Widely as these differ among themselves, they have characters which differentiate them from all men of the eighteenth century, and also from the men of the era of Goethe and Scott. Can we imagine _Sartor Resartus_ being published in the age of Johnson, or _In Memoriam_ in that of Byron? How different a land is the Italy which Ruskin sees from the Italy that Rogers knew! What a new world is that of the Brontes and George Eliot beside that which was painted by Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen! In what things would Southey and John Morley agree, except about books and pure English? Place Burke _On the Sublime and Beautiful_ beside Ruskin's _Modern Painters_; compare the _Stones of Venice_ with Eustace's _Classical Tour_; compare Carlyle's _French Revolution_ with Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_; compare the _Book of Snobs_ with Addison's _Spectator_; contrast _The Ring and the Book_ with Gray's _Elegy_ or Cowper's _Task_. What wholly different types, ideas, aims! The age of Pope and Addison, of Johnson and Gibbon, clung to symmetry, "the grand air," the "best models"; it cared much more for books than for social reforms, and in the world of letters a classical manner was valued far more than originality of ideas. And when we come to a later age, what an irrepressible and stormy imagination do we find! Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Landor, revelled in romance and colour, in battle and phantasmagoria, in tragedy, mystery, and legend. They boiled over with excitement, and their visions were full of fight. The roar and fire of the great revolutionary struggle filled men's brains with fierce and strange dreams.