_The age which has been the first to accept this condition, then, should be rich in frankly lyrical poetry; and this we find to be the case with the Victorian period. At no time has a greater mass of this species of verse been produced, not even in the combined Elizabethan and Jacobean age. But when we come to consider the quality of this later harvest of song, we observe in it a far less homogeneous character. We can take a piece of verse, and decide at sight that it must be Elizabethan, or of the age of the Pléiade in France, or of a particular period in Italy. Even an ode of our own eighteenth century is hardly to be confounded with a fragment from any other school. The great Georgian age introduced a wide variety into English poetry; and yet we have but to examine the selected jewels strung into so exquisite a carcanet by Mr. Palgrave in his "Golden Treasury" to notice with surprise how close a family likeness exists between the contributions of Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron. The distinctions of style, of course, are very great; but the general character of the diction, the imagery, even of the rhythm, is more or less identical. The stamp of the same age is upon them,--they are hall-marked 1820._ _It is perhaps too early to decide that this will never be the case with the Victorian lyrics. While we live in an age we see the distinction of its parts, rather than their co-relation. It is said that the Japanese Government once sent over a Commission to report upon the art of Europe; and that, having visited the exhibitions of London, Paris, Florence, and Berlin, the Commissioners confessed that the works of the European painters all looked so exactly alike that it was difficult to distinguish one from another. The Japanese eye, trained in absolutely opposed conventions, could not tell the difference between a Watts and a Fortuny, a Théodore Rousseau and a Henry Moore. So it is quite possible, it is even probable, that future critics may see a close similarity where we see nothing but divergence between the various productions of the Victorian age. Yet we can judge but what we discern; and certainly to the critical eye to-day it is the absence of a central tendency, the chaotic cultivation of all contrivable varieties of style, which most strikingly seems to distinguish the times we live in._