From about 1840, when great literature again began to appear, the conditions were more like those with which we are familiar. There was an unparalleled output of books of all kinds, a very large reading public, and a steadily increasing number of professional authors dependent on the success of their popular appeal. As in our own day, a great quantity of good second-rate talent trod on the heels of genius, and made it more difficult for really first-rate work to find recognition. The impetus of the Romantic movement was by no means exhausted, but it began to spread into new fields. The study of 'Gothic' art and literature had been at first, as was inevitable, ill-informed. Its reconstruction of the Middle Ages was a matter of sentimental antiquarianism, no more successful than much of its church restoration. The Victorians now extended the imaginative sensibility which had been expended on nature and history, to the life of the individual. This meant that the novel instead of the poem was to be the characteristic means of literary expression; and even the chief Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning, are sometimes novelists in verse. The grandest and most fully representative figure in all Victorian literature is of course Alfred Tennyson. And here let me digress for one minute. It was a good rule of Thomas Carlyle to set a portrait of the man whom he was describing in front of him on his writing-table. It is a practice which would greatly diminish the output of literary impertinence. Let those who are disposed to follow the present evil fashion of disparaging the great Victorians make a collection of their heads in photographs or engravings, and compare them with those of their own little favourites. Let them set up in a row good portraits of Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Gladstone, Manning, Newman, Martineau, Lord Lawrence, Burne Jones, and, if they like, a dozen lesser luminaries, and ask themselves candidly whether men of this stature are any longer among us. I will not speculate on the causes which from time to time throw up a large number of great men in a single generation. I will only ask you to agree with me that since the golden age of Greece (assuming that we can trust the portrait busts of the famous Greeks) no age can boast so many magnificent types of the human countenance as the reign of Queen Victoria. We, perhaps, being epigoni ourselves, are more at home among our fellow-pygmies. Let us agree with Ovid, if we will: Prisca iuvent alios; ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor; haec aetas moribus apta meis. But let us have the decency to uncover before the great men of the last century; and if we cannot appreciate them, let us reflect that the fault may possibly be in ourselves.