Dictionary
1756.  War with France |
1759.  Wolf at Quebec |
1760.  George III (d. 1820) | 1760-1767.  Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
| 1764.  Johnson’s Literary Club
1765.  Stamp Act | 1765.  Percy’s Reliques
| 1766.  Goldsmith’s Vicar of
| Wakefield
|
| 1770.  Goldsmith’s Deserted Village
| 1771.  Beginning of great newspapers
1773.  Boston Tea Party | 1774.  Howard’s prison reforms | 1774-1775.  Burke’s American speeches 1775.  American Revolution | 1776-1788.  Gibbon’s Rome 1776.  Declaration of Independence | 1779.  Cowper’s Olney Hymns
| 1779-81.  Johnson’s Lives of the Poets
1783.  Treaty of Paris | 1783.  Blake’s Poetical Sketches
| 1785.  Cowper’s The Task
| The London Times
1786.  Trial of Warren Hastings |
| 1786.  Burns’s first poems (the
| Kilmarnock Burns)
| Burke’s Warren Hastings
1789-1799.  French Revolution |
| 1790.  Burke’s French Revolution
| 1791.  Boswell’s Life of Johnson
1793.  War with France |
============================================================
================

* * * * *

CHAPTER X

THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM (1800-1850)

THE SECOND CREATIVE PERIOD OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The first half of the nineteenth century records the triumph of Romanticism in literature and of democracy in government; and the two movements are so closely associated, in so many nations and in so many periods of history, that one must wonder if there be not some relation of cause and effect between them.  Just as we understand the tremendous energizing influence of Puritanism in the matter of English liberty by remembering that the common people had begun to read, and that their book was the Bible, so we may understand this age of popular government by remembering that the chief subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common men and the value of the individual.  As we read now that brief portion of history which lies between the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the English Reform Bill of 1832, we are in the presence of such mighty political upheavals that “the age of revolution” is the only name by which we can adequately characterize it.  Its great historic movements become intelligible only when we read what was written in this period; for the French Revolution and the American commonwealth, as well as the establishment of a true democracy in England by the Reform Bill, were the inevitable results of ideas which literature had spread rapidly through the civilized world.  Liberty is fundamentally an ideal; and that ideal—­beautiful, inspiring, compelling, as a loved banner in the wind—­was kept steadily before men’s minds by a multitude of books and pamphlets as far apart as Burns’s Poems and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man,—­all read eagerly by the common people, all proclaiming the dignity of common life, and all uttering the same passionate cry against every form of class or caste oppression.