have done something to turn his ideas and schemes into accomplished facts, have effected some moral or social reform, have set a mark on history.  It must be remembered that a great writer’s fame is often a posthumous growth, and we must be very careful not to attribute to a famous author a consciousness in his lifetime of his subsequent, or even of his contemporary, influence.  It is undoubtedly true that Ruskin and Carlyle affected the thought of their time to an extraordinary degree.  Ruskin summed up in his teaching an artistic ideal of the pursuit and influence of beauty, while Carlyle inculcated a more combative theory of active righteousness and the hatred of cant.  But Ruskin’s later years were spent in the shadow of a profound sense of failure.  He thought that the public enjoyed his pretty phrases and derided his ideas; while Carlyle felt that he had fulminated in vain, and that the world was settling down more comfortably than ever into the pursuit of bourgeois prosperity and dishonest respectability.

And yet if, on the other hand, one compares the subsequent fame of men of action with the fame of men of letters, the contrast is indeed bewildering.  Who attaches the smallest idea to the personality of the Lord Lichfield whom Dr. Johnson envied?  Who that adores the memory of Wordsworth knows anything about Lord Goderich, a contemporary prime minister?  The world reads and re-reads the memoirs of dead poets, goes on pilgrimage to the tiny cottages where they lived in poverty, cherishes the smallest records and souvenirs of them.  The names of statesmen and generals become dim except to professed historians, while the memories of great romancers and lyrists, and even of lesser writers still, go on being revived and redecorated.  What would Keats have thought, as he lay dying in his high, hot, noisy room at Rome, if he had known that a century later every smallest detail of his life, his most careless letters, would be scanned by eager eyes, when few save historians would be able to name a single member of the cabinet in power at the time of his death?

There is a charming story told by Lord Morley, of how he once met Rossetti in the street at Chelsea when a general parliamentary election was going on, and it transpired, after a few remarks, that Rossetti was not even aware that this was the case.  When he was informed, he said with some hesitation that he supposed that one side or other would get in, and that, after all, it did not very much matter.  Lord Morley, telling the anecdote, said that he himself had forgotten which side did get in, from which he concluded that it had not very much mattered.