Other high names there are upon the front of the century.
Macaulay, Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill (one of the earliest, by the way,
to recognise the genius of Browning), Alexandre Dumas, George Sand,
Victor Hugo, Ampere, Quinet, Prosper Merimee, Sainte-Beuve,
Strauss, Montalambert, are among the laurel-bearers who came into existence
betwixt 1800 and 1812.

When Robert Browning was born in London in 1812, Sheridan had still
four years to live; Jeremy Bentham was at the height
of his contemporary reputation, and Godwin was writing glibly
of the virtues of humanity and practising the opposite qualities,
while Crabbe was looked upon as one of the foremost of living poets.
Wordsworth was then forty, Sir Walter Scott forty-one, Coleridge forty-two,
Walter Savage Landor and Charles Lamb each in his forty-fifth year.
Byron was four-and-twenty, Shelley not yet quite of age,
two radically different men, Keats and Carlyle, both youths of seventeen.
Abroad, Laplace was in his maturity, with fifteen years more yet to live;
Joubert with twelve; Goethe, with twenty; Lamarck, the Schlegels,
Cuvier, Chateaubriand, Hegel, Niebuehr (to specify some leading names only),
had many years of work before them. Schopenhauer was only four-and-twenty,
while Beranger was thirty-two. The Polish poet Mickiewicz
was a boy of fourteen, and Poushkin was but a twelvemonth older;
Heine, a lad of twelve, was already enamoured of the great Napoleonic legend.
The foremost literary critic of the century was running about the sands
of Boulogne, or perhaps wandering often along the ramparts of the old town,
introspective even then, with something of that rare and insatiable curiosity
which we all now recognise as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve. Again,
the greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate,
was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at Tours,
undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures,