But the swift onrush of manufacturing and trading called for armies of accountants, skilled workers, and salesmen. These made up a new class of society; hitherto there had been aristocrats and peasants, educated and ignorant, rich and poor. The army of business employees, alert, vigorous, ready for any quantity of reading-matter that would amuse or furnish knowledge, added their countless numbers to the reading public. Fiction, at first in the novel, and later in the short story, was published as fast as it could be printed. This great middle class itself provided material for genius to work on. Dickens and George Eliot are striking examples of authors who wrote about this new middle class in order to amuse it. The influence of business life made the world more matter of fact and in consequence literature became rather more prosaic, with a tendency to present a realistic picture of everyday life and manners. Science, aided by a multitude of mechanical inventions, made unprecedented progress and assumed a more important place in the minds of men than ever before. History was treated scientifically, thought was more systematic than ever, the nineteenth century presented a union of the enthusiasm of the Renaissance, the love of system of the Classic Age, and the devotion to nature of the Romantic Period. The following lists have been selected from the great array of nineteenth-century authors with the view of presenting those whose work has been peculiarly significant of the period. POETRY Arnold, M. Browning, E. B. Browning, R. Bryant Longfellow Lowell Morris, W. Poe Rossetti Swinburne Tennyson Whitman FICTION Austen Balzac Dickens Dumas Eliot Hardy Harte Hawthorne Irving Kipling Poe Stevenson Thackeray Tolstoi Zola HISTORY Bancroft Carlyle Ferrero Green Guizot Hodgkin Michelet Mommsen Motley Parkman Prescott Symonds Taine ESSAY & BIOG. Arnold, M. Chesterton Emerson La Ramée Lewes Lockhart Lowell Morley Pater Sainte-Beuve Stephen Thoreau Villari PHILOSOPHY & SCIENCE Carlyle Darwin Emerson Galton Hamilton Ruskin Shaler Spencer RELIGION Bowne Brierley Brooks Channing Robertson NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS Each of the nations, like each of the great eras of human progress, possesses definite characteristics of its own. Frenchmen differ from Englishmen in their faces, their customs, and also in intellectual trend. Shakespeare is unlike Ibsen not simply because he lived at an earlier date, in another epoch, but also because he was the native of another country. Kipling's point of view is not the same as that of Thomas Bailey Aldrich; their national traditions and surroundings varied sufficiently to leave a mark upon their work so legible that one is recognized as English and the other as American without need of referring to their biographies.