Of the other glories of Victorian literature I can say nothing now. But before leaving this part of the subject, consider the wonderful variety of strong or beautiful English prose writing which that age produced. Froude, Macaulay, Newman, Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson are each supreme in very different styles; and all of them achieved excellence by an amount of labour which very few writers are now willing to bestow.
I have no wish to offer an unmeasured panegyric on an age which after all cannot be divested of the responsibility for making our own inevitable. It was to a considerable extent vulgarised by the amazing success of the Industrial Revolution. Napoleon's nation of shopkeepers did judge almost everything by quantitative standards, and by quantitative standards the higher values cannot be measured. There was no lack of prophets to point out a better way, but the nation as a whole was not unfairly caricatured as John Bull, that stout, comfortable, rather bullying figure which excited Ruskin's indignation, and which others
