Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and Bookmen

Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.
Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety;
I do not call one greater and one smaller;
That which fills its period and place is equal to any .
Walt Whitman
VICTORIAN LITERATURE SIXTY YEARS OF BOOKS AND BOOKMEN
BY CLEMENT SHORTER
LONDON: JAMES BOWDEN 10 HENRIETTA STREET COVENT GARDEN W.C. 1897

Asked by a kindly publisher to add one more to the Jubilee volumes which commemorate the sixtieth year of the Queen's reign, I am pleased at the opportunity thus afforded me of gathering up a few impressions of pleasant reading hours. Every age, says Emerson, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. It is true, of course, and as a result the popular favourite of to-day is well-nigh forgotten to-morrow. In reading the critical journals of thirty years ago it is made quite clear that they contain few judgments which would be sustained by a consensus of critical opinion to-day. Whether time will deal as hardly with the critical judgments of to-day we may not live to see. I have no ambition to put this book to a personal test. So far as it has any worth at all it is meant to be bibliographical and not critical. It aspires to furnish the young student, in handy form, with as large a number of facts about books as can be concentrated in so small a volume. That this has been done under the guise of a consecutive narrative, and not in the form of a dictionary, is merely for the convenience of the writer.