taire, never very popular in England, becomes "as mischievous a
monkey as any of them"; the enthusiasm for Rousseau, which had reached
extravagant proportions, completely disappears, and he is merely the
slanderous sceptic, who, after soaking other people's waistcoats with
his tears, sent his own babies to the Foundling Hospital. The influence
of the French eighteenth-century literature on the mind of England was
first combated and then baldly denied. The premier journalist of the age
declared, with the satisfaction of a turkey-cock strutting round his
yard, that no trace of the lowest level of what could be called
popularity remained in England to the writers of France, and he felt
himself "entitled to treat as an imbecile conceit the pretence" that a
French school of thought survived in Great Britain. Such was the
Podsnappery of the hour in its vigilance against moral and religious
taint.

Notwithstanding, or perhaps we ought to say inevitably conducted by
these elements of passion and disdain, the infant Victorian Age passed
rapidly into the great political whirlpool of 1846, with its violent
concentration of enthusiasm on the social questions which affected the
welfare of the masses, with, in short, its tremendous upheaval of a
practical radicalism. From that time forth its development baffles
analysis. Whatever its present enemies may allege to its discredit, they
cannot pretend that it was languid or monotonous. No Age hitherto lived
out upon the world's surface has been so multiform or so busy; none
defies the art of the historian to such a bewildering degree. Its latest
critic does not exaggerate when he says that our fathers and our
grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of
information concerning it "that the industry of a Ranke would be
submerged by it and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it."
This is manifestly true, and it is evident that an encyclopaedia would be
required to discuss all the divisions of so tremendous a subject. If we
look over too wide a horizon we lose our bearings altogether. We get a
hopelessly confused notion of the course of progress; we see
experiments, criticisms, failures, but who is to assure us what was the
tendency of evolution?

Mr. Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" has arrived at the very
moment when all readers are prepared to discuss the age he deals with,
and when public opinion is aware of the impatience which has been
"risin