In these present times only a few people in the metropolis, and hardly anybody out of it, can tell without consulting some book of reference who may be the estimable persons who to-day fill the Deanery of Westminster and the Mastership of the Temple, nor has Canon Liddon any successor that the world acclaims, and I can vouch for it that none of them has ever extended to us a helping hand or publicly condemned the torture of animals for scientific purposes. It is always the loftiest names in literature and the most illustrious authorities on ethics that are found ranged against the infliction of suffering upon helpless animals for the enlargement of human knowledge. Those who support such inflictions are never in the first rank of literature, art, or moral teaching. Dean Stanley left behind him a reputation incomparably greater than any occupier of his Deanery that has succeeded him. The same must be conceded to Dean Vaughan at the Temple; and the eloquence of Canon Liddon compelled the absorbed attention of such congregations as are not now collected by the Canons that have followed him. As far as I am aware, none of the successors of these great men have ever helped our cause at all. No doubt whenever there shall arise in the ministry of the Church of England men of the commanding power, distinguished character, and potent speech that these great men of the last generation displayed we shall find them also espousing the cause of the helpless vivisected animals; in the meanwhile the occupiers of the most dignified positions in the Established Church seem to have drifted into the somewhat ignoble attitude of avoiding the disagreeable subject of vivisection altogether. When we invite them to help us we receive either no reply at all, or a reply that is carefully evasive, or we are damned with faint praise while assured that the writer is too busy to give the subject the attention it needs before any public utterance is possible upon it. All of which methods of dealing with the matter display much wisdom of the world and a very human desire to avoid controversy and other uncomfortable mental and epistolary disturbance, but none of the spirit that led Archbishop Temple when he was Bishop of Exeter to stand unflinching on a temperance platform while the publicans pelted him with flour. CHAPTER XII: QUEEN VICTORIA Queen Victoria has given her name to a period which has no parallel in magnificence since the days of the great Elizabeth. The galaxy of great poets, teachers, and philosophers that flourished in the Victorian age cannot be matched in any similar series of years in all the history of the modern world. With her departure exhaustion seems to have come upon the world of letters for a time, and to the classic glories of the nineteenth century there has succeeded an usurpation of journalists without the splendour of genius or even the distinction of scholarship.