and lyric utterances of her husband.  All three have honoured themselves and their country by a majestic purity of moral and religious teaching—­an excellence shared by many of their contemporaries, whose powers would have won them a first place in an age and country less fruitful of genius; but not so conspicuous in some younger poets, later heirs of fame, whose lot it may be to carry on the traditions of Victorian greatness into another reign.

There are not a few writers of our day whose excellent prose work has won more of popular favour than their verse, which notwithstanding is of high quality.  Such was the “unsubduable old Roman,” Walter Savage Landor, a contemporary of Byron and Wordsworth, who long outlived them, dying in 1864.  Such—­to bring two extremes together—­are the critic and poet Matthew Arnold, the poet and theologian John Henry Newman.  Intimately associated in our thought with the latter, who has enriched our devotional poetry with one touching hymn, is Keble, the singer par excellence of the “Catholic revival,” and the most widely successful religious poet of the age, though only very few of his hymns have reached the heart of the people like the far more direct and fervent work of the Wesleys and their compeers.  He is even excelled in simplicity and passion, though not in grace and tenderness, by two or three other workers in the same field, who belong to our day, and whose verse is known more widely than their names.

We have several women-poets who are only less beloved and less well known than Mrs. Browning; but so far the greatest literary distinction gained by the women of our age and country, notwithstanding the far wider and higher educational advantages enjoyed by them to-day, has been won, as of yore, in the field of prose fiction.  More than a hundred years ago a veteran novelist, whose humour and observation, something redeeming his coarseness, have ranked him among classic English authors, referred mischievously to the engrossing of “that branch of business” by female writers, whose “ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart,” have not, however, availed to redeem their names from oblivion.  For some of their nineteenth-century successors at least we may expect a more enduring memory.

Numerous as are our poets, they are far outnumbered by the novelists, whose works are poured forth every season with bewildering profusion; but as story-tellers have always commanded a larger audience than grave philosophers or historians, and as our singers deal as much in philosophy as in narrative, perhaps in seeking for the cause of this overrunning flood of fiction we need go no further than the immensely increased number of readers—­a view in which the records of some English public libraries will bear us out.  We may therefore be thankful that, on the whole, such literature has been of a vastly purer and healthier character than of yore, reflecting that higher and better tone of public feeling which we may attribute, in part at least, to the influence of the “pure court and serene life” of the Sovereign.