novel has become to the
solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences of
Elizabeth's reign, or the periodical essay, like the _Tatler_ and
_Spectator_, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne's. And if
its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the drama
gives, it is far more searching and minute. No period has ever left in
its literary records so complete a picture of its whole society as the
period which is just closing. At any other time than the present, the
names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley, and Charles
Reade--names which are here merely mentioned in passing--besides many
others which want of space forbids us even to mention--would be of
capital importance. As it is, we must limit our review to the three
acknowledged masters of modern English fiction, Charles Dickens
(1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), and "George
Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880).

It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in
order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is. This lowest term
may often be found in his early work, before experience of the world has
overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions. Dickens was much
more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and George Eliot than a
moralist; but they had their starting-points respectively in humor, in
burlesque, and in strong ethical and religious feeling. Dickens began
with a broadly comic series of papers, contributed to the _Old M