. . . I hear the ghost of late Victorian England whimpering
on the grave thereof.--G. M. YOUNG

I N A COLD, WINTER RAIN, four days before the beginning
of the new year, a hearse transported the body of George
Eliot to Highgate Cemetery. She had caught cold at the
Saturday Popular Concert two weeks previously and was
dead on December 22, 1880. The Great Victorians, few with
their garlands still unwithered, were passing from the scene.
It would be only a few years before Lawson, Philip Carey's
friend, could say: "Damn the Great Victorians. Whenever
I open a paper and see Death of a Great Victorian, I thank
Heaven there's one more of them gone. Their only talent
was longevity. . . ." ¹ Macaulay had been one of the first to
go, in 1859. The next decade, the 'sixties, saw death come to
Albert the Good, Clough, Mrs. Browning, Thackeray, Cob-
den, Mrs. Gaskell, and Dean Milman. By 1880 Dickens,
Grote, Mill, Bulwer, Lyell, Kingsley, Forster, Harriet Mar-
tineau, Walter Bagehot, and G. H. Lewes were gone. Carlyle
died on February 5, 1881, a feeble and disillusioned old man
who had had nothing to say to the new generation for
years. ² If the London press, symbol of all that Carlyle had
despised, was aware that Dostoevski had anything to say to
the West, it did not notice that he too had died this winter.

But the press did notice the death of a far more prominent

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