al monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the
incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its
elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault
like some forlorn and forgotten trophy, the Hat."

Longinus tells us that "a just judgment of style is the final fruit of
long experience." In the measured utterances of Mr. Asquith we recognise
the speech of a man to whom all that is old and good is familiar, and in
whom the art of finished expression has become a habit. No more
elegantly balanced, no more delicately perceptive mind than his has
appeared of recent times in our midst, and there is something in the
equipoise of his own genius which points Mr. Asquith out as a judge
peculiarly well fitted to sit in judgment upon rival ages. In his
Romanes lecture there was but one thing to be regretted: the restricted
space which it offered for the full expansion of the theme. Mr. Asquith
excels in swift and rapid flights, but even for him the Victorian Age is
too broad a province to be explored within one hour. He endeavoured to
lighten his task by excluding theology and politics, and indeed but for
such self-denial he could scarcely have moved at all in so dense an air.
He was able, however, having thrown out so much formidable ballast, to
rise above his subject, and gazing at the Victorian Age, as it recedes,
he declared it to have been very good. The young men who despise and
attack that Age receive no support in any particular from Mr. Asquith.

He dwells on the fecundity of the literature of the Victorian Age in its
middle period, and especially on the publications which adorned the
decade from 1850 to 1859. He calls those years, very justly, "marvellous
and almost unexampled" in their rich profusion. I may suggest that the
only rival to them in our history is the period from 1590 to 1600, which
saw the early plays of Shakespeare, the _Faerie Queene_, the _Arcadia_,
the _Ecclesiastical Polity_, _Tamburlaine_, _The Discovery of Guiana_,
and Bacon's _Essays_. If the works catalogued by Mr. Asquith do not
equal these in intensity, they excel them by the breadth of the ground
they cover, extending from Browning to Darwin and from Thackeray to
Ruskin. Moreover, the Oxford list might have included _Lavengro_ and
Newman's _Lectures_, and Herbert Spencer's _Social Statics_. The only
third decade worthy to be named with those of 1590 and 1850 is that
which opens in 1705, and is illu