OCR Text |
Show VICTORIAN ERA WORTH WHILE Deserved Rebuke for Those Who Stills at Epoch Which Had Many Good Points. ! Why dc t lie heathen rage against the ' Vi. tonsil! epoch? Men who " lived through a great part of it found It exciting, interesting, amusing anil sometimes terrible. Talleyrand once said that nobody could understand the real delights of society unless be had lived before the French revolution. Similarly, what young person, or near-voung near-voung person, of today can experience the delights of the time when it was possible to begin at ease the first ehap- i ter of a volume of Dickens or Thackeray, Thack-eray, to wait impatiently for George Eliot's new novel or even to bear the shock of Robert Buchanan's famous review of Swinburne? There w ere, too, ; the terrors occasioned by Mrs. Harriet Reecher Stowe when her tierce Puritan friendship induced her to print the confidences of Lady Byron ! Our eyes were turned towards England, it is true, yet Hawthorne and Emerson were not only discussed, but read. Among the lesser lights there were Gail Hamilton Ham-ilton and James Fields, whose very satisfying literary essays were great features of the . Atlantic Monthly. People really did not spend their time in singing ".Tuanlta" or in reading "Ouida" on the sly, nor did nil the women dress in the magentas and sol-ferinos sol-ferinos In which contemporary satirists clothed the ladles of the middle periods of Victoria and Eugenie. The Crimean and Civil wars, so microscopic to the careless young, the Franco-Prussian struggle which preluded the chaos of 1914, were events that kept our minds from stagnating ; and there were doers and thinkers in Europe worth our constant con-stant consideration. Maurice Francis Egan in Yale Review. |