colourless lives demand, yet on the whole committed to some standard of accuracy, some reflection of the fact in the record. In America, where such limitations are voted tiresome, the vision becomes gigantic, monstrous, like the Gargantuan architecture of its distorted cities. The observer who, in any future civilisation which may arise there, should attempt reconstruction of the barbaric past from a file of the New York Sunday editions, would find himself plunged into a region grotesque and hideous, like evil dreams. But the survival of this peculiar literature is too impossible--perhaps too dreadful--an assumption. Let us believe that the great works will endure--the poetry, the fiction, the social studies and declamations of the representative people of the age. Are we in any better plight? Select ten, say, of the greatest writers of the Victorian era, and attempt from the picture which they present to effect a reconstruction of the Victorian age. The product is a human society so remote from all benignant ways as to demand nothing less than the advent of a kindly comet which will sweep the whole affair into nothingness. Our fathers led their decent, austere lives in that Victorian age which now seems so remote from us, making their money, carrying out their business and boisterous pleasure, inspired by their vigorous, if limited, creeds. They wrangled about politics and theology; they feasted at Christmas, and in the summer visited the seaside; they gave alms to the poor, and rejoiced that they lived in nineteenth-century England. But to the prophets of their age they were unclean from crown of head to sole of foot, a people who had visibly exhausted the patience of God. You may choose your verdict where you please--in Carlyle’s “torpid, gluttonous, sooty, swollen, and squalid England,” given up to the “deaf stupidities and to the fatalities that follow, likewise deaf”; or, in Ruskin’s interpretation of the “storm cloud” as “a symbol of the moral darkness of a nation that has blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly, and has done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it was in his power to do.” You may accept the condemnation kindly, as in Meredith’s “folly perpetually sliding into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth and leisure, with many whims, many strange ailments, and strange fancies”; the condemnation plaintive, as in Arnold’s “brazen prison,” in which most men, with “heads bent o’er their toil,” languidly “their lives to some unmeaning task-work give”; the condemnation defiant and rejoicing, as in Morris: “Civilisation which I _know_ now is destined to perish; what a joy to think of.” You may find it rising to a rather shrill shriek in the later Tennyson, with his protest against the city children--who “soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime”--with his calling upon vastness and silence to swallow up the noises of his clamorous, intolerable day.