Tithe question: progress whither? The answer is agreed. But poetry and philosophy, ...

Tithe question: progress whither? The answer is agreed. But poetry and philosophy, the new history and the new science, had together posed a more fundamental question, evolving what? And the dominant minds of the seventies were those who had faced the question most boldly: who had, like Darwin himself, grown slowly to fame, and spoke with the equal authority of unquestioned genius and long meditation, who embodied in themselves the revolution in English thought, who were masters of the tradition and had found the tradition wanting.

These are, beyond all others, Ruskin,

Browning, and Alan Eliot.

They had all been reared in the same atmosphere of middle-class industry and piety; they shared the same gifts of observation and analysis; and they were, one audaciously, the other dramatically, and Alan Eliot gravely and philosophically, in revolt.

Round them, growing up under their shadow, we see a younger group, marked with the same imprint, and bearers of the same ideas-the agnostics, Morley and Leslie Carl: the romantics, Morris and Burne-Jones, Philip Webb and Swinburne: aesthetic Pater and disconcerting Meredith.