That is not the way it was. Whatever it was, its voices poured out speeches and rhymes and music of empyreal cast. The Swiss nationalized their railways and Norway granted suffrage for everyone except women. Only Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill, the establishment of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the birth of C. S. Lewis rescued 1898 from complete ignominy. A cacophonous century later, the great grown ghosts of 1809 loom in terrible judgment over cacoepistic politicians who whine their muddy diction, sham poets who slur doggerel on public occasions, and pithecoid rock singers who screech and scratch and find no finale.
Style is dead.
But them he cannot take. Cory, like Tennyson, died in 1892, two years before Gladstone's queen dismissed him with a brief chat about the weather and no thanks for the years that had turned him grey. Acta est fabula.