One of the last survivors of the mid-Victorian time spoke of those ...

One of the last survivors of the mid-Victorian time spoke of those years as having the sustained excitement of a religious revival.

Excitement was Lord Morley's word also, and all through the fifties we are aware of the increasing tension of thought.

The Christian Socialists rose in ill-directed but fruitful revolt: the Pre-Raphaelites struck out for a freedom which they had not strength to reach.

Tennyson, in Maud, Dickens in Hard Times turned savagely on the age that had bred them. We miss the precise objectives, the concentrated purpose of the earlier time.