Our Victorian Age is as different from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of the age of Gray and Johnson, as it is from the resounding torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our literature; while, on the other hand, our practical and scientific genius scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle's _French Revolution_ is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is history. Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on various social abuses; and George Eliot's heart is ever with Darwin, Spencer, and Comte, as much as it is with Miss Austen. Ruskin would sacrifice all the pictures in the world, if society would transform itself into a Brotherhood of St. George. Tennyson has tried to put the dilemmas of theological controversy into lyric poetry, and Psychology is now to be studied, not in metaphysical ethics, but in popular novels. The aim of the modern historian is to compile a _Times_ newspaper of events which happened three or four, eight or ten centuries ago. The aim of the modern philosopher is to tabulate mountains of research, and to prune away with agnostic _non possumus_ the ancient oracles of hypothesis and imagination. Our literature to-day has many characteristics: but its central note is the dominant influence of Sociology--enthusiasm for social truths as an instrument of social reform. It is scientific, subjective, introspective, historical, archaeological:--full of vitality, versatility, and diligence:--intensely personal, defiant of all law, of standards, of convention:--laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, symmetry, or colour:--it is learned, critical, cultured:--with all its ambition and its fine feeling, it is unsympathetic to the highest forms of the imagination, and quite alien to the drama of action.