7 Disraeli's _Sybil_ will
attest), was not enough to satisfy the ardent idealism that blazed in
the breasts of men stirred by revolutions and the new birth of Christian
zeal. In contrast to the ordered pursuit of reform, the spirit of which
the Utilitarians hoped to embody in societies and Acts of Parliament,
were the rebellious impulses of men filled with a prophetic spirit,
walking in obedience to an inward voice, eager to cry aloud their
message to a generation wrapped in prosperity and self-contentment. They
formed no single school and followed no single line. In a few cases we
may observe the relation of master and pupil, as between Carlyle and
Ruskin; in more we can see a small band of friends like the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the leaders of the Oxford Movement, or the
scientific circle of Darwin and Hooker, working in fellowship for a
common end. But individuality is their note. They sprang often from
surroundings most alien to their genius; they wandered far from the
courses which their birth seemed to prescribe; the spirit caught them
and they went forth to the fray.

The time in which they grew up was calculated to mould characters of
strength. Self-control and self-denial had been needed in the protracted
wars with France. Self-reliance had been learnt in the hard school of
adversity. Imagination was quickened by the heroism of the struggle
which had ended in the final victory of our arms. And to the generations
born in the early days of the nineteenth century lay open fields wider
than were offered to human activity in any other age of the world's
history. Now at last the full fruits of sixteenth-century discovery were
to be reaped. It was possible for Gordon, by the personal ascendancy
which he owed to his single-minded faith, to create legends and to work
miracles in Asia and in Africa; for Richard Burton to gain an intimate
knowledge of Islam in its holiest shrines; for Livingstone, Hannington,
and other martyrs to the Faith to breathe their last in the tropics; for
Franklin, dying, as Scott died nearly seventy years later, in the cause
of Science, to hallow the polar regions for the Anglo-Saxon race.
Darkest Africa was to remain impenetrable yet awhile. Only towards the
end of the century, when Stanley's work was finished, could Rhodes and
Kitchener conspire to clasp hands across its deserts and its swamps: but
on the other side of the globe a new island-empire had been already
created by the energy o