Victorian Worthies | Page 2

selection of
the portraits.
Three of my friends have been kind enough to read parts of the book
and to give me advice: the Rev. A. T. P. Williams and Mr. C. E.
Robinson, my colleagues here, and Mr. Nowell Smith, Head Master of
Sherborne. I owe much also to the good judgement of Mr. Milford's
reader. If I venture to thank them for their help, they are in no way
responsible for my mistakes. Writing in the intervals of
school-mastering I have no doubt been guilty of many, and I shall be
grateful if any reader will take the trouble to inform me of those which
he detects.
G.H.B.
WINCHESTER,

April 1920.

LIST OF PORTRAITS
Thomas Carlyle From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National
Portrait Gallery.
Sir Robert Peel From the painting by J. LINNELL in the National
Portrait Gallery.
Sir Charles Napier From the drawing by EDWIN WILLIAMS in the
National Portrait Gallery.
Lord Shaftesbury From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National
Portrait Gallery.
Lord Lawrence From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National
Portrait Gallery.
John Bright From the painting by W. W. OULESS in the National
Portrait Gallery.
Charles Dickens From the painting by DANIEL MACLISE in the
National Portrait Gallery.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the
National Portrait Gallery.
Charles Kingsley From a drawing by W. S. HUNT in the National
Portrait Gallery.
George Frederick Watts From a painting by himself in the National
Portrait Gallery.
John Coleridge Patteson From a drawing by WILLIAM RICHMOND.
(By kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)

Sir Robert Morier From a drawing by WILLIAM RICHMOND. (By
kind permission of Mr. Edward Arnold.)
Lord Lister From a photograph by MESSRS. BARRAUD.
William Morris From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National
Portrait Gallery.
John Richard Green From a drawing by FREDERICK SANDYS. (By
kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)
Cecil Rhodes From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National
Portrait Gallery.

INTRODUCTION
THE VICTORIAN ERA
We like to fancy, when critics are not at our elbow, that each Age in
our history has a character and a physiognomy of its own. The
sixteenth century speaks to us of change and adventure in every form,
of ships and statecraft, of discovery and desecration, of masterful
sovereigns and unscrupulous ministers. We evoke the memory of
Henry VIII and Elizabeth, of Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, of Drake
and Raleigh, while the gentler virtues of Thomas More and Philip
Sidney seem but rare flowers by the wayside.
The glory of the seventeenth century shines out amid the clash of arms,
in battles fought for noble principles, in the lives and deaths of
Falkland and Hampden, of Blake, Montrose, and Cromwell. If its
nobility is dimmed as we pass from the world of Shakespeare and
Milton to that of Dryden and Defoe, yet there is sufficient unity in its
central theme to justify the enthusiasm of those who praise it as the
heroic age of English history.
Less justice, perhaps, is done when we characterize the eighteenth
century as that of elegance and wit; when, heedless of the great names

of Chatham, Wolfe, and Clive, we fill the forefront of our picture with
clubs and coffee-houses, with the graces of Chesterfield and Horace
Walpole, the beauties of Gainsborough and Romney, or the
masterpieces of Sheraton and Adam. But each generalization, as we
make it, seems more imperfect and unfair; and partly because Carlyle
abused it so unmercifully, this century has in the last fifty years
received ample justice from many of our ablest writers.
Difficult indeed then it must seem to give adequate expression to the
life of a century like the nineteenth, so swift, so restless, so many-sided,
so full of familiar personages, and of conflicts which have hardly yet
receded to a distance where the historian can judge them aright. The
rich luxuriance of movements and of individual characters chokes our
path; it is a labyrinth in which one may well lose one's way and fail to
see the wood for the trees.
The scientist would be protesting (all this time) that this is a very
superficial aspect of the matter. He would recast our framework for us
and teach us to follow out the course of our history through the
development of mathematics, physics, and biology, to pass from
Newton to Harvey, and from Watt to Darwin, and in the relation of
these sciences to one another to find the clue to man's steady progress.
The tale thus told is indeed wonderful to read and worthy of the telling;
but, to appreciate it fully, it needs a wider and deeper knowledge than
many possess. And it tends to leave out one