For example, there are now in Great Britain no poets who are the peers of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning;--no brilliant essayists who are the peers of Carlyle and Macaulay, and no novelists who are the peers of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray.

In the United States we have no poets who are a match for Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell--no jurists who are the rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal Bancroft, Prescott and Motley.

These facts do not necessarily indicate (as some assert) a widespread intellectual famine.

The most probable explanation of the fact is that the mental forces in our day exert themselves in other directions.

This is an age of scientific research and scientific achievement.