[Illustration: Rev. J. G. Wood.]
[Illustration: Dean Church.]
English letters have suffered by the removal of many whose services
in one way or another have been great: the prose-painter Richard
Jefferies; the pure and beneficent Mrs. Craik, better known as Miss
Muloch; Matthew Arnold, poet, educationalist, critic, whose verse
should outlive his criticisms; the noble astronomer Richard Proctor;
Gustave Masson, the careful biographer of Milton; Laurence Oliphant,
gifted and eccentric visionary; the naturalist J. G. Wood; the
explorer and orientalist Burton; the historians Kinglake, Froude, and
Freeman; the great ecclesiastics Bishop Lightfoot, Canon Liddon,
Archbishop Magee of York, Dean Church, Dean Plumptre, and the
Cardinals Newman and Manning; Tennyson and Browning, poets whose
mantle has yet fallen on none; Huxley and Tyndall, eminent in
science; the justly popular preacher and writer Charles H. Spurgeon;
the orator and philanthropist John Bright, whose speeches delight
many in book-form; and Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist,
poet. To these we may add Eliza Cook and Martin Tapper, widely
popular a generation ago, and surviving into our own day; Lord
Lytton, known as "Owen Meredith," a literary artist, before he became
viceroy of India and British ambassador at Paris; and Professor Henry
Drummond, dead since 1897 began, and widely known by his "Natural Law
in the Spiritual World." Even so our list is far from complete.
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