Yesterday week, Sir Stafford Northeote delivered a very in- teresting
address at Birmingham to the Suburban Institutes Union, on Literature as the greatest monument of human activity which the earth contains. We have commented suffi- ciently on the leading idea of this address elsewhere, bat may add here that Sir Stafford North cote distinctly expressed his belief that, since the death of Milton, there had been no great development of literary force in this country which could com- pare at all with the development of scientific force. We cannot agree with him. Surely, Sir Walter Scott represents a literary force even greater, taken in all its aspects, than Milton himself, —certainly a force that has affected the other Continental literatures much more powerfully than ever Milton did. In any case, the remarkable outburst of literary activity which began with Cowper and Burns, and ended with Keats and Shelley, and which included not only Sir Walter Scott, but Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, must be regarded as having added more to the literature of England than any other period of equal length since the death of Shakespeare.
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