Yet in the far distance I can well conceive the world turning ...

Yet in the far distance I can well conceive the world turning wistfully in imagination, as to the culminating achievement of European culture, to the life of the University-bred classes in England of the mid-nineteenth century, set against the English landscape as it was, as it can be no more, but of which, nevertheless, some memorials remain with us to-day, in the garden at Kelmscott, in the hidden valleys of the Cotswolds, in that walled close where all the pride and piety, the peace and beauty of a vanished world seem to have made their last home under the spire of St. Mary of Salisbury.

But Aristophanes has given the best definition of the type that I know, 'an insider who enjoys his privileges and is regular in his duties to the outsiders' In surveying a period of history it is sometimes useful to step outside and see what happened next. Of late Victorian England the most obvious characteristics are the Imperialism of Beaconsfield and Chamberlain and the counterthrust of Gladstonian Liberalism; the emergence of a Socialist and, in a lesser degree, of a Feminist movement as calculable forces; the decay of the religious interest and the supersession of the aristocracy by the plutocracy, a process masked by the severe and homely court of Victoria, but growing precipitate, after the agricultural depression, with the influx of South African money and American brides.

Early Victorian had become a term of reproach when Victoria had still ten years to reign. It was the good fortune of England in the years we have been surveying to confront a sudden access of power, prosperity, and knowledge, with a solidly grounded code of duty and self-restraint.

In the fifties and sixties, the code still held good, but the philosophy on which it was based was visibly breaking up.