The next two lectures, in a cross-section of the seventeenth century,
showed John Bunyan keenly alive to the literature and the life of the
world of Charles the Second's time, yet burning straight flame of
spiritual idealism with these for fuel. Over against him stood Samuel
Pepys, lusty and most amusing, declaring in every page of his _Diary_
the lengths to which unblushing paganism can go.
Representative of modern literature, Carlyle comes first with his
_Sartor Resartus_. At the ominous and uncertain beginning of our modern
thought he stood, blowing loud upon his iron trumpet a great blast of
harsh but grand idealism, before which the walls of the pagan Jericho
fell down in many places. Yet such an inspiring challenge as his was
bound to produce _reactions_, and we have them in many forms. Matthew
Arnold presses upon his time, in clear and unimpassioned voice, the
claim of neglected Hellenism. Rossetti, with heavy, half-closed eyes,
hardly distinguishes the body from the soul. Mr. Thomas Hardy, the Titan
of the modern world, whose heart is sore with disillusion and the
bitterness of the earth, and yet blind to the light of heaven that still
shines upon it, has lived into the generation which is reading Mr.
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