Fifty Years Ago

by Walter Besant

THOMAS MOORE

Wm. L. Bowles

-REV. WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES-

‘VATHEK’ BECKFORD

(From a Medallion)

It is difficult to understand, at first, that between the time of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats, and that of Dickens, Thackeray, Marryat, Lever, Tennyson, Browning, and Carlyle, there existed this generation of wits, most of them almost forgotten. Those, however, who consider the men and women of the Thirties have to deal, for the most part, with a literature that is third-rate. This kind becomes dreadfully flat and stale when it has been out for fifty years; the dullest, flattest, dreariest reading that can be found on the shelves in the sprightly novel of Society, written in the Thirties.