III.

bers of his Ministry were regarded with the most favour who СНАР. were supposed to be the least identified with Lord Liverpool's opinions. So has it constantly been from the days of Alfred to the days of Victoria. Contemporary critics have enthusiastically applauded the statesmen who spent their time in a vigorous defence of existing abuses. Posterity has almost unanimously awarded the chief fame to their opponents who passed their days in assailing them. The fame of Lord Liverpool in 1816 overshadowed the slender authority of Lord Grey. The position of Lord Ellenborough was far more enviable than that of Sir Samuel Romilly. Yet the barren honours of Lord Grey and Romilly seem now far preferable to the stars and sinecures with which Lord Liverpool and Lord Ellenborough were rewarded. The latter are associated with traditions which have been abandoned in disgust; the former are identified with reforms, which have given peace and happiness to a contented people.

СНАР.
IV.

English
Literature.

CHAPTER IV.

THE reign of George III. will always be remarkable for the development of British industry and British trade. The ability and ingenuity of a few great men placed new resources at the disposal of the nation, and by substituting the steam engine for the hand of man; the road for the track; and the canal for the road; increased a hundredfold the resources of the country, and its capacity for industrial enterprise. It is questionable whether great wealth and great prosperity are favourable to the cultivation of literature, science, and art. The noblest literature of Rome was, indeed, produced amidst the prosperity and wealth which made the reign of Augustus Cæsar memorable. The Tuscan school flourished under the patronage of the wealthiest and the wisest of the Medicis. But Raphael in modern history, and Virgil in the ancient world, owed more to the tone of society and to the tone of thought of the ages in which they lived than to the patronage of Augustus or the Medicis. Horace did more to perpetuate the name of Mæcenas than Mæcenas did to cultivate the genius of the poet. This country has become much wealthier since the days of Elizabeth and the days of Anne. But it has failed to produce a second Shakespeare or a second Dryden.

The almost unanimous verdict of competent critics has pronounced the most brilliant era of English literature to have commenced with the age of Elizabeth and to have closed with that of Anne. The century and a half which is embraced in this period produced the two greatest masters of the English language-Shakespeare

and Milton. But other writers, some of whom were hardly inferior to these, dignified this golden period of English literature. Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Raleigh, Cowley, Selden, Clarendon, Bunyan, Butler, Defoe, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, and Bolingbroke, in various ways illustrated and enriched the noble language of their common country. A circumstance, with which they had no direct connection themselves, stereotyped the expressions which they used. The Bible was translated into English at the very time at which Shakespeare was writing. The Reformation placed the work in the hands of every Englishman who could read. The language of the Bible became the language of the nation; the expressions which its translators used became for ever part and parcel of English speech. An ordinary person can hardly read the pre-Reformation writers without a glossary. No one requires a key to enable him to appreciate the beauties of the Elizabethan dramatist or to understand Raleigh's "History of the World.'

Success in any line of life usually leads to imitation. Where one man achieves fame, a hundred others think that they may become equally famous. Birmingham ware has in every age been foisted on a credulous public; and Brummagem has appeared in spurious literature and art nearly as frequently as in spurious silver and gold. The scholars of Raphael imitated with matchless fidelity the finish of their master; and an uncritical age, enchanted with the beauty of their pigments, forebore to notice their want of originality and power. Exactly the same thing occurred in literature in the eighteenth century. Few writers, indeed, had the hardihood to imitate the imagery of Shakespeare, the diction of Milton, or the vigour of Dryden. But a dozen writers succeeded in copying the rhythmical excellence of Pope. Though, however, they caught the trick of Pope's style, they failed to imitate the vigour of his language. Churchill, the

CHAP.

IV.

CHAP.
IV.

Intellectual

most successful of them all, attacked with power and
venom some of the vices of his time. No satire was
ever more severe than his description of Fitzpatrick, the
nameless thing, in the Rosciad.' But the Rosciad'
ranks as a poem below the Dunciad.' Three times in
the century, indeed, different writers, each of considerable
power, cast a temporary ray upon the darkness which
obscured the literature of England. For the style and
finish of their pieces, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper have
never been surpassed. The Elegy,' The Deserted Vil-
lage,' and the Lines on my Mother's Picture,' are ad-
mirable examples of perfection in composition. But,
though these pieces are evidently the productions of intel-
lects naturally of a high order, and polished with the
most careful culture, they have failed to place their
authors in the very first flight of English poets. The
polish is almost too bright, and its brightness seems de-
signed to atone for the absence of higher qualities. If,
however, such authors as Gray, Cowper, or Goldsmith
failed to attain the highest rank in English literature,
what shall be said of the lesser poets, who were read and
admired during the same period?

Augustus still survives in Maro's strain,
And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign.
Great George's acts let tuneful Cibber sing,
For nature formed the poet for the king.

During the first seventy years, then, of the eighteenth activity in century, the literature of Britain gradually declined from the latter the high position which it had occupied in the reign of eighteenth Anne; but, during the latter portion of this period, at any

century.

rate, the gradual decadence of imaginative literature was accompanied with a remarkable development of reasoning, investigation and research. The foremost thinkers of the time were no longer satisfied with accepting the theories which their predecessors had venerated as axioms, and

the boldest inquiries were freely pushed into every branch of human knowledge. This intellectual activity was equally visible in England and Scotland. In physical science, Scotland produced Black and Hutton; England, Priestley and Cavendish; Scotland the land of his birth, England the country of his adoption, have an equal claim to the merit of John Hunter's profound investigations into the structure of men and animals. The glory attaching to the great inventions of the period belongs equally to the two countries. England produced the machines which revolutionised every branch of the textile industry; a Scotchman discovered the motive power, without which these inventions would have been deprived of half their value.

CHAP.

IV.

The profound investigations which were made by Black, Priestley and Cavendish in physical science; the knowledge of the anatomy of the lower forms of animals which John Hunter succeeded in acquiring, and the foundations which Hutton laid of the modern science of geology, had ultimately a prodigious effect on the thinking portion of British men and women. This effect will, however, be more conveniently considered in connection with the great religious movement which commenced towards the close of the first half of the nineteenth century, and which was in reality the reaction of the more superstitious portion of the community against the free thought which scientific investigation had produced. For the present, therefore, it is unnecessary to refer any further to the purely scientific investigations of the eighteenth century. But the same intellectual activity, which animated Priestley and Black, characterised also another class of thinkers, who exercised an enormous influence on the minds of succeeding generations. The decade in which Black was born gave birth to Adam Smith; and Adam Smith may be said to have changed the whole Adam theory of government, and in this way to have contributed

Smith.