they are for middle class audiences with middle class sympathies. And this early change does represent the growing influence of middle class audiences and their demand that virtue shall come through any ordeal triumphant. We shall see more of this change of temper as we study the eighteenth century.

Just as the Puritan Prynne cleared the atmosphere of the stench of the dying Elizabethan drama, so in 1698 Jeremy Collier by his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage directed a blast of indignation against the foulness of the contemporary theatre. This rough explosion shares with the gentler persuasion of Addison and Steele the credit of doing much toward the reformation of manners. Collier attacked the plays of Dryden, among others, receiving in reply a manly confession of fault and a promise of reformation.

These Restoration comedies of gallantries and fashion have been defended by Lamb in a charming essay as the artificial creation of a dream world that has no relation to our world of moral values. They should therefore be enjoyed as works of art untouched by ordinary standards; but the fact remains that the authors deliberately announced their intention of exposing vice and folly with the definite purpose of reforming manners. Macaulay has taken issue with Lamb in a brilliant paper entitled The Comedy of the Restoration.

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CHAPTER V

THE NEO-CLASSICAL PERIOD

1688-1745

ITH the accession of William of Orange to the throne of England, the modern period begins. Throughout the eighteenth century, while life crystallized into set molds and traditional conventions dominated men's outward activities, much of importance to our present points of view was germinating beneath the surface. The one hundred and ten years before the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 witnessed a fairly complete reversal of older methods of thinking and a clear, definite application of modern methods of meeting the problems of living. During the latter half of the century two revolutions effected a violent break with the past and created problems which have not yet been solved but which have grown more acute as time has elapsed. The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution came at the end of a long period in which conditions had been undergoing a vital change in advance of the coming social and political transformations. The Restoration revealed the transition; the eighteenth century saw the germination of new ideas; the first quarter of the nineteenth century was the explosive period of the new democracy; the remainder of the century became the battleground of old and new; and to-day the world faces the social problem in an acute form, and it does not yet perceive a solution

which has proved acceptable to any great number of men.

As far back as the early years of the seventeenth century the modern spirit began its work. The chief result of the great struggle between Cavalier and Roundhead was the working out of another stage in the cause of English political liberty. Pym and Hampden rebelled, not primarily for reasons of religion, but from unjust taxation; and Milton, by means of his prose pamphlets, which at least in substance seem strangely modern, struck valiant blows in the cause of liberty.

The Restoration in 1660 spelt reaction, and it was only when Charles and his successor James threatened to sell England's dearly bought political and religious liberties to Louis of France and the Pope that the people rose against the dreaded tyranny. The bloodless revolution of 1688, the flight of the Stuarts and William's accession to the throne mark the true beginning of parliamentary government in England. Thenceforth the ministers were responsible, not to the Crown, but to Parliament, the duly elected representatives of the people. This change, after Magna Carta the next step in England's progress toward political democracy, was held up for a century by political philosophers for the imitation of the rest of the world, and is still the basis upon which most of the constitutional goverments of the present time are established. For the sake of strict accuracy, however, it should be said that though Parliament ruled, it was very far from being a truly democratic body. The task of the nineteenth century has been to extend the franchise to larger bodies of men-that of the twentieth, to women. Even to-day the work is incomplete. The eighteenth century was governed for the greater part of the time by the landed aristocracy and their political

opponents, the rising commercial class. The country gentlemen, who called themselves Tories, were in many cases Jacobites, men loyal to the cause of the exiled Stuarts, and nearly always High Churchmen, who held out for no change in established institutions. The Whigs, the new bankers and men of business, who benefited by the coming Industrial Revolution, stood for reform, for expansion and empire, and an energetic handling of foreign affairs. England's long peace until the French wars of the latter half of the century was due to the Whig rule of Sir Robert Walpole, who guided affairs of state much along Tory lines without the aid of parliamentary debate.

The eighteenth century, which socially and politically commences with the Revolution of 1688, is a period of consolidation and development of material resources as well as a concentration of social life in the towns. The England of the early nineteenth century, in consequence of her prolonged peace, faced the Napoleonic power enormously wealthy and very sure of herself. It was during this early time that the features of John Bull began to form themselves into something of the likeness they have assumed ever since. Insularity, an honest bluntness, and a certain quiet refusal to be hurried were the qualities attached to this strong nation which was to play a dominant part in European politics down to the present time.

Two aspects of the Augustan Age, the name given to the era of the first two Georges, need to be emphasized. One is the purely rational character of its intellectual life. For nearly a century reason continued to prevail over the emotions, the critical habit over the creative. In matters of religion, the supernatural, and therefore the element of mystery, was quite reasoned out of existence.

Christianity Not Mysterious was the title of one of the books on this question of what an unemotional age should do with a great historical religion. Natural religion, or the worship of some vague spirit that need not have any direct contact with human life, was the principal substitute for a living faith; and the Church, an establishment aiding in the preservation of order, became the center of conventionality and formalism. Likewise, in the moral realm a conventional code of manners and good form took the place of a living ethical standard. The early portion of the century shows the tightening of the screws upon the machine of formal life and a narrowing of all things into their particular niches in a static social system; the latter portion witnessed, if we may change our figure, a sapping of this citadel of the reason from every side by the forces of sentimentalism, of humanitarianism, and the coming romantic revolution. This change was one of the most important and impressive in modern history, and an understanding of it is of the utmost value to our comprehension of the periods that follow.

The second point we must consider is the extremely social character of the period. The fifty years of peace and security which came to England after the accession of the Hanoverians, following the wars of the preceding reigns, allowed the people to settle down in complacent satisfaction with things as they were. With the religious question settled, parliamentary government organized, and the machinery of the elegant social order working smoothly, men were ready to accept Pope's dictum that whatever is, is right. Though manners in the country were coarse and brutal enough, life in the towns was hedged about by the elegances of social convention. The