the Romantic or earlier periods. While the dogmatism of the Romantics may have been urging readers toward a belief in the spirituality to be found in nature, for instance, Houghton notes that Victorian dogmatism had perhaps a greater task at hand - a filling of the void left by emerging atheism and refinement of scientific thought. He indicates that dogmatic doctrine to the Victorians "was not only natural (given the climate of opinion) - it was attractive. They liked it. One might even say they asked for it. The prophets who put on the mantle of infallibility did so as much from public demand as from a personal sense of fitness" (154). Intellectual dogmatism, in a sense, became the "new religion" for many during the Victorian age. Houghton's examination of Victorian intellectual dogmatism reveals it to be not so much a striking contrast to Romantic revolution in poetry, for example, but rather, the next step, how ever more pronounced, of that same dogmatism that was practiced by the Romantics and their predecessors. ...
