underwent a revolution which its ancestral legal forms proved strong and flexible enough to accomplish without convulsion or bloodshed; and during the long reign of Queen Victoria it has been more and more widely asserting the imperial dominion of the flexibly vital traditions of our Common Law.

II

ENGLISH LITERATURE SINCE 1800

So we come to the literature of England during the nineteenth century. By chance several dates which we have named for other purposes are significant in literary history as well as in political. In 1798, when Nelson fought the battle of the Nile, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their famous volume of "Lyrical Ballads." This little book is commonly regarded as the first important expression of that romantic outburst of poetry which substituted for the formal literary traditions of the eighteenth century those traditions of individual artistic freedom which have persisted until the present time. In brief, the literary emancipation of England, amid blind political conservatism, was almost as marked as the literary conservatism of France, amid revolutionary political changes. The spirit of revolution was everywhere abroad; but in England it more profoundly influenced phrase than conduct, while in France the case was just the reverse. In 1832, the year of the Reform Bill, Scott died; Byron, Shelley, and Keats were already dead; so was Miss Austen; and every literary reputation contemporary with theirs was finally established.

Broadly speaking, the period of English literature which began with the "Lyrical Ballads" and ended with the death of Scott may be divided at 1815, the year of Waterloo. The chief expression which preceded this was a passionate outburst of romantic poetry, maintaining in widely various forms the revolutionary principle that the individual, freed from accidental and conventional trammels, may be trusted to tend toward righteousness; that human nature is not essentially evil but excellent; and that sin, evil, and pain are brought into being

by those distortions of such human nature which are wrought by hampering, outworn custom and superstition. Though this philosophy may never have been precisely or fully set forth by any one of the English poets who flourished between. 1800 and 1815, it pervades the work of all; and this work taken together is the most memorable body of poetry in our language, except the Elizabethan. So far as one can now tell, this school distinguishes itself from the Elizabethan, and from almost any other of equal merit in literary history, by the eclectic variety of its individual members; their passionate devotion to the ideal of freedom in both thought and phrase made these new poets differ from one another almost as conspicuously as the poets of the eighteenth century were alike. For all this, as one reads them now, a trait common throughout their work grows salient. Despite the fervour of their revolutionary individualism, Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron and Shelley and the rest agreed in eagerly looking forward to an enfranchised future in which this world was to be incalculably better and nobler than in the tyrant-ridden past. This was the dominant sentiment of English literature from the battle of the Nile to that of Waterloo.

Between Waterloo and the Reform Bill, which was passed in the year when Scott died, a new phase of feeling dominated the literature of England. Though something of this elder spirit of hope lingered, the most considerable fact was the publication of all but the first two of the Waverley Novels. The contrast between these and the preceding poetry is strongly marked. What gave them popularity and has assured them permanence is the fervour with which they retrospectively assert the beauty of ideals which even in their own time had almost vanished. If the first outburst of English literature in the nineteenth century was a poetry animated by aspiration toward an ideal future, the second period of that literature, embodied in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, dwelt in carelessly dignified prose on the nobler aspects of a real past.

These two phases of English literature roughly correspond with the Regency and the reign of William IV. The literature which has ensued will probably be known to the future as Victorian; and it is still too near us for any confident generalisation. But although there has been admirable Victorian poetry, of which the most eminent makers seem to have been Tennyson and the Brownings; and although in its own time serious Victorian prose, of which perhaps the most eminent makers were Ruskin and Carlyle, has seemed of paramount interest, there is probability that posterity may find the most characteristic feature of Victorian literature to have been that school of fiction which brought the English novel to a point of development comparable with that of the Elizabethan drama. It is almost literally to the reign of Queen Victoria that we owe the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and the numberless lesser novelists and story-tellers whose work has been the chief reading of the English-speaking world, down to the days of Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.

The first and the most widely popular of Victorian novelists was Dickens, whose work began less than five years after Scott's ended. The contrast between them is among the most instructive in literary history. Scott's ideal was always that of a gentleman; Dickens's, with equal instinctive honesty of feeling, was that of the small trading classes. Whatever merits Dickens had, and these were great and lasting, he fatally lacked one grace which up to his time the literature of his country had generally preserved, -— that of distinction. The other novelists who soon arose differed from Dickens in many ways, often possessing a sense of fact far more true than his, and sympathies more various. At least in their comparative lack of distinction, however, they have been more like him than like the men of letters of any preceding period. They have generally dealt, too, with matters of nearly contemporary fact. In brief, the dominant note

of Victorian fiction, which is probably the dominant fact of Victorian literature, is a note of triumphant democracy.

Broadly speaking, then, we may say that up to the time of the Reform Bill the English literature of the nineteenth century expressed itself first in that body of aspiring poetry which seems the most memorable English utterance since Elizabethan times, and secondly in those novels of Sir Walter Scott, which, dealing romantically with the past, indicate the accomplishment of a world revolution; and that since the Reform Bill decidedly the most popular phase of English literature has been prose fiction dealing with contemporary life. It is beyond our purpose to emphasise the growth of science meanwhile, a growth which has corresponded with such material changes as are typified by the use of steam and electricity. But many now think that in time to come the most lasting name of the Victorian epoch will, after all, be that of Charles Darwin.

Slight as this sketch of English literature in the nineteenth century has been, it is sufficient for our purpose, which is only to remind ourselves of what occurred in England during the century when something which we may fairly call literature developed in America.