protected by law in France at the fall of the First Napoleon than in Great Britain.  Nevertheless, the movement had begun in the latter country forty years before.  A generation had passed since the battle of Culloden, and the island was at length indissolubly and efficiently one.  It shared fully in the intellectual impulse of the day.  Victorious in all its latest struggles and freed from all sources of internal danger, it might naturally have been expected to enter at once on a career of improvement more marked than in the case of its neighbors.  It is not easy to assign reasons for failure in this respect, unless we seek them in disgust at the subsequent dismemberment and disturbance of the empire by the fruits of popular agitations in America, Ireland and France.  The reaction due to such causes was probably sufficient to defeat all liberal efforts.  The leading English writers of the Revolutionary period were strong Tories.  Such were Johnson, the Lake poets after their brief swing to the opposite extreme, and Scott.  All these except the first belong as well to the time of successful reform, and Johnson may be claimed by the eighteenth century; which serves to illustrate the blight cast upon British literature by the prolonged resistance of British statesmen to the prevailing current—­a resistance which took its keynote from the dying recantation and protest of the Whig Chatham.

The opening of the epoch, then, was as marked in Great Britain as elsewhere.  Only in special fields she afterward fell behind, and lost something like half the century.  In others she kept abreast, or even in advance.

Criticism was not content to exercise its new powers and apply its newly-framed laws exclusively in the investigation of any branch of philosophy.  It brought them to bear upon the arts.  The discovery of the buried cities of Campania aided in attracting renewed attention to the art-stores of Italy, ancient and modern.  The principles of taste and beauty which they illustrated were searchingly analyzed and carefully explained.  Painting and sculpture began slowly to emit their rays through the eclipse of more than a century.  The allied art shared in this second and secondary renaissance.  Haydn was in full fruit, Mozart ripening, and Music watched, in the cradle of Beethoven, her budding Shakespeare.  A fourth Teuton was studying the symphonies of the spheres; and within the first five years of the century, while the “crowning mercy” of Yorktown was maturing, a planet that had never before dawned on the eye of man took its place with the ancient six, and “swam into the ken” of Herschel.