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more," and "Mackery End" all deal with places associated with Lamb's history; "Old China," "Dream Children," and "The Superannuated Man" are more directly personal. For De Quincey's biography, his "Autobiographic Sketches," and the "Confessions of an Opium-Eater" are of fundamental interest.

CHAPTER XIV

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE VICTORIAN

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I. INTRODUCTION

Social Changes and Their Effect Upon Literature.-Never before, not even in the troubled seventeenth century, have there been such rapid and sweeping changes in the society of the English-speaking races as have taken place since the beginning of the long reign of Victoria (1837-1901). Among the many circumstances making for change the chief one has been the growth of democracy. The Reform bill of 1832 placed the political power of England in the hands of the middle class, and since that date the ballot has been gradually extended to the working classes. With the growth of democracy has gone the spread of popular education, and a great increase in the number of readers of books. Literature has become in consequence more democratic. It has attempted more and more to reach out to all manner of men, to move, instruct, and inspire them. The great change from hand-labor to machine-labor, which began in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and has continued throughout the nineteenth, has kept the economic basis of society unsettled. Labor troubles have been frequent. Social unrest, and the demand for social justice, have appeared in the work of nearly all the great writers of the time. The growth of manufacture and commerce has brought a great increase of wealth, and added greatly to the comfort and luxury of living; but it has also exposed men to the danger of losing themselves in these external things, at the expense of the inner life. Against this danger the prophets and preachers of the time have striven with all the earnestness that is in them.

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During the nineteenth century the means of communication between distant places have been vastly increased. 1819 the first steamship crossed the Atlantic; in 1830 the first railroad was opened, between Liverpool and Manchester; in 1838 the electric telegraph was introduced into England, and twenty years later the first Atlantic cable was laid. By subsequent inventions and improvements, town has been knit to town, county to county, nation to nation. The telegraph and the modern printing press have laid the news of the world day by day before even the humblest reader. Literature, in consequence, has become broader in its interests. A community of ideas has been established throughout the civilized world; sympathy with life in all its forms has been widened. Historical science has brought, as never before, the buried past before our eyes, and writers have presented the past with a truthfulness not possible in former times. The mental sciences have led to a deeper study of character, a closer analysis of human motives, a broader interest in all kinds and types of human life. Novelists and poets have vied with each other in throwing light upon the secret places of man's soul.

The Growth of Science.-Another great cause of change and unrest has been the growth of science, which has made more gigantic strides in this age than in all the past history of the race. Especially the world-shaking doctrine of evolution, dating from the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, has given men a new idea of their own origin, of the prehistoric past of the human race. In so doing it has unsettled many old beliefs. It has brought "obstinate questionings" concerning life and death, and has led many men, against their wills, into religious doubt. But here again there have been voices lifted up to declare anew the truths of religion, and to interpret the teachings of science in a spiritual sense.

The "Time-Spirit" in the Great Victorian Writers.-Each of the writers whom we are about to study illustrates some phase of the "time-spirit" which we have tried briefly to describe. Macaulay made it his life-work to put his vast stores of knowledge into a form easy for common men to understand.

Carlyle's rugged figure stands as a protest against the selfsatisfied, external view of life to which an age of commerce and of mechanical science is prone. He preaches the dignity of the individual as opposed to the crowd; he utters fierce warnings against the levelling process of democracy. Tennyson took the facts of natural science, and showed the poetry hidden in them; he helped to fight the battle of faith against doubt, and to break down the opposition between science and religion. Browning, and the great novelists, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, studied the souls of men as they reveal themselves in the actual life about us; or summoned up men and women from the past to reveal their inmost natures. Arnold, in the poetry of his youth, voiced the unrest, despondency, and doubt which afflicted. so many sensitive souls in this age of change; his later life he spent in preaching to Englishmen the necessity of being alert to new ideas. Ruskin waged unending war against the vulgarity and ugliness which he believed to be an outgrowth of the commercial basis of modern life, and sought earnestly for some better foundation upon which might be built the society of the future.

II. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859)

Life of Macaulay.-Thomas Babington Macaulay was born in 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire. His father, Zachary Taylor, was an anti-slavery reformer, of a family of Scotch Presbyterians, many of whom had been preachers. His mother was of Quaker descent, and a woman of vigorous intelligence. Many anecdotes are related of the boy Macaulay's startling precocity. He made at seven a "compendium of universal history"; at eight he knew Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel by heart, and himself composed several long epic poems in imitation of it. Histories, odes, and hymns flowed with astonishing facility from his boyish pen. Throughout life he was a prodigious reader, and his memory, surprising to start with, became by cultivation one of the most marvellous on record. He declared that if every

copy of Paradise Lost or the Pilgrim's Progress were destroyed, he would be able to replace them from memory.

At Cambridge, whither he went at nineteen, he took a prominent part in the excited discussion which was then going on all over England concerning the reform of the suffrage laws. He was then, as afterward, a Whig; that is to say, he believed in the gradual extension of liberty, but distrusted violent and revolutionary methods. Before leaving college, he began writing for the reviews. In 1825 his essay on Milton appeared in the Edinburgh Review. This essay made him instantly famous. Even the potentates of the critical world, such as Jeffrey, the much-feared editor of the periodical in which the "Milton" appeared, wondered where the brilliant newcomer had "picked up that style."

From this time on Macaulay's career was one of uninterrupted success, both in literature and politics. In 1830 he entered Parliament, in time to take a prominent part in the passage of the Reform bill. Four years later he went to India, as legal adviser to the Supreme Council. He found time from his legal duties to write the essay on Bacon; the essays on Machiavelli, Dryden, Byron, and Dr. Johnson had already appeared. He returned in 1838, with a comfortable fortune saved from his salary, to play once more a leading rôle in the Whig party. He was made Secretary of War and a member of the Privy Council. During these years of active political life he wrote several of his most famous essays, notably those on Addison and on Sir William Temple, and the splendid ones on the Indian pro-consuls, Clive and Warren Hastings, the materials for which he had gathered during his stay in the east.

In 1847 he published his Lays of Ancient Rome, dignified and vigorous celebrations, in ballad verse, of the antique civic virtues, as shown in Horatius, Virginius, and other Roman worthies. The next year, after long delay, he began to realize the dream of his life, in the publication of the first part of his History of England. This was instantly and immensely popular; and the remainder of the work which he lived to complete increased his success. The History was translated into most of the languages of Europe, and at home

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