reign of Victoria is the history of great advances in art and science, and of remarkable inventions of time and labour-saving machines. Ships now cross the Atlantic ocean in less than six days, and trains travel at marvellous rates of speed. By the aid of the electric telegraph messages are carried across oceans and continents with the speed of lightning, while the more recent invention of the telephone enables us to carry on a conversation with friends many miles away. The phonograph keeps a record of the voices of the living and the dead, while the photograph keeps fresh in our memory the features of the absent. Electricity is now extensively used as a motive power to drive machinery, to propel trains, and to furnish light for our homes, shops, and streets. Science has made wonderful progress in nearly every department of human knowledge. Geology, biology, chemistry, history, political economy, language, medicine, theology, and politics, have each and all felt the influence of the scientific spirit and its methods of discovery and investigation. The age has been particularly great in writers of history, such as Hallam, Macaulay, Grote, Green, Froude, Freeman, Gardiner, Leckey, and Carlyle. In fiction, we have had Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot (Mrs. Cross), Charlotte Bronté, and a host of others only second to these great names. Tennyson (still living), the poet Laureate, and Robert Browning are great names in the realm of poetry, while Matthew Arnold has taught us the art of a true and lofty criticism of life and literature.
17. Conclusion.—These are a few, and only a few, of the names of English writers of the present century. So widespread has education become, and so numerous the fields of human activity, that where, a century ago, ten men distinguished themselves in art, science, or literature, a thousand now can be found. We have followed the stream of English history down from its small beginnings in the first century to the present day. We have seen the gradual rise of parliamentary government and the steady growth of political freedom under the Plantagenets and the Lancastrians. We have seen, also, the struggle against despotism and tyranny under the Tudors and Stuarts, and the recovery of lost liberties by the Revolution of 1688. We have watched the steady increase in wealth and material prosperity under the Georges, and we have rejoiced at the success of the great moral movement in the 18th century, which roused England from spiritual deadness, and
