competitive armaments, which was destined to wreck a great part of the wealth which two generations of peaceful industry had gathered, was begun. We have to remember that the prosperity and security of the happy time which we are now considering were due to temporary causes, which can never recur. In the nineteenth century England was the most fortunately situated country, geographically, in the world. When the opening and development of the Atlantic trade deprived the Mediterranean ports of their pride of place, an Atlantic stage of world-commerce began, in which England, an island with good harbours on its western coasts, was in the most favourable position. The Pacific stage which is now beginning must inevitably give the primacy to America. We had also a long start, industrially, over all our rivals, and our possession of great coal-fields and iron-fields close together gave us a still further advantage. Our labour was then cheap and good; our manufacturers capable and energetic. All these advantages are past or passing. Henceforth we shall have to compete with other nations on unprivileged conditions. It is useless to lament the inevitable, but it is foolish to shut our eyes to it. The Victorian Age was the culminating point of our prosperity. Our great wealth, indeed, continued to advance till the catastrophe of 1914. But there was a shadow of apprehension over everything--'never glad confident morning again.' Let us now turn to the intellectual and spiritual movements of the reign. The Romanticist revolution was complete, in a sense, before 1825. It was a European, not only an English movement, and perhaps it was not less potent in France than in Germany and England, though in accordance with the genius and traditions of that nation it took very different forms. In England it inspired verse more than prose, though we must not forget Scott's novels. It produced a galaxy of great poetry during the Great War, and added another immortal glory to that age of heroic struggle. By a strange chance, nearly all the great poets of the war-period died young. Wordsworth alone was left, and he was spared to reap in a barren old age the honours which he had earned and not received between 1798 and 1820. For about fifteen years there was an interregnum in English literature, which makes a convenient division between the great men of the Napoleonic era and the great Victorians.