of half-reluctant sympathy with that undyspeptic and rather worldly period, much in the same way as one grows to find a keener savor in Horace and Montaigne. In the first three quarters of it, at least, there was a cheerfulness and contentment with things as they were, which is no unsound philosophy for the mass of mankind, and which has been impossible since the first French Revolution. For our own War of Independence, though it gave the first impulse to that awful riot of human nature turned loose among first principles, was but the reassertion of established precedents and traditions, and essentially conservative in its aim, however deflected in its course. It is true that, to a certain extent, the theories of the French doctrinaires gave a tinge to the rhetoric of our patriots, but it is equally true that they did not perceptibly. affect the conclusions of our Constitutionmakers. Nor had those doctrinaires themselves any suspicion of the explosive mixture that can be made by the conjunction of abstract theory with brutal human instinct. Before 1789 there was a delightful period of universal confidence, during which a belief in the perfectibility of man was insensibly merging into a conviction that he could be perfected by some formula of words, just as a man is knighted. He kneels down a simple man like ourselves, is told to rise up a Perfect Being, and rises accordingly. It

certainly was a comfortable time. If there was discontent, it was in the individual, and not in the air; sporadic, not epidemic. The discomfort of Cowper was not concerning this world but the world to come. Men sate as roomily in their consciences as in the broad-bottomed chairs which suggest such solidity of repose. Responsibility for the Universe had not yet been invented. A few solitary persons saw a swarm of ominous question-marks wherever they turned their eyes; but sensible people pronounced them the mere muscae volitantes of indigestion which an honest dose of rhubarb would disperse. Men read Rousseau for amusement, and never dreamed that those flowers of rhetoric were ripening the seed of the guillotine. Post and telegraph were not so importunate as now. People were not compelled to know what all the fools in the world were saying or doing yesterday. It is impossible to conceive of a man's enjoying now the unconcerned seclusion of White at Selborne, who, a century ago, recorded the important fact that "the old tortoise at Lewes in Sussex awakened and came forth out of his dormitory," but does not seem to have heard of Burgoyne's surrender, the news of which ought to have reached him about the time he was writing. It may argue pusillanimity, but I can hardly help envying the remorseless indifference of such men to the burning questions

of the hour, at the first alarm of which we are all expected to run with our buckets, or it may be with our can of kerosene, snatched by mistake in the hurry and confusion. They devoted themselves to leisure with as much assiduity as we employ to render it impossible. The art of being elegantly and strenuously idle is lost. There was no hurry then, and armies still went into winter quarters punctually as musquashes. Certainly manners occupied more time and were allowed more space. Whenever one sees a picture of that age, with its broad skirts, its rapiers standing out almost at a right angle, and demanding a wide periphery to turn about, one has a feeling of spaciousness that suggests mental as well as bodily elbow-room. Now all the ologies follow us to our burrows in our newspaper, and crowd upon us with the pertinacious benevolence of subscription-books. Even the right of sanctuary is denied. The horns of the altar, which we fain would grasp, have become those of a dilemma in the attempt to combine science with theology.

This, no doubt, is the view of a special mood, but it is a mood that grows upon us the longer we have stood upon our lees. Enough if we feel a faint thrill or reminiscence of ferment in the spring, as old wine is said to do when the grapes are in blossom. Then we are sure that we are neither dead nor turned to vinegar, and

repeat softly to ourselves, in Dryden's delightful paraphrase of Horace:

“Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call to-day his own;

He who, secure within, can say,

'To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day;
Be fair or foul, or rain or shine,

The joys I have possessed in spite of Fate are mine;
Not heaven itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.'

One has a notion that in those old times the days were longer than now; that a man called to-day his own by a securer title, and held his hours with a sense of divine right now obsolete. It is an absurd fancy, I know, and would be sent to the right-about by the first physicist or historian you happened to meet. But one thing I am sure of, that the private person was of more importance both to himself and others then than now, and that self-consciousness was, accordingly, a vast deal more comfortable because it had less need of conscious self-assertion.

But the Past always has the advantage of us in the secret it has learned of holding its tongue, which may perhaps account in part for its reputed wisdom. Whatever the eighteenth century was, there was a great deal of stout fighting and work done in it, both physical and intellectual, and we owe it a great debt. Its very inefficacy for the higher reaches of poetry, its

very good breeding that made it shy of the raised. voice and flushed features of enthusiasm, enabled it to give us the model of a domestic and drawing-room prose as distinguished from that of the pulpit, the forum, or the closet. In Germany it gave us Lessing and that half century of Goethe which made him what he was. In France it gave us Voltaire, who, if he used ridicule too often for the satisfaction of personal spite, employed it also for sixty years in the service of truth and justice, and to him more than to any other one man we owe it that we can now think and speak as we choose. Contemptible he may have been in more ways than one, but at any rate we owe him that, and it is surely something. In what is called the elegant literature of our own tongue (to speak only of the most eminent), it gave us Addison and Steele, who together made a man of genius; Pope, whose vivid genius almost persuaded wit to renounce its proper nature and become poetry; Thomson, who sought inspiration in Nature, though in her least imaginative side;' Fielding, still in some respects our greatest

I That Thomson was a man of true poetic sensibility is shown, I think, more agreeably in The Castle of Indolence than in The Seasons. In these, when he buckles the buskins of Milton on the feet of his natural sermo pedestris, the effect too often suggests the unwieldy gait of a dismounted trooper in his jack-boots.