Mr. Asquith delivered the Romanes Lecture at Oxford on Satur-
day last, taking as his subject " 7.,ome Aspects of the Victorian Age." The newspaper reports were necessarily brief, as the lecture is to be published in book form. But we gather that Mr. Asquith dis- regarded the modem tendency to jeer at the Victorian age, and that he did justice to some of the many great men of that time. A reaction in their favour is coming, and is indeed inevitable. In science and industry the Victorian age transformed the world even more com- pletely than did the age of Columbus and the Renaissance. In literature and art the Victorian age has yet to be equalled by this generation, though our clever young people affect to scoff at Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning and Matthew Arnold, and forget that Mr. Hardy is a Victorian.
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