Mr. Stephen Coleridge has been privileged to know many eminent
men. Some of them he commemorates in a series of articles reprinted from the Western Mail under the title of Famous Victorians I have Known (Simpkin and Marshall, 10s. 6d.). He is more anxious to praise than to describe, forgetting perhaps that many of his readers know little about Ruskin, Newman, Manning, G. F. Watts and Leighton, Irving and Lord Avebury and others in the series. Matthew Arnold told him that he had never made £500 a year by his pen. Browning, he says, was disappointing as a talker, though others have expressed a contrary opinion. Mr. Coleridge takes very seriously the criticisms passed by some young writers on the Victorians and their age. He thinks that the spread of education has tended to bring literary work to something " of a dead level." Surely he is wrong.
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