Portraits of the Nineties

The late Mr. Justin McCarthy’s vivid _Portraits of the Sixties_, the late Mr. George Russell’s admirable volume dealing with the men and women of the Seventies, and Mr. Horace H...

So wrote Mr. William Cory, one of the masters at Eton in the Sixties, concerning a favourite pupil, Lord Dalmeny, later to be widely famed as Earl of Rosebery and Prime Minister...

The Nineties were the high and palmy days of the great Randlords and the “Kaffir Circus.” The romance of the time was expressed, perhaps better than in the verse of Mr. Kipling,...

It was in the nature of things that the majestic and challenging personality of Mr. Gladstone should evoke such variety of worship and censure that even to-day, after all has be...

George Meredith was impatient of talk about life’s ironies; he took things as they came, accepted Fate’s decrees with fortitude, and did not blame Nature for being natural. That...

In the Berlin Conference days Bismarck described Lord Salisbury as “a lath painted to look like iron.” By the Nineties the sneer had lost point in every particular. To the dulle...

At the battle of Omdurman, fought on September 2, 1898, the Dervishes had 10,800 killed and some 16,000 wounded; the losses of the British and Egyptian forces amounted to only 4...

There are certain things that come to one only in maturity. One is a taste for Jane Austen. Another is a correct sense of the meaning and importance of such men as Spencer Compt...

It is related of Frederick Temple, when he was Bishop of London, that he offered two shillings to a cabman who had brought him from somewhere near Piccadilly to Fulham Palace. T...

In 1880 Lord Randolph Churchill was regarded as a trifler; in 1885 he was definitely numbered among the three or four men who counted in British politics; in 1890 he was, politi...

It struck me at the time that the reverend gentleman was fighting an unusually extinct Satan. For even in the Nineties the number of young men who desecrated the Sabbath in this...

The life of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, like that of the Chevalier d’Artagnan, was spent in three sets of duels. The first was with a great man’s men; the second was with the great...

One evening in the early summer of 1895 the newsboys were shouting “All the winners.” Yet one line on their placards gave the lie to that eternal cry which mocks the death of gr...

Those who seek the legislative monument of Sir William Harcourt must examine the Finance Act of 1894, which put real estate on the same footing as personal in the matter of deat...

When Mandell Creighton was Bishop of London it fell to him to admonish an earnest High Church Vicar, working in the East End, on the subject of incense. The Vicar, pleading hard...

I remember hearing John Morley—it was then impossible to conceive of him as containing the germ of John Viscount Morley—addressing one of the many “flowing tide” meetings which...

It was in the late Nineties that I first met the most talked-of journalist of his day. Though still on the sunny side of fifty, W. T. Stead gave the impression of age. His face,...

On the surface at least there was an incurable ordinariness about Henry Hartley Fowler, afterwards first Viscount Wolverhampton. His parts, though sound, were not brilliant; ima...

Aubrey Beardsley represented most authentically a special aspect of the Nineties. There were two main attitudes in the thought of the period. Most that was virile was Imperialis...

When any man declaims “Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” it is not easy to avoid the suspicion that (whatever his passion for principle) he is pretty sure that the heavens will not fa...

For nearly twenty years the name of Thomas Hardy had been associated with a constantly ascending literary reputation. _Under the Greenwood Tree_, emerging modestly in 1872, was...

“A picture to remember. Spencer with his noble carriage and fine red beard. Mr. Gladstone, seated on a low stool, discoursing as usual, playful, keen, versatile; Rosebery, sayin...

Sir Henry Morton Stanley made a double appeal to the imagination of the early Nineties. He represented both the old romance of adventurous travel and the new romance of mechanic...

I first met Justin McCarthy in the schoolroom of a little Gloucestershire village. It was during the short-lived “union of hearts” between the General Election of 1886 and the g...

The Nineties were rich in painters of all kinds. People bought pictures then, and all sorts of pictures; in those days of still happy and careless barbarism there was no veto on...

I have remarked in another place that the man who takes his religion too seriously stands suspect of not quite believing in it. Those who are never troubled with doubts are pron...

Dim enough now is the memory of the Parnell Commission. There are few who, without reference to record, could give an intelligent summary of the findings of the unhappy judges w...

What we do, are, and suffer journalistically was determined for us in the Nineties. The decade was the meeting-ground of opposing forces, and the battle between them was largely...

Theatrically the Nineties were less interesting than the preceding decade. The Eighties saw the great glories both of the Savoy and the Lyceum; they might be likened to a glorio...