Leslie Stephen's analyses of the novelists and poets of the mid-nineteenth century are some of his most illuminating works of literary criticism. He studies the philosophy embedded in the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; he writes engagingly about the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott as well as the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, William Makepeace Thackeray (whose nephew by marriage he was), and George Eliot; and he dissects...