THE CENTURY AND ITS GREAT MEN.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 1800, 3 June 1891, Page 4

THE CENTURY AND ITS GREAT MEN.

The century is dying (says the St. James' Gazette) before our eyes. The great men who began it are going, one after the other. Browning is gone, and Lord Tennyson has just kept bis 81st birthday. Carlyle is gone, and Newman, the last long survivor of his fellows, goes to join him. The veteran James Martineau is still productive, but he is in his 86th year. Darwin, the century's most typical man of science, is gone ; and its two greatest novelists, Thackeray and Dickenß went long ago. Mr Kinglake, born a year earlier than Diskens, a year later than Thackeray, is still witb us, in his 80th year. Even Mr Ruskin, one migbt say, already belongs to the glories of a last year. Of jtbe age which follows, pet us enjoy what we can, and not assume to pronounce prematurely the final judgment. But we may quote the judgment of the keen observer now dead. ' This is not a day,' said John Henry Newman in 1858, f for great writers, but for good writing, and a great deal of it.' He thought the «poch of England's classical literature migbt well be over. Already its epoch of great writers had ended for a term of about 300 years — as long, that is, as the period from Sappho to Demosthenes, or from Ennius to Pliny. We should have no right to be disappointed, he held, if the classical period were close upon its termination. Literature, according to Newman, is the autobiography of the race of humanity. ' Literature is to man in some sort what autobiography is to the individual. His Life and Remains.' It is a definition worth reflecting on. England will, of course, go on writing her autobiography, and it will be ivoluminous. The question is whether it will be classical.