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eighteenth century is a period of many and rapid changes. In it we see the birth and gradual development of modern England and of modern English literature, which in its breadth, its love of Nature, its imaginative power, and its faith, is at the furthest remove from the intellectual and cynical, though brilliant, age that preceded it. We pass from the narrowness of Pope's world to a world that has something of the large movement and exhaustless energy characteristic of Elizabethan England, and to a literature which is surpassed only by that of Shakespeare and his great contemporaries.

New Spiritual Growth. The most significant of these changes in English life, the motive force back of many others, is the rise of a new spiritual and moral sensitiveness. Men could not, in the very nature of things, long remain satisfied with mere reason or common sense as the rule of life; nor with a religion that appealed only to the intellect, and was often insincere and cold; nor with a philosophy that ignored or discredited man's inner life and the experiences of the soul. The nation was too inherently emotional and religious for such a mood to endure. The higher side. of man's nature began to assert itself, and those human hopes and longings which the "freezing reason" cannot satisfy began to stir and claim their due. It was inevitable that men should arise who would see through the shallowness and hardness of that life and of the system of thought that sustained it, and who, in the fuller power of a more perfect manhood, would throw a new spiritual energy and depth of meaning into politics, religion, philosophy, and poetry.

The Rise of Methodism. This growth of a new enthusiasm and faith is seen in a great wave of religious feeling that is associated with the rise of Methodism.

Early in the century, the Church of England shared in the prevailing coldness and unspirituality; the filling of its offices was tainted by political intrigue, and while its clergy were idle and often shamefully lax in manners and morals, their parishioners, too, were often indifferent. But with this condition of affairs many men came to be dissatisfied, especially JOHN and CHARLES WESLEY and GEORGE WHITEFIELD. These men felt that religion should be a more real and personal experience, and, by appealing to man's conscience and heart rather than to his reason, should be a sincere motive in life. Stirred by their own intense convictions, they went among the masses and preached in the open air to crowds of mechanics and farmers. Their marvelous eloquence and sincerity struck deep into the souls of thousands. The preaching of Whitefield made the tears trickle down the grimy faces of the Bristol colliers. A ship-builder in the colonies, who once heard him preach, said, “Every Sunday that I go to my parish church, I can build a ship from stem to stern under the sermon; but were it to save my soul, under Mr. Whitefield I could not lay a single plank." This new religious sincerity spread throughout England, and from the lower classes to society at large.

Deeper Sympathy with Man. With this revival of a more spiritual life in the midst of a jovial, unbelieving, and often coarse and brutal society, there came an increasing sense of human brotherhood and of the inherent dignity of manhood. English history contains few things more truly beautiful than the story of this awakening tenderness and compassion. The novel sense of pity became wide and heartfelt enough to embrace not men only, but all wantonly hurt and suffering creatures. Bull-baiting gradually fell into disfavor,

and the cruel sport known as bull-running was suppressed (1788). Individuals and committees examined the condition of the jails and tried to relieve the unspeakable sufferings of the captives. Statesmen and journalists labored for the abolition of slavery. The criminal was no longer dragged through crowded London streets to be hanged at Tyburn, a holiday spectacle to jeering or admiring throngs; the rigors of the code which condemned wretches to death for a trifling theft were gradually softened. So, in these and countless other ways, the social revulsion against brutality and violence which marked the rise of a new England unmistakably declared itself.

Walpole and Pitt. In the spirit of politics, too, we note a great change. This is evident in the striking contrast between the administration of ROBERT WALPOLE (1721-1742) and that of WILLIAM PITT (1757-1761). During the former, in an interval of profound peace, England had devoted herself to the development of trade and the business of money-making: the merchant gained in social position, and wealth rapidly increased. Walpole, the guiding spirit of this prosperous period, was the embodiment of its prosaic and mercantile character. Shrewd and narrow-minded, he had great business ability, but was incapable of approaching life from its ideal or imaginative side. Openly corrupt in his political methods, he declared that men would come out of their rhapsodies about patriotism, and grow wiser. Such traits are characteristic of early eighteenthcentury England. But, as we advance toward the middle of the century, those higher impulses which were manifesting themselves in so many ways were at work in politics also. By 1757, William Pitt, the animating spirit of the so-called Patriot party, was virtually at

the head of the government affairs. A great historian has observed that Pitt did a work for politics similar to that which John Wesley was, at the same time, accomplishing for religion. He believed in his countrymen, and England responded to his trust. Instead of debauching public morals by bribery, he made his passsionate appeal to patriotism.

The Expansion of England. - Under Pitt's enthusiasm and devotion, the interests of England, which before had seemingly been narrowed to insular limits, expanded before men's eyes, and about the middle of the century the nation entered upon that great duel with the rival power of France which was to raise her from an island monarchy to a world empire. In 1757 Robert Clive won a great victory at Plassey, and laid the foundation of England's supremacy in India. In 1759 Wolfe captured Quebec, and established her dominion in America. Two worlds, the rich civilization of the ancient East, and the vast and undeveloped resources of the new West, were almost at the same instant within England's grasp. "We are forced," said Horace Walpole, "to ask every morning what victory there is, for fear of missing one." Men's hearts were warm with a glow of patriotic pride and a sense of England's mighty destiny. Meanwhile, exploration as well as foreign war was directing the thoughts of Englishmen to distant and almost unknown lands. In 1770 Captain Cook explored the east coast of Australia, and took possession of it in the name of Great Britain. Eighteen years later the first permanent English settlement was made on the site of the present city of Sydney, and the British colonial empire was definitely extended to these far-off waters of the Pacific. The story of Cook's voyages, like those of the explorers of Elizabeth's time, brought home a

new world to the imagination, and introduced into literature a more cosmopolitan spirit and a sense of the wonder and variety of the world's life.

Industrial and Social Changes. While patriotism and imagination were thus quickened by the great part that England began to play in the world-wide drama of human destiny, at home a silent revolution was transforming the aspect of life and the very structure of society. From the building of the first canal by James Brindley in 1761, new facilities for transportation and new methods of manufacture followed quickly on each other, until the agricultural England of old times became the industrial England of the nineteenth century, and the "workshop of the world." Following hard on these changes are those problems of labor and capital which confront our modern world.

The Growth of Democracy and the Age of Revolution. And side by side with all these new things was the beginning of one of the greatest historic movements since the Renaissance, the rise of modern democracy. With the conviction of human brotherhood, with the passionate sense of the worth and dignity of individual manhood, come the blood and violence of those social upheavals which usher in our modern world. Men are possessed with a fever for the "rights of man;" they dream of a wholesale reorganization of society, and the coming of an idyllic Golden Age; they struggle to convert the gospel of a "return to Nature" advocated by the great French writer, Jean Jacques Rousseau, into a practical reality. In America, a Republic is established on the foundations of human freedom and equality; in feudal France, after generations of dumb misery, the people lift their bowed backs from labor, and, in the French Revolution, and particularly during the Reign

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