There is an interest in tracing through these
metamorphoses the essential unity of a man's character. On the other
hand, one cannot but admire the steadfastness with which Darwin and
Lister, Tennyson and Watts, pursued the even tenor of their way.

Again we may notice the strange irony of fortune which drew Carlyle from
his native moorlands to spend fifty years in a London suburb, while his
disciple Ruskin, born and bred in London, and finding fit audience in
the universities of the South, closed his long life in seclusion amid
the Cumbrian fells. So two statesmen, who were at one time very closely
allied, present a similarly striking contrast in the manner of their
lives. Till the age of forty Joseph Chamberlain limited himself to
municipal work in Birmingham, and yet he rose in later life to imperial
views wider than any statesman's of his day. Charles Dilke, on the other
hand, could be an expert on 'Greater Britain' at thirty and yet devote
his old age to elaborating the details of Local Government and framing
programmes of social reform for the working classes of our towns.
Accidents these may be, but they lend to Victorian biography the charm
of a fanciful arabesque or mosaic of varied pattern and hue.

Eccentrics, too, there were in fact among the literary men of the day,
even as there are in the fiction of Dickens, of Peacock, of George
Meredith. There was Borrow, who, as an old man, was tramping solitarily
in the fields of Norfolk, as earlier he wandered alone in wild Wales or
wilder Spain. There was FitzGerald, who remained all his life constant
to one corner of East Anglia, and who yet, by the precious thread of his
correspondence, maintained contact with the great world of Victorian
letters to which he belonged.

Some wandered as far afield as Asia or the South Seas; some buried
themselves in the secluded courts of Oxford and Cambridge and became
mythical figures in academic lore. Not many were to be found within hail
of London or Edinburgh in these forceful days. Brougham, the most
omniscient of reviewers, with the most ill-balanced of minds, belongs
more properly to the preceding age, though he lived to 1868; and it is
from this age that the novelists probably drew their eccentric types.
But between eccentricity and vigorous originality who shall draw the
dividing line?

Men like these it is hard to label and to classify. Their individuality
is so patent that any general statement is at once open to atta