PREFACE The Essays included in this volume originally appeared in
the Church Quarterly Review, and were-with the exception of that on
Tennyson, which came out in 1893-written by my husband between 1878
and 1883, the period of his life when there was least pressure on
his time, and when he was therefore more free than at any other to
devote himself to those literary studies which were always among
the chief interests and pleasures of his life. He never revised the
Essays, and I have thought it best to leave them practically
unaltered, in spite of certain anachronisms which the lapse of time
has made inevitable. I may perhaps be permitted to relate that,
when the essay on Julian was published, Mr. Gladstone was so struck
with it that he wrote to ask the name of the author, and was
answered by the Editor of the Church Qularterly in the words, "You
have not far to look." I should like to express my gratitude to the
Bishop of Rochester for writing the Memoir which precedes the
Essays at a time when his work was more than usually pressing, and
to thank those friends who have kindly contributed recollections of
my husband's life and work. My thanks are also due to the Editor of
the Church Quarterly Review for his courtesy in allowing me to
reprint the Essays. KATHLEEN LYTTELTON. CONTENTS. Memoir of the
Author. Tennyson. Browning. The Poetry of Doubt (Arnold and Cough).
Carlyle's Life and Works. George Eliot. Modern Pagan Poetry
(Swinburne and James Thomson). The Pagan Under the Emperor Julian.
Memoir of the Author. I have undertaken to record partly in my own
words and partly in the words of others some-thing of the character
and mental history of the writer of these Essays. He hated
memorials and advertisements but we owe it to ourselves and to what
he was to make this much mention of it. For it may be confidently
said that by his death his land and his Church have lost one of the
strongest, best-furnished, and, so far as man may judge, best of
her sons. There was much in him that would lend itself to an ideal
description- the physical beauty of his manhood, the grace and
variety of his knowledge, the strength and sanity of his judgment,
the union of strong conviction with largeness of mind, the equal
gifts for action and for counsel, the consistent success in all to
which he put his hand yet his personality was not one of those
which take the world by storm-his influence, strong and steady as
it was, was not of the magical sort. He was one whom every one
could admire and respect, but not one who was quickly known, or
whom many knew well. He owed a great debt to circumstances, and he
set his own stamp on what he received. Few of the sons of that
noble generation of high-souled men and lofty loyalties with which
the Victorian age opened began life under better auspices. He was
the fifth son of a father- the good Lord Lyttelton, as, to borrow
the soubriquet of an ancestor, he may well be called-whose strong
personality almost constrained to a high standard of living and
thinking the lives of his eight sons-a brilliant scholar, Senior
Classic at Cambridge, a bold rider, a man of exact method and
capacity for business, and one in whom the virility of an impulsive
and boyish nature and unfaltering submission to the discipline of
religion produced a blend as rare as it was simple and
spontaneous...
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