No Tyranny, and Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.  Nor did politics by any means usurp the columns of the reviews.  Literature, art, science, the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review. Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, and the other monthlies published stories, poetry, criticism, and correspondence—­every thing, in short, which enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.

Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half of the 18th century, and in particular with the writings of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French Revolution.  The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian in the 16th and of the French in the 18th.  In other words, the German writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than with models of style.  Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope’s time.  It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to domesticate the diction of German prose.  But the nature and extent of this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the authors of the time one by one.

The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more obvious and immediate.  When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm among the friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly less intense than in France.  It was the dawn of a new day; the shackles were stricken from the slave; all men were free and all men were brothers, and radical young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar of the Paris mob.  Wordsworth’s lines on the Fall of the Bastile, Coleridge’s Fall of Robespierre and Ode to France, and Southey’s revolutionary drama, Wat Tyler, gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the English democracy.  In after life, Wordsworth, looking back regretfully to those years of promise, wrote his poem on the French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement.

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive;
  But to be young was very heaven.  O times
  In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
  Of custom, law, and statute took at once
  The attraction of a country in romance.

Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at Cambridge, spent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI. signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath of fidelity to the new constitution.  In the following year Wordsworth revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy