55. Of the writers who were between ten and twenty years old at the beginning of the reign, Florence Nightingale was seventeen. Of her Hints on Hospitals, in 1859, and Notes on Nursing, the result of devoted care of the sick soldiers in the Crimea, more than a hundred thousand copies were diffused. Miss Charlotte Mary Yonge was fourteen. She published, in 1853, The Heir of Redclyffe, and, like Miss Sewell, has been since generously busy in using her pen, as a novelist and otherwise, in aid of religion and religious education. She died in 1901. James Anthony Froude, historian of the Reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, and biographer of Thomas Carlyle, was at the beginning of the reign nineteen years old; he died in 1894. Edward Augustus Freeman, who died two years before Froude, was five years his junior. Besides other works, Professor William Stubbs, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, born in 1825, died in 1901, produced, in 1875-78, the best extant Constitutional History of England. The most important of many accurate and thorough books by Professor Freeman is his History of the Norman Conquest of England, in five volumes (1867-79). He published also, in 1881, an Historical Geography of Europe. To the best historical literature of the reign belongs also the series of works in which Samuel Rawson Gardiner has studied the reigns of the two earlier Stuart kings of England, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, beginning with the accession of James I. In 1901 appeared the third volume of the history of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, which brings the story down to 1656, leaving only four years yet to be dealt with. Henry Thomas Buckle, Matthew Arnold, David Masson, and Henry Morley, were all, at the beginning of the reign, fifteen. Henry Thomas Buckle died in 1862, having produced, in 1858 and 1861, two volumes introductory to a projected History of Civilisation in Europe. Buckle's view of history was the reverse of Carlyle's, for he ascribed no influence to the independent force of character, and pleasantly startled readers by extravagant statement of the half truth, that all events depend on the action of inevitable law. He said also that the moral element was of less consequence than the intellectual in a History of Civilisation, because moral principles are the same as they were a thousand years ago, and all the progress has been intellectual. Steam also is what it was a thousand years ago; and intellect has developed the steam-engine. But where lies the motive power to which every ingenious detail has been

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made subordinate? Matthew Arnold, son of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, born in 1822, died April 15th, 1888, took a chief place among English critics, but is now remembered even more by his poetry than by his criticism. He aided the advance of education, and touched questions of religion. The chief work of David Masson, Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh, is his Life of Milton, told in connection with the History of his Time, in six volumes, begun in 1859, and finished in 1880. It is a storehouse of information, laboriously sought, carefully weighed. George Macdonald and William Wilkie Collins, two novelists of high mark, and George Macdonald, poet also, with a long list of works to his credit, were both born in 1824. Wilkie Collins died in 1889. Sydney Dobell, who gave much promise as a poet, and died in 1874, was also thirteen. Wilkie Collins's Woman in White, published in 1860, remains, perhaps, the most famous example of that skill in the construction of a peculiar form of plot which excited, at last, the emulation of Charles Dickens. Among men of science, John Tyndall (died 1893) was aged seventeen, and Thomas Henry Huxley (died 1895) twelve, both of them brilliant men of letters as well as able men of science. Edward Hayes Plumptre, divine and poet (died 1891), was nineteen. William Hepworth Dixon, who died in 1879, after an active literary life, was sixteen. Philip James Bailey, who published, in 1839, the remarkable poem of Festus, was twenty-one at the beginning of the reign. John Westland Marston (died 1890), a dramatic poet, who produced several good plays on the stage, was seventeen; and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, one of our ablest and most patient students of Shakespeare, was seventeen. Charles Kingsley and "George Eliot" were eighteen.

56. Charles Kingsley was born in 1819 in the vicarage of Holne, on the border of Dartmoor. After being at school in Clifton and Helston, he was sent to King's College, London, and went thence, in 1838, to Magdalene College, Cambridge. He graduated with high honours, took a curacy at Eversley, in Hampshire, where in 1844 he became rector. In that year he married. In 1847 he first made his genius known by publishing a dramatic poem, The Saint's Tragedy, upon the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. In 1848 he was stirred deeply by the

events of the new Revolution in France. There was a menacing Chartist movement in England, and Kingsley, joining himself with F. D. Maurice, whose books had strongly influenced his mind, laboured to put Christian life into the masses, while showing sympathy with their best hopes, and knowledge of the evils that then cried for remedy. Kingsley's Alton Locke, in 1850, and his Yeast, in 1851, represented the stir of the time, and showed what it meant in the long struggle towards a better life on earth. Other novels and poems followed: Westward ho! in 1855; Two Years Ago, in 1857; Andromeda, and other Poems, in 1858; The Water Babies; a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, in 1863; Hereward the Wake, in 1866. There were books also that helped to diffuse his love of nature, as Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore, in 1857; with writings upon social history and volumes of sermons. In 1859 Charles Kingsley was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and also Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. In 1869 he obtained a Canonry in Chester. In 1873 he became Canon of Westminster. In January, 1875, he died. A fitting biography

was published by the companion of all his thoughts, his widow, in 1879.

57. "George Eliot was the name taken by a novelist of rare genius, whose maiden name was Mary Ann Evans. She was born in November, 1819, at Griff, near Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, where her father was land agent and surveyor to several estates. When she was about fifteen her mother died, and she was youngest daughter in the house. She went to a school at Nuneaton, and removed with her father, in 1841, to Foleshill, near Coventry. The elder children then were all married, and at Foleshill she was alone with her father, from whom she took some features for her Caleb Garth, in Middlemarch. The head master of the Coventry Grammar School gave Miss Evans lessons in Greek and Latin. She taught herself Hebrew; learnt French, German, and Italian from another master; and music, in which she took intense delight, from the organist of St. Michael's Church, at Coventry. Her chief friends at Coventry were a gentleman and his wife, of high intellectual and personal character, who both wrote useful books, and in whose house she found the intellectual society she needed. But her friends had put aside the Christianity to which at Nuneaton she had been strongly attached. The society at the house of her friends was intellectual and sceptical. Another friend was

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found, whose influence was yet stronger in the same direction. Taking up the unfinished work of a daughter of her new friend's, Mary Ann Evans completed a translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu, which was published in 1846. Such work brought her at times to London, and into the society of thinkers like those whom she had learned to respect at Coventry. In 1849 her father died, and she left Foleshill. Her home then was with her Coventry friends till 1851. She next removed to London, to assist Mr. John Chapman in editing a new series of the Westminster Review. This brought her into relation with George Henry Lewes.

George Henry Lewes, born in 1817, had begun the world as clerk in the house of a Russian merchant. He had an active, eager intellect, with equal appetite for literature and science, but none for the counting-house. He left business, studied in Germany for a year or two, and then began to write, producing many books and contributing to many journals. He wrote A Biographical History of Philosophy, of which there was an enlarged fourth edition in 1871. In 1846 he wrote two novels : Ranthorpe; and Rose, Blanche, and Violet; in 1847 and 1848, a tragedy, The Noble Heart, which was acted at Manchester in 1848; A Life of Robespierre, in 1849. He was enthusiastic for the Positivism of Auguste Comte, and published a book on Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences, in 1853. The philosophy of Comte has also strong supporters in a few able and earnest English thinkers, subject to impulse originally received from some enthusiastic students of Wadham College, Oxford, who have carried out their ideal in after-life. Its aim is generous and just. It is, indeed, little more than the French crystallisation into a single and harmonious theory of the main thought of our time, that only by the fidelity of each one to the highest sense of duty we advance Humanity. To most people this is a part of religion; to Comte it was the clear and perfect whole, expressed in formulas, and shaped into a science, of which the worst enemy can only say that it is a truth, but not the whole truth; and a truth that, rightly acted on, can only work for the well-being of the world.

What was fascinating in this doctrine Miss Evans felt. She was obscure, and without sense of responsibility to others, when she joined her life to that of Mr. Lewes by a faithful bond, though there were reasons why it could not have "the social sanction." It was he who caused her to try her strength in writing tales.

In 1856 the first work of George Eliot-Scenes of Clerical Life-was offered to Blackwood's Magazine, and the first of the three stories, Amos Barton, began to appear in 1857. In January, 1859, Adam Bede was published, and "George Eliot" took her place in the front rank of English novelists. The Mill on the Floss followed, in 1860; Silas Marner, in 1861 ; Romola, in 1863; Felix Holt, in 1866; The Spanish Gipsy, a poem, in 1868; Middlemarch, in 1872; Daniel Deronda, in 1877; and in 1879, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Mr. Lewes had founded in 1865 the Fortnightly Review-afterwards made monthly, without change of name-for the purpose of bringing within one journal both sides of the discussion of all matters that concerned the general well-being. The conception was a noble one. It was followed by the establishment, in 1866, of the Contemporary Review, with like purpose, but with a religious bias, as in the Fortnightly the bias would be Positivist. These were followed yet again by another monthly, in 1877, the Nineteenth Century, which vigorously labours also to bring the best minds, of all forms of thought, into council with the public. In May, 1879, Mr. Lewes died. In May, 1880, "George Eliot " was married to an old and devoted friend, Mr. John Walter Cross. On the 22nd of the following December she died, after a short illness.

66 George Eliot's" novels are admirably various in their scenery. They now paint Methodist life in the days of Wesley; now Medieval Catholicism in the days of Savonarola; now the whole range of the Jewish nationality. They are alike in their rich play of humour and pathos, in sympathy with the varieties of human character, in the spirit of humanity that is allied with every honest aspiration; they are alike also in the steadiness with which every one exalts the life that is firmly devoted to the highest aim it knows. Again and again there is the type of the weak pleasure-loving mind, too easily misled, and of the firm spirit, capable of self-denial, true to its own highest sense of right. "George Eliot's" novels will cloud no true faith; they are the work of a woman of rare genius, whose place is, for all time, among the greatest novelists our country has produced.

58. John Ruskin was born in 1819, only son of a successful wine merchant, who had fine taste in higher things than wine. Beginning his teaching when, as a graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, he published his Modern Painters, in 1843-46, he in all his writings used his genius as faithfully.