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SECOND PHASE OF THE CRITICAL PERIOD.

Age of George II. (1727-1760).

FEATURES.

Politics. A period of Whig supremacy. Pressed by the people and abandoned by the crown, the Tories were unable to take any share in the government. Strong in numbers and in property, they had scarcely a single man of distinguished talents in business or debate. The preponderance of intellect was Whig.

Internally-with the exception of one or two ineffectual attempts to disturb the tranquility-a time of political torpor.

into repose.

Faction had sunk

Two ministers give lustre to the administrative policy,-Robert Walpole and William Pitt. The first loved peace, and made his country prosperous; the secound loved war, and made her glorious.

Society. For literary merit, a dark night between two sunny days. The age of princely patronage had passed; that of general intelligence had not arrived. A poet was a wild ass wedded to his desolate freedom; a ragged, squalid fellow who lodged in a garret up four flights of stairs, dined in a cellar on musty pudding among footmen out of place, wore dirty linen and a greasy coat, stood at restaurant windows snuffing the scent of what he could not afford to taste; slept, like savage, amid the ashes of a glass-house in December, died in a hospital, and was buried, not in Westminster Abbey, but in a parish vault. Such was the fate of many a writer who, had he lived thirty years earlier, might have sat in Parliament; and, had he written in our day, would have lived in comfort by the mere sale of his writings. A few eminent authors were more fortunate. Pope. raised above want by his legacy, and the patronage which, in his youth, both parties extended to his Iliad, lived calm and admired in his villa. Upon Young, Walpole had bestowed his only pension as the reward of literary excellence. Thomson, by attaching himself to the opposition, had obtained, after much severe suffering, the means of subsistence. Richardson depended less upon his novels than upon his shop. Johnson and Fielding, two of the ablest men of the period, were hunted by bailiffs, and arrested for debt.

The change in the position of writers was injurious to society, as well as to literature. The Government, by helping only those who would employ their talent in the lowest forms of political libel, gave society a frivolous and material tone which it has never wholly lost.

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Moral revolutions are slow. As in the preceding period, we see corruption in high places, and brutality in low. In the House of Commons, members were notoriously at the command of the highest bidder, formed combinations, and extorted large wages by threatening to strike. Here is a man of the world doing buisiness :-'He (Walpole) wanted to carry a question.... to which he knew there would be great opposition. As he was passing through the Court of Requests, he met a member of the contrary party, whose avarice, he imagined, would not reject a large bribe. He took him aside, and said, "Such a question comes on this day; give me your note, and here is a bank-bill of two thousand pounds," which he put into his hands. The member made him this answer: "Sir Robert, you have lately served some of my particular friends; and when my wife was last at court, the king was very gracious to her, which must have happened at your instance. I should therefore think myself very ungrateful (putting the bank-bill into his pocket) if I were to refuse the favor you are now pleased to ask me."

Private manners were not more estimable than public. 'Money' wrote Montesquieu, 'is here esteemed above every thing, honor and virtue not much.' The coarseness of fashionable life, prevailing in the first years of the century, was but little mitigated. The novels of Richardson, attaining at once an extraordinary popularity, did something to refine the tone of society, but there was no very perceptible improvement till the reign of George III. The professor of whist and quadrille was a regular attendant at the levees of fashionable ladies. Wrote Chesterfield to his son: 'It seems ridiculous to tell you, but it is most certainly true, that your dancing-master is at Europe of the greatest importance to you.' in London, 1730, we find 'a mad bull to be and turned loose in the game place, a dog to be dressed up with fire-works over him, a bear to be let loose at the same time, and a cat to be tied to the bull's tail, a mad bull dressed up with fire-works to be baited.' Such amusements were mingled with prize-fighting, and boxing-matches between women.

this time the man in all Among the entertainments dressed up with fire-works

Gin bad been discovered in 1684; in 1742, England consumed annually seven millions of gallons. Nine years later it was declared to be 'the principal sustenance (if it may so be called) of more than one hundred thousand people in the metropolis,' and that, 'should the drinking of this poison be continued at its present height during the next twenty years, there will, by that time, be very few of the common people left to drink it.'* A tax was imposed to stop the madness, but the minister, finding himself threatened with a riot, repealed it, declaring that 'in the present inflamed temper of the people, the Act could not be carried into execution without an armed force.'

*Fielding: On the Late Increase of Robbers.

The general level of humanity was little, if any, higher than that of the preceeding generation. Executions, if not a public amusement, were at least a favorite public spectacle. In 1745, a ghastly row of rebel heads lined the top of Temple Bar. When Blackstone wrote, 160 offences were punishable with death, and not infrequently ten or twelve culprits were hung on a single occasion. In every important quarter of

the city were gallows, and on many of them corpses were left rotting in chains. Often the criminals were led to their doom intoxicated, and some of the most distinguished were first exhibited by the turnkeys at a shilling a-head. Women convicted of murdering their husbands, were publicly burnt. Both men and women were still whipped at the tail of a cart through the streets.

The impunity with which outrages were yet committed in London, it is difficult now to realize. Thieves organized with officers, a treasury, a commander-in-chief, and multiplied, though every six weeks they were carried to the gallows by the cartload. 'One is forced to travel,' it was said in 1751, 'even at noon as if one were going to battle.' Perhaps no portion of English history has contributed so much to the romance of crime.

Religion. Among the educated classes the main thing was to imitate the French,-their grace and dexterity, their sustained elegance, their glitter, their fine drawing-room polish. English literature has no sadder sentence than that in which Butler, in 1736, declares: 'It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all peaple of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.' In 1751, he speaks of the general decay of religion 'in this nation; which is now observed by every one, and has been for some time the complaint of all serious persons'; and adds that 'the deplorable distinction of our age is an avowed scorn of religion in some, and a growing disregard of it in the generality.' Warburton mourned that he had 'lived to see the fatal crisis when religion had lost its hold on the minds of the people.' Religion, like literature, was cold and unspiritual. Preachers were more eager to denounce an absent adversary than to save the souls of those who heard them. Not enthusiasm and extravagonce, but sobriety and good sense were the qualities most valued in the pulpit. 'Discourses,' said Voltaire, 'aiming at the pathetic anda ccompanied with violent gestures' would excite laughter in an English congregation .... A sermon in France is a long declamation, scrupulously divided into three parts and delivered with enthusiasm.

In England, a sermon is a solid but sometimes dry dissertation which a man reads to the people without gesture and without any particular exaltation of the voice.' Here is Tillotson, the most authoritative of divines in his time, who talks like a demostrator of anatomy. Mark the style of his first sermon,- The Wisdom of being Religious:

'These words consist of two propositions, which are not distinct in sense; ... So that they differ only as cause and effect, which by a metonymy, used in all sorts of authors, are frequently put one for another . . . Having thus explained the words, I come now to consider the proposition contained in them, which is this; That religion is the best knowledge and wisdom. This I shall endeavor to make good these three ways:

ness.

'1st. By a direct proof it.

"2d. By showing on the contrary the folly and ingnorance of irreligion and wicked

'3d. By vindicating religion from those common imputations which seem to charge it with ignorance or imprudence. I begin with the direct proof of this.'

Expositions, apologies, moral essays, while they supply rational motives to virtue, rarely kindle a living piety, and are utterly incapable of reclaiming the depraved. The heart is not touched by the dust that settles on the countenance. But between the dregs at the bottom and the foam at the top quietly coursed the genuine sap of the national life. Under the smoke, burning in silence, glowed the simple faith that never dies, soon to give evidence of its powerful vitality. The revival began with a small knot of Oxford students, whose master spirit was John Wesley. Their methodical regularity of life gained them the nickname of Methodists. Breaking away from the settled habits of the clerical profession, they avoided all polemical and abstract reasoning, and preached, as they were moved by the spirit, the lost condition of every man born into the world-the eternal tortures which are the doom of the unconverted-justification by faith-free salvation by Christ-the necessity of personal regeneration-the imminence of death,-doctrines which were now seldom heard from a Church of England pulpit. These they regarded as the cardinal tenets of the Christian religion, and taught them with a vehemence and fire that started the smouldering piety of the nation into flame. Their unstudied eloquence and complete disregard of conventionalities contrasted with the polished and fastidious sermons that were the prevailing fashion of the time. Wesley, relying upon the Divine guidance, frequently opened the Bible at random for a text. He believed in the devil, saw God in the commonest events, heard supernatural noises. His father had been thrice pushed by a ghost. He declared that 'a string of opinions is no more Christian faith than a string of beads is Christian holiness.' Such convictions are able to turn emotion into madness, and render the madness contagious. At his death, he had eighty thousand disciples; now he has a million. The

oratory of Whitefield, another of the Oxford society, was so impassioned that at times he was overcome by his tears, while half his audience were convulsed with sobs. His first sermon, as a bishop complained, 'drove fifteen people mad.' He instituted itinerant preaching, became a roving evangelist, sought the haunts of ignorance and vice, to deal out to their half-savage populations the 'bread of life.' His rude auditors, numbering, five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty thousand, were electrified. A few incidents will exemplify his peculiarities, and at the same time illustratate the characteristics of this reaction against the colorless, marble polish of the age. On one occasion, seeing the actor Shuter, who was then attracting much attention in the part of Ramble in the Rambler, seated in a front pew of the gallery, he turned suddenly towards him and exclaimed: 'And thou, too, poor Ramble, who hast rambled so far from him, oh! cease thy ramblings and come to Jesus.' 'God always makes use of strong passions' he was accustomed to say, 'for a great work,' and it was his object to rouse such passions to the highest point. Sometimes he would reproduce the condemnation scene as he had witnessed it in a court of justice. With tearful eyes and a trembling voice, he would begin, after a momentary pause: 'I am now going to put on the condemning cap. Sinner, I must do it. I must pronounce sentence upon you.' Then, with a dramatic change of tone, he thundered over his awestruck hearers the solemn words 'Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire!' On another occasion, to illustrate the peril of sinners, he described an old blind man deserted by his dog, tottering feebly over the desolate moor, vainly endeavoring to feel his way with the staff, drawing nearer and nearer to the verge of an awful precipice; and drew the picture so vividly that the urbane Chesterfield lost all self-possession and was heard to exclaim, 'Good God! he is gone.' Preaching before seamen at New York, he adopted the familiar symbols of their occupation: 'Well, my boys, we have a clear sky, and are making fine headway over a smooth sea before a light breeze, and we shall soon lose sight of land. But what means this sudden lowering of the heavens, and that dark cloud arising from beneath the western horizon? Hark! don't you hear distant thunder? Don't you see those flashes of lightning? There is a storm gathering! Every man to his duty! How the waves arise and dash against the ship! The air is dark! the tempest rages ! Our masts are gone! The ship is on her beam-ends!-What next?'-"The long boat! take to the long boat!' shouted the excited crowd. His favorite maxim was, that 'a preacher, when he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear.'

In this burning fervor of realization, began the revival of popular religion, a revolt against the frigid and formal teaching, the easy-going

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