In 1859 founded the , and Thackeray became its first editor. Among his contributors were Tennyson, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Gaskell, ,… - Sidney Dark

Great literature is the creation of its age and its nation. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare's plays could have been written anywhere but in England and at any time but the later Renaissance. ... But while great literature is the child of one age it is the father of the next. As a nation reads, so it becomes. Let me decide what the people shall read, and you may make their laws. In saying this I am not merely referring to social and political and philosophic treatises. I am thinking of the whole gamut of a library, and particularly of works of the imagination.

, so Shakespeare relates, was often at the in , and there was the wonderful meetings of poets—Beaumont, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare himself—at the famous on the south side of .

Christianity is a revolutionary religion or it is nothing.