Eminent Victorians

Eminent Victorians is a English biography collection by Lytton Strachey featuring the following biographical sketches: Cardinal Manning -- Florence Nightingale -- Dr. Arnold -- The end of General Gordon. THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian--ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it.