It is only when we remember these conditions that we can understand two books, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which can hardly be considered as literature, but which exercised an enormous influence in England.  Smith was a Scottish thinker, who wrote to uphold the doctrine that labor is the only source of a nation’s wealth, and that any attempt to force labor into unnatural channels, or to prevent it by protective duties from freely obtaining the raw materials for its industry, is unjust and destructive.  Paine was a curious combination of Jekyll and Hyde, shallow and untrustworthy personally, but with a passionate devotion to popular liberty.  His Rights of Man published in London in 1791, was like one of Burns’s lyric outcries against institutions which oppressed humanity.  Coming so soon after the destruction of the Bastille, it added fuel to the flames kindled in England by the French Revolution.  The author was driven out of the country, on the curious ground that he endangered the English constitution, but not until his book had gained a wide sale and influence.

All these dangers, real and imaginary, passed away when England turned from the affairs of France to remedy her own economic conditions.  The long Continental war came to an end with Napoleon’s overthrow at Waterloo, in 1815; and England, having gained enormously in prestige abroad, now turned to the work of reform at home.  The destruction of the African slave trade; the mitigation of horribly unjust laws, which included poor debtors and petty criminals in the same class; the prevention of child labor; the freedom of the press; the extension of manhood suffrage; the abolition of restrictions against Catholics in Parliament; the establishment of hundreds of popular schools, under the leadership of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster,—­these are but a few of the reforms which mark the progress of civilization in a single half century.  When England, in 1833, proclaimed the emancipation of all slaves in all her colonies, she unconsciously proclaimed her final emancipation from barbarism.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE.  It is intensely interesting to note how literature at first reflected the political turmoil of the age; and then, when the turmoil was over and England began her mighty work of reform, how literature suddenly developed a new creative spirit, which shows itself in the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and in the prose of Scott, Jane Austen, Lamb, and De Quincey,—­a wonderful group of writers, whose patriotic enthusiasm suggests the Elizabethan days, and whose genius has caused their age to be known as the second creative period of our literature.  Thus in the early days, when old institutions seemed crumbling with the Bastille, Coleridge and Southey formed their youthful scheme of a “Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna,”—­an ideal commonwealth, in which the principles of More’s Utopia should be put in practice.  Even Wordsworth, fired with political enthusiasm, could write,