is much more general than study. At the same time it is perhaps better to know something of Theocritus or Dante or Bacon than to gape at them as mere names, distant stars in the firmament conveying little or no meaning to the mind-and it is conceivable that even that knowledge at second hand might inspire a mind worthy of it to greater exertions and better things.

It is wholly impossible for the most industrious pen to record the number of writers of good abilities and ready literary gifts who contribute and have contributed to the periodicals of the time, sometimes ably and with insight, and with an extraordinarily good level of literary skill and workmanship. In the last chapter of this book an attempt will be made to trace the great development of the Press, and the many journals, magazines, and periodicals of all kinds which have come into existence during the later part of our age; but to cope with the immeasurable array of writers is beyond our skill. Their name is legion, and to the credit of our time and age it must be recorded that the greater number of them work in a manful and honest spirit, and that the corruption which existed in former times, the flattery of a patron, the indiscriminate partisanship which had no opinion but that of its employer, is very little known among them. There

is a class of purveyors of gossip and personalities copied from the American, for whom little can be said but it is fortunately unnecessary to speak of them at all.

CHAPTER VIII

OF THE LEADING PERIODICALS

AND NEWSPAPERS OF THE VICTORIAN ERA

IT is a common thing to hear said in our day that people read nothing but the magazines. There has indeed been such an extraordinary increase in our own time of periodical publications that we can imagine the conscientious student of the literature of the day hardly finding time to work his way through all the latest numbers in the space of a month, while a margin of leisure for looking at books would be to such a person a complete impossibility. It has, indeed, always been a standing mystery to us where the constantly increasing recruits of this noble army find any readers at all, and we have sometimes thought that the real cause of the constant multiplication might be that nobody in the present day feels called upon to read, while every one attempts to write, and desires to see him or herself in print.

The pages of the last new cheap magazine, however precarious its existence and doubtful its future, offer to the misunderstood genius an asylum at least as honourable and as lucrative as the wastepaper basket of the Nineteenth Century. There is possibly here an explanation of the mystery. For our purpose, however, it will be sufficient to give a glance at some of the chief periodicals of the day without attempting to throw a light upon the innumerable trivialities of this description which can hardly be called literature at all.

We have already recorded the origin of some of the older magazines which in most cases still exist. The three old quarterlies are still to the fore, and have still their public, though the immense competition of the monthly magazines has done much much to impair their position. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly, however, retain most of their prestige; the Westminster has perhaps of late fallen rather into the background. There are other magazines which are also published quarterly, but these are for the most part of a more or less technical kind. The Church Quarterly, for instance, is intended for Church of England readers, while the old-established but now defunct British Quarterly was the organ of the Nonconformists; the Asiatic Quarterly is of special interest to Anglo-Indians, the Historical Review to students of history,

and the Classical Review to scholars. But few if any of these are of first rate importance to the general public. The quarterly form has been decided to be too cumbrous for ordinary use, and the most serious and substantial magazines are now thrust upon an unwilling world every month. Three of these, in particular, which have been established in the last quarter of a century appear so much more akin to the old quarterlies than to any other form of periodical that we must speak of them before their contemporaries.

The first of these was due to the philanthropic enterprise of that goodly fellowship who had sounded the very depths of knowledge and convinced themselves that nothing could possibly exist beyond the reach of their plumb-line. The public, they decided, lacked instruction; it required to be told, and told over and over again, that its commonly received beliefs were out of date and must be given up forthwith on pain of the displeasure of science. For this purpose the Fortnightly Review was started in 1865 under the editorship of George Lewes, a very appropriate leader for such an enterprise, whose mantle fell some two years later upon the expectant shoulders of Mr. John Morley. The new periodical was to be Liberal in politics and agnostic where religious questions were concerned; it was at first published, as the title implied, every fortnight, but the