his neighbor, of finding in Whig and Tory, in Catholic and Protestant, in Anglican and Dissenter, the same general human characteristics that he found in himself.  This good work was helped, moreover, by the spread of education and by the growth of the national spfrit, following the victories of Marlborough on the Continent.  In the midst of heated argument it needed only a word—­Gibraltar, Blenheim, Ramillies, Malplaquet—­or a poem of victory written in a garret[184] to tell a patriotic people that under their many differences they were all alike Englishmen.

In the latter half of the century the political and social progress is almost bewildering.  The modern form of cabinet government responsible to Parliament and the people had been established under George I; and in 1757 the cynical and corrupt practices of Walpole, premier of the first Tory cabinet, were replaced by the more enlightened policies of Pitt.  Schools were established; clubs and coffeehouses increased; books and magazines multiplied until the press was the greatest visible power in England; the modern great dailies, the Chronicle, Post, and Times, began their career of public education.  Religiously, all the churches of England felt the quickening power of that tremendous spiritual revival known as Methodism, under the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield.  Outside her own borders three great men—­Clive in India, Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, Cook in Australia and the islands of the Pacific—­were unfurling the banner of St. George over the untold wealth of new lands, and spreading the world-wide empire of the Anglo-Saxons.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS.  In every preceding age we have noted especially the poetical works, which constitute, according to Matthew Arnold, the glory of English literature.  Now for the first time we must chronicle the triumph of English prose.  A multitude of practical interests arising from the new social and political conditions demanded expression, not simply in books, but more especially in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers.  Poetry was inadequate for such a task; hence the development of prose, of the “unfettered word,” as Dante calls it,—­a development which astonishes us by its rapidity and excellence.  The graceful elegance of Addison’s essays, the terse vigor of Swift’s satires, the artistic finish of Fielding’s novels, the sonorous eloquence of Gibbon’s history and of Burke’s orations,—­these have no parallel in the poetry of the age.  Indeed, poetry itself became prosaic in this respect, that it was used not for creative works of imagination, but for essays, for satire, for criticism,—­for exactly the same practical ends as was prose.  The poetry of the first half of the century, as typified in the work of Pope, is polished and witty enough, but artificial; it lacks fire, fine feeling, enthusiasm, the glow of the Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of Puritanism.  In a word, it interests us as a study of life, rather than delights or inspires us by its appeal to the imagination.  The variety and excellence of prose works, and the development of a serviceable prose style, which had been begun by Dryden, until it served to express clearly every human interest and emotion,—­these are the chief literary glories of the eighteenth century.