Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 099, March, 1876

Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added by the transcriber.
THE CENTURY—ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
SKETCHES OF INDIA.
THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.
BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF PATRICIA KEMBALL.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
We have presented a feeble sketch of a century that stands out from its fellows, not as a mere continuation, or even intensification, of them—a hundred annual circuits of the earth in its orbit as little distinguished by intellectual or material achievement as those repetitions of the old beaten track through space are by astronomical incident—but as an epoch sui generis , a century d'elite , picked out from the long ranks of time for special service, charged by Fate with an extraordinary duty, and decorated for its successful performance. Those of its historic comrades even partially so honored are few indeed. They will not make a platoon—scarce a corporal's guard. We should seek them, for instance, in the Periclean age, when eternal beauty, and something very like eternal truth, gained a habitation upon earth through the chisel and the pen; in the first years of the Roman empire, when the whole temperate zone west of China found itself politically and socially a unit, at rest but for the labors of peace; and in the sixteenth century, when the area fit for the support of man was suddenly doubled, when the nominal value of his possessions was additionally doubled by the mines of Mexico and Peru, and when his mental implements were in a far greater proportion multiplied by the press.
The last of these periods comes nearest to our standard. The first had undying brilliance in certain fields, but the scope of its influence was geographically narrow, and its excessively active thought was not what we are wont to consider practically productive, its conquests in the domain of physical science being but slender. The second was in no sense originative, mankind being occupied, quietly and industriously, in making themselves comfortable in the pleasant hush after the secular rattle of spear and shield. The third was certainly full of results in art, science and the diffusion of intelligence through the upper and middle strata of society. It might well have celebrated the first centennial of the discovery of printing or of the discovery of America by assembling the fresh triumphs of European art, so wonderful to us in their decay, with the still more novel productions of Portuguese India and Spanish America. But the length of sea—voyages prosecuted in small vessels with imperfect knowledge of winds and currents, and the difficulties of land-transportation when roads were almost unknown, would have restricted the display to meagre proportions, particularly had Vienna been the site selected. Few visitors could have attended from distant countries, and the masses of the vicinage could only have stared. The idea, indeed, of getting up an exhibition to be chiefly supported by the intelligent curiosity of the bulk of the people would not have been apt to occur to any one. The political and educational condition of these was at the end of the century much what it had been at the beginning. Labor and the laborer had gained little.