Her Majesty's reign, already longer than that of any anointed monarch of England, has necessarily coincided with the production of an enormous mass of literature. We speak of the Victorian as we speak of the Elizabethan, or of the Augustan, or of the Georgian Age. To a seeker for hasty generalisation, the late Victorian Age will be remarkable for the wide diffusion of instruction, and the parallel decline and decay of most of the arts. We may not be able to discover any connection of cause and effect between the teaching of art and literature in hundreds of schools, colleges, institutions, and the accompanying frivolity, feebleness, and fantastic waywardness of painting; the frivolity, fantastic waywardness and ignorance of much popular literature. Compare the art of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hoppner, Romney, Cotman, with our Royal Academy, or our cheap impressionism. Compare Fielding with the various Amuraths who succeed each other as the most popular novelists. The more we chatter about art, the worse is our performance. The more we prate of method and style in letters, the more does a large part of the public rejoice in certain romances which, in various proportions, combine all the blatancies, all the vulgarities, all the faults of taste and of morals. The more we educate, the lower is the standard of critical conscientiousness and critical learning, till a reviewer, in a highly respectable journal, actually does not know how many volumes there are in the work submitted to his judgment – the number being one!

There are, of course, exceptions, and all literary work of to-day is not frivolity or fustian, or earnest journalism ‘standing,’ like the Abomination of Desolation, ‘where it should not.’ The Victorian Age, in fact, can give a good account of itself, though certain existing tendencies deserve what has been said of them in the mass. The age has many glories, though education, in being diffused, has, perhaps unavoidably, been spread uncommonly thin.

When her Majesty ascended the throne, there had fallen a lull in poetry. The great time was over: Scott, Shelley, Byron, and Keats were dead. Wordsworth was long past his prime; Southey was nearing his pathetic end; Landor was not listened to; Coleridge had ceased to sing; even Milman had relapsed on prose; nothing was heard but the unregarded twitterings of minor minstrels – mostly women.