Four other great prose writers presenting startling divergences from one another cannot be omitted. Belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb earned wide popularity by his _Tales from Shakespeare_ and _Poetry for Children_, written in collaboration with his sister Mary; but he was specially remarkable for his famed _Essays of Elia_, wherein he affords evidence of possessing an almost paradoxical mixture of delicate sensibility and humour, as well as of accurate and also fantastic observation. Newman, at first an English clergyman but subsequently a cardinal, after conversion to the Catholic Church, appears to me hardly eligible in a history of literature in which Lamennais has no place. As a literary man, his famous sermons at Oxford and the Tracts exercised much influence, and provoked such impassioned and prodigious revival of old doctrines and of an antiquated spirit in religion; then the _Apologia Pro Vita Sua_, _Callista_, and the _History of Arianism_, revealed him as a master of eloquence. Ruskin, as art critic, in his bold volumes illumined with remarkable beauty of styles, _Modern Painters_, _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, and _The Stones of Venice_, formulated the creed and the school of pre-Raphaelitism. At the time of the religious revival at Oxford, he preached a servile imitation of antiquity by the path of the Renaissance, appealing to national and mediæval inspiration, not without _naïveté_ and archaism, none the less evident because he was sincere and mordant. George Meredith, who died only in 1910, was a prolific and often involved novelist (the Browning of prose), with a passion for metaphors and a too freely expressed eclectic scorn for the multitude. Withal, he had a profound knowledge of life and of the human soul; impregnated with humour, he was creator of unforgettable types of character, and no pre-occupation of his epoch was foreign to his mind, whilst his vigorous realism always obstinately refused to turn from contemporaneous themes, or to gratify the needs and aspirations which it was possible to satisfy. His epitaph might well be that he understood the women of his time, a rare phenomenon. HISTORY.--History could show two writers of absolute superiority--Macaulay (_History of England since James II_), an omnivorous reader and very brilliant writer, and Carlyle, the English Michelet, feverish, passionate, incongruous, and disconcerting, who dealt with history as might a very powerful lyrical poet. CHAPTER XVII THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: GERMANY Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland; Prose Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Herder, Kant. Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Goethe, Schiller, Körner.