Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and BookmenShorter, Clement King
History
Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and Bookmen
Shorter, Clement King
English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
A writer who distinguished himself most notably at one period by a
combination of antagonism to Supernatural Christianity, and a gift for
writing biography, was =John Morley (1838- )=. Mr Morley was born at
Blackburn, and educated at Cheltenham and at Lincoln College, Oxford.
Much of his work was done in journalism; he edited in succession the
_Morning Star_, the _Literary Gazette_, the _Fortnightly Review_, the
_Pall Mall Gazette_, and _Macmillan's Magazine_. He resigned the
editorship of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1883, when he entered
Parliament as member for Newcastle-on-Tyne, and he gave up his post on
_Macmillan's Magazine_ on entering a Liberal Cabinet in 1886. He still
edits the "English Men of Letters Series," a remarkable collection of
handy biographies, for which he wrote a "Life of Burke." His literary
achievement, apart from his essays, is entirely biographical, but it was
of enormous influence upon the intellectual development of thoughtful
young men at the Universities during the seventies and eighties. He has
written lives of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, which throw much light
on the period prior to the French Revolution, and give abundant evidence
that, had he not devoted himself to politics he would have been able to
produce a history of the French Revolution of inestimable value. On the
other hand his "Life of Cobden" was a failure from a literary
standpoint. The essay "On Compromise" is a most interesting development
of the fundamental idea of Milton's "Areopagitica," and is probably the
most exhaustive treatment of the question--how far we are justified in
keeping back the expression of our opinions in deference to the views
and customs of our fellow-men.
Another good biographer who gave up to Parliament time which might have
been better employed, from the point of view of a lover of letters, is
=Sir George Otto Trevelyan (1838- )=, whose life of his uncle, Lord
Macaulay, is a delightful biography, full of entertainment for the most
frivolous of readers. Not less entertaining is Sir George Trevelyan's
"Early History of Charles James Fox" (1880), a book which makes one wish
that the writer had devoted himself to that epoch of our history, and
had done for the period of the Georges what his uncle had done for their
immediate predecessors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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