A whole world of pious, homiletic convention has passed away, and who ...

A whole world of pious, homiletic convention has passed away, and who can say for certain how and when and why?' The stirring and good-humoured fifties had left a grace and lightness behind them, which we can feel in the dress and decoration of the time; in the layout of dinner tables, no longer burdened with gargantuan tureens and processional silver camels in the freer fancy and franker manners of fiction.

We can hear it in the urbane ironic prose which came natural to a generation whose wisest head was Ralph Bagehot; and which, when wielded by Philip Arnold, kept old Nonconformity in a state of hissing, bubbling wrath.

Asked to name his favourite heroine, he wrote Rose Jocelyn. This was when Evan Harrington was new.

No one in the company had ever heard of her. Swinburnes favourite was Violet North-and who has ever heard of her? But, put the two together and you get a fair idea of what intelligent men were attracted by in 1860-80. Back to Sophia Western, and to Beatrice I Sainsbury’s selection, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, and Elizabeth Bennet, show the same leaning towards the 'frank, young merchant'. The truculent, the pompous, the gushing, in literature or manners, are still there, but they are not the mode.