The men of the Victorian age have lived in the midst of almost cataclysmic mental changes. New facts have rained upon them with a rapidity that baffles hypothesis, and stamps theory as obsolete before half the world has become reconciled to its existence. In such a time of intellectual flux anything like monumental art is impossible, since neither the artist nor the age possesses the permanence of mood required for a true presentment. Although, however, the Victorian era has not produced much that the most liberal charity can conceive as belonging to all time, it has shown immense fertility and vigour in supplying the intellectual wants of the present. In all but those supreme manifestations of the human intellect which we ascribe to genius, its products are at least equal, and in most cases superior, to those of any period of our history, while in quantity and variety of intellectual effort, and in diffusion of intellectual interest, it is entirely unapproachable. "REMEMBER MITCHELSTOWN" (1887). =Source.=--_The Times_, October 19. (MR. GLADSTONE at Nottingham): The case I have now to mention goes further than that. It is the Mitchelstown case. I was responsible for putting in a telegraphic answer to a telegram the words, "Remember Mitchelstown," and Mitchelstown will and must be remembered, and the meeting has an account to settle with the Government in respect to Mitchelstown. I should have been glad to have sealed my own lips, had not the Government sent forth its testimony, its solemn, downright, unequivocal judgment that the proceeding at Mitchelstown were right.... What did Mr. Balfour say, when the Irish Nationalist members brought up the question of the proceedings at Mitchelstown? He said that the whole action of the police was in the face of the most tremendous provocation, and absolutely in self-defence. He said that when the order to fire was given the order was to fire only on those portions of the crowd who were engaged in throwing stones.... Three human beings lost their lives under the fire of the police. I cannot say three men, for in the ordinary sense of the word they were not men. Two of them had been men, and were in harmless old age. The other was growing to be a man, and was still in harmless boyhood. Not one of these three persons is even alleged to have thrown a stone. Not one of them, if I recollect aright, is even alleged to have carried a stick.... Is not this a melancholy and a miserable farce--tragic, too, in the highest degree, when we consider that these trumpery proceedings, perhaps of some casual boys or men, who are only able in the utmost of their wrath and in the supply of stones that they could command to break two or three windows in the police barracks--that these are to be represented as leading and heading an attack which caused a humane and intelligent body of the representatives of the Government to fire out of windows, to kill three persons, one of