J G Lockhart
-JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART-
Between the first and the fiftieth years of Victoria’s reign there arose and flourished and died a new generation of great men. Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, in his later and better style; George Eliot, Charles Reade, George Meredith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, stand in the very front rank of novelists; in the second line are Charles Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, Lever, Trollope, and a few living men and women. Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, are the new poets. Carlyle, Freeman, Froude, Stubbs, Green, Lecky, Buckle, have founded a new school of history; Maurice has broadened the old theology; Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lockyer, and many others have advanced the boundaries of science; philology has become one of the exact sciences; a great school of political economy has arisen, flourished, and decayed. As to the changes that have come upon the literature of the country, the new points of view, the new creeds, these belong to another chapter.
CHARLES DARWIN
There has befallen literature of late years a grievous, even an irreparable blow. It has lost the salon. There are no longer grandes dames de par le monde, who attract to their drawing-rooms the leaders and the lesser lights of literature; there are no longer, so far as I know, any places at all, even any clubs, which are recognised centres of literature; there are no longer any houses where one will be sure to find great talkers, and to hear them talking all night long. There are no longer any great talkers—that is to say, many men there are who talk well, but there are no Sydney Smiths or Macaulays, and in houses where the Sydney Smith of the day would go for his talk, he would not be encouraged to talk much after midnight. In the same way, there are clubs, like the Athenæum and the Savile, where men of letters are among the members, but they do not constitute the members, and they do not give altogether its tone to the club.
Fifty years ago there were two houses which, each in its own way, were recognised centres of literature. Every man of letters went to Gore House, which was open to all; and every man of letters who could get there went to Holland House.
Saml Rogers
-SAMUEL ROGERS-