THE PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 
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imitation of a Greek play which is especially happy ; the ease and 
swing of its choruses reminding us more of the Greek dramatists 
than any other English poem does. The tendency to go back to 
Greece for inspiration which Morris and Swinburne display is one 
of the characteristics of the age. 
Not many years ago there passed away from us one of the 
strangest figures of modern times, that of the Scottish peasant, 
who, trusting to the light he felt to be in him, set himself to war 
against the darkness of his age, against its pleasant delusions, its 
cherished hopes, its comfortable doctrines ; who, in return, was 
accepted by that age as its oracle, flattered and caressed by society, 
and surnamed its prophet. Much of his crusade must appear to 
later ages fantastic and Quixotic. How could it be otherwise, 
when he acknowledged himself that the light which dwelled in 
him was half darkness 1 Yet in his main purpose, in his honest 
and often painful striving after truth — truth in thought as well as 
word and deed — he really deserved much of the enthusiasm which 
he created ; and his influence on our literature can scarcely prove 
anything but beneficial. To later times the man, Thomas Carlyle, 
will perhaps be more interesting than his writings. When will a 
biographer come forward who will give us an adequate account of 
the man, of his rugged Scotch nature and breeding, his self- won 
education drawn from German wells, his intense devotion to his 
work, which was in truth the very life by which he lived, and yet 
which was ever a painful labour to him, to be wrought by the 
sweat of his brow ; his egotism, his vanity, his great sincerity and 
belief in his own mission, his acute sensitiveness to trifles — all those 
things which make him so marked an individuality 1 
Of all branches of modern literature, we are told that the one 
which is the most active and the most sought after is that of 
Fiction. Yet, strange to say, we have no great living novelist. 
Only a short time ago we lost, in Mary Ann Evans, alias George 
Eliot, one of the greatest novelists England has ever produced. 
The truth of her character-drawing, the breadth of her sympathies, 
and the beauty of her style, all combine to make such works as 
Middlemarch lasting treasures of the English nation. 
Charles Reade was a pleasant and genial writer, as well as a 
zealous and eager opponent of wrongs and abuses. To his warm 
heart and graphic pen we owe, not only many a pleasant hour, but 
also the more humane regulation of our prisons. 
