round Dr. Darwin and his Lunar Society! | dish, Volta, Galvani, Bichat, and Hunter. with James Watt and Matthew Boulton, To interpret its ideas, it had such masters then at work on their steam-engine, and of speech as Voltaire, Rousseau, Swift, Murdoch, the inventor of gas-lighting; Johnson, Gibbon, Lessing, Goethe, and and Wedgwood, the father of the pot- Burke. It organized into sciences (crysteries; and Hutton the bookseller, and tallizing the data till then held in solution) Baskerville the printer, and Thomas Day, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, comand Lovell Edgeworth; a group to whom parative anatomy, electricity, psychology, often came Franklin, and Smeaton, and and the elements of social science, both Black, and in their centre their great in history and in statics. It threw up philosopher and guide and moving spirit, these three dominant movements: (1) the the noble Joseph Priestley. Little as we idea of law in mind and in society, that think of it now, that group, where the is, the first postulate of mental and social indomitable Boulton kept open house, science; (2) that genius for synthesis of was a place of pilgrimage to the ardent which the work of Buffon, of Linnæus, minds of Europe; it was one of the intel- and the Encyclopædia itself, were all lectual cradles of modern civilization. phases; (3) that idea of social reconstrucAnd it is interesting to remember that tion, of which the new régime of '89, the our great Charles Darwin is on both sides American Republic, and our reformed the grandson of men who were leading Parliament are all products. The sevenmembers of that Lunar Society, itself a teenth century can show perhaps a list of provincial Royal Society. What forces greater separate names, if we add those lay within it! What a giant was Watt, fit in poetry, politics, and art. But for mass, to stand beside Gutemberg and Columbus, result, multiplicity, and organic power, it as one of the few whose single discov- may be doubted if any century in modern eries have changed the course of human history has more to show than the eighcivilization! And, if we chose one man teenth. as a type of the intellectual energy of the century, we could hardly find a better than Joseph Priestley, though his was not the greatest mind of the century. His versatility, eagerness, activity, and humanity; the immense range of his curiosity, in all things physical, moral, or social; his place in science, in theology, in philosophy, and in politics; his peculiar relation to the Revolution, and the pathetic story of his unmerited sufferings, may make him the hero of the eighteenth century. It There is this stamp upon every stroke of eighteenth-century work: the habit of regarding things as wholes, bearing on life as a whole. Their thirst for knowledge is a practical, organic, working thing; their minds grasp a subject all round, to turn it to a useful end. The Encyclopædic spirit animates all with a genius for clearness, comprehension, and arrangement. It was for the most part somewhat premature, often impatient, at times shallow, as was much of the work of Voltaire, Diderot, Johnson, and GoldThe strength of the century lay neither smith. But the slightest word of. such in politics nor in art; it lay in breadth of men has to my ear a human ring, a living understanding. In political genius, in voice that I recognize as familiar. poetry, in art, the eighteenth was inferior awakens me, and I am conscious of being to the seventeenth century, and even to face to face with an interpreter of humanthe sixteenth; in moral, in social, and in ity to men. When they write histories material development it was far inferior whole centuries glow with life; we see to the nineteenth. But in philosophy, in and we hear the mighty tramp of ages. science, in mental versatility, it has hardly In twelve moderate octavos, through all any equal in the ages. Here, especially, which not a sentence could belong to any it is impossible to limit the view to one other book, Gibbon has compressed the country. Politics, industry, and art are history of the world during more than a local. Science and research know noth- thousand years. Is there in all prose liting of country, have no limitations of erature so perfect a book as this? In tongue, race, or government. In philoso- these days we write histories on far prophy then the century numbers: Leibnitz, founder methods; but for the story of ten Vico, Berkeley, Montesquieu, Diderot, ordinary years Mr. Freeman and Mr. D'Alembert, Condorcet, Kant, Turgot, Froude will require a thousand pages; and Hume, Adam Smith. In science, it Macaulay's brilliant annals, we are told, counts Buffon, Linnæus, Lavoisier, La- needed more time to write than the events place, Lamarck, Lagrange, Halley, Her-needed to happen. schel, Franklin, Priestley, Black, Caven- I often take up my Buffon. They tell us now that Buffon hardly knew the elements of his subject, and lived in the palæozoic era of science. It may be, but I find in Buffon a commanding thought, the earth and its living races in orderly relalation, and in the centre man with his touch of them and his contrast to them. What organic thought flows in every line of his majestic scheme! What suggestions in it, what an education it is in itself! And if Buffon is not a man of science, assuredly he is a philosopher. No doubt his ideas of fibres and cells were rudimentary, his embryology weak, and his histology rude; but he had the root of the matter when he treated of animals as liv ing organisms, and not simply as accumulations of microscopic particles. Now Buffon is a typical worker of the eigh teenth century, at its high-water mark of industry, variety of range, human interest, and organizing life. We may take Adam Smith, Hume, Priestley, Franklin; they are four of the best types of the century; with its keen hold on moral, social, and physical truth at once; its genius for scientific and for social observation, its inexhaustible curiosity; and its continual sense that man stands face to face with Nature. They felt the grand dualism of all knowledge in a way that perhaps we fail to grasp it with our infinity of special information, and a certain hankering after spiritualities that we doubt, and infinitesmal analyses which cease to fructify. Adam Smith, the first (alas! perhaps the last) real economist, did not devote his life to polishing up a theory of rent. Astronomy, society, education, government, morals, psychology, language, art, were in turns the subject of his study, and in all he was master; they all moved him alike, as part of man's work on earth. He never would have founded political economy if he had merely been an economist. And all this is more true of Hume, with a range even wider, an insight keener, a judgment riper, a creative method even more original. And so, Priestley and Franklin: as keen about gases and electric flashes as about the good of the commonwealth and the foundations of human belief. And when Turgot, himself one of the best of this band of social reformers, said of Franklin, Eripuit cælo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis, it is true, in a wide sense, of them all, and especially of Turgot himself. They all sought to conquer the earth, as the dwelling-place of a reformed society of men. This Encyclopædic, social spirit belongs to all alike. We recognize in all the zeal to make their knowledge fruitful, systematic, common to all, useful to man. Out of fashion as such a thing is to us, every sentence they utter bears its meaning on its face; every book, every voyage, every discovery, is hailed with enreka through Europe; the voyages of travellers, or the surgical operation for cataract, instantly affect history, morals, logic, and philosophy. They cannot rest till every corner of the planet is explored, till the races of man are compared, and the products of the earth are stored in museums, classified in orders, grouped into kingdoms. Science and social life, nay, philosophy and morals, were strangely transformed when the limits and the form of man's earth were first exactly realized. Cook and Banks, Anson and Bougainville, reveal to Europe the antipodes, and their human, brute, and vegetable worlds; and every science and every art is alive with new ideas; history, philosophy, morals, and social economy, are lit up with new laws. We see the same thing to-day; but the sacred fire perhaps burns with a soberer flame; the wonder and the sympathy are a little dulled by use; and through the mountains of our materials the volcanic shock of a new truth is less distinctly felt. The universal human interest of these men throbs in every page they write. Defoe is politician, romancer, theologian, economist, pamphleteer, and philosopher. Swift is all this, verse-maker, and many things beside. Voltaire is poet, historian, critic, moralist, letter-writer, polemist, arbiter in science, philosophy, and art in general; like Virgil's monster, with a hundred tongues and a hundred throats of brass. Diderot was a very Encyclopædic Briareus. But the intense social aim comes out in all alike, however different in nature and taste. Cowper himself has it, as he sits beside his tea-urn, watches his hare and his spaniel, or apostrophizes his sofa. Fielding clothes it with flesh and blood, hot blood and solid flesh; it lights up the hackwork of Goldsmith, and sheds a fragrance forever through his lovely idyll of the vicar's home; Johnson in his armchair thunders it out as law to the club; Bentham tears up the old statute. book by passionate appeals to the greatest happiness of the greatest number; Burns sang for it the songs which will live forever in English homes; Hogarth, the Fielding of the brush, paints it; Garrick, the most versatile of actors, played it; Mozart, the most sympathetic of all musi- | The revelation of this great intellectual cians, found its melody; Reynolds caught strength in England was made by Monevery smile on its cheek, and the light tesquieu and Voltaire. Voltaire, if not upon its eye; and Hume, Adam Smith, exactly a thinker, was the greatest interPriestley, and Burke sounded some of its preter of ideas whom the world has ever deepest notes. seen; and became the greatest literary power in the whole history of letters. When in 1728 he took back to France his English experience and studies, he carried with him the sacred fire of freedom whereby the supremacy of thought began to pass to France. Within ten years that fire lit up some of the greatest beacons of the modern world. Voltaire wrote his " Essay on Manners" in 1740; Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws" appeared in 1748, and its influence was greater than that of any single work of Voltaire. The forty years, 1740-1780, were perhaps the most pregnant epoch in the history of human thought. It contained the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, D'Alembert, Vauvenargues, Buffon, Lavoisier, Rousseau, the Encyclopædists, Condorcet, and Turgot in France; and in England, those of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Gibbon, Robertson, Hume, Adam Smith, Priestley, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gray. During the last twenty years of the century France was absorbed in her tremendous Revolution, and again the supremacy in literature passed away from her to give to Germany Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven; to give to England Burke, Bentham, Cowper, Burns, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Scott. So sways the battle of ideas from age to age and from shore to shore. Of all in this century, three men stand out, in three countries, as types of its vast range, of its organizing genius, of its hold on the reality behind the veil that we see: Kant in Germany, Diderot in France, Hume in England. For us here, Hume is the dominant mind of the age; with his consummate grasp of human life in all its moral, social, and physical conditions; by his sense, good-fellowship, urbanity, and manliness. This was not the age of the lonely thinkers in their studies, as Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, had been. Nor was it the age of Bacon, Pascal, Hobbes, and Locke; when philosophy was shaken by political and religious fanaticism. It was not the age of the wonderful specialists of our own day, when mountains of observation defy all attempts at system. It was an age more like the revival of thought and learning but with a notable difference. Its curiosity is as keen, its industry even greater; its mental force as abundant. But it is far less wild; its resources are under command; its genius is constructive; and its ruling spirit is social. It was the second and far greater revival- that new birth of time whereof the first line was led by Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, and Bacon; whereof the second line was led by Newton, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, Hume, and Kant; whereof the third line will be led by those who are to come. This is not the place to discuss the vast movement of the human mind which is In the progress of Europe, especially loosely called the Revolution. As an in its mental progress, there is an inces. Oxford wit used to say, "To sit in judgsant ebb and flow, a continual give and ment on the Revolution is like asking if take. The intellectual lead passes from the fall of man were a justifiable proceedone to the other, qualified and modified by ing." Our judgment on all this depends each great individual genius. In the six- on the bent of our minds in theology, philteenth century it was Spain and Italy, in osophy, and politics. One who holds on the seventeenth it was Holland and En- to his Bible chiefly for its damnatory regland, in the eighteenth it was France, sources has assured us that this was the and now perhaps it is Germany, which Satanic age. If we look at its achievesets the tone, or fashion, in thought. For ments, one is tempted to wish that our the first generation perhaps of the eigh- own age were more often visited by that teenth century, England had the lead which accomplished gentleman. The century Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Hobbes, completely transformed all that had previ. Locke, Harvey, Cromwell, and William, ously been known as to heat, gases, methad given her in the century preceding. als, electricity, plants, animals, tissues, The contemporaries of Newton, Locke, diseases, geography, geology, the races, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Defoe, and Addi- products, and form of the earth, psychol. son, were a force in combination which ogy, chronology, history, political and the worshippers of Louis the Fourteenth social and economic science. It would did not immediately perceive, but which take a volume to enlarge on these. One was above anything then extant in Europe. I can but give the names of those depart ments of knowledge. Compare the ana tomical resources of Dr. Radcliffe with those of Hunter, Bichat, and Dupuytren; the chemical and physical notions of Boyle with those of Davy, Volta, and Galvani; the physiology of Boerhaave with that of Lamarck; compare the classificatory notions of Ray with those of Buffon, Linnæus, and Cuvier; take the ideas on society of Hobbes or Harring. ton, and compare them with those of Hume, A. Smith, Burke, and Bentham; compare Gibbon's idea of history with that of Raleigh, Bacon, Milton. Compare the psychology of Kant with that of Descartes, or Locke; and we see that the century made a stride, not as we have done by enlarging the sciences, but in creating them or turning their rudiments into mature organisms. The weak side of the century was certainly in beauty; in poetry, and the arts of form. It was essentially the age of prose; but still it was not prosaic. Its imaginative genius spoke in prose and not in verse. There is more poetry in "The Vicar of Wakefield " than in "The Deserted Village," in "Tom Jones" than in Pope's Iliad, and the death of Clarissa Harlowe is more like Sophocles than the death of Addison's Cato. The age did not do well in verse; but if its verse tended to prose, its prose ever tended to rise into poetry. We want some word (Mr. Matthew Arnold will not let us use the word poetry) to express the imaginative power at work in prose, saturating it with the fragrance of proportion and form, shedding over the whole that indefinable charm of subtle suggestion, which belongs to rare thoughts clothed in perfect words. For my part I find "the vision and the faculty divine" in the inexhaustible vivacity of "Tom Jones," in the mysterious realism of "Robinson Crusoe," in the terrible tension of Clarissa's tragedy, in the idyllic grace of the vicar's home. This imaginative force has never since been reached in prose save by Walter Scott himself, and not even by him in such inimitable witchery of words. If it be not poetry, it is quite unlike the prose that we read or write to day. Besides, one cannot allow that there is no poetry in the century. Let us give a liberal meaning to poetry; and where we find creative fancy, charm of phrase, the vivid tone of a distinct voice that we could recognize in a thousand there, we are sure, is the poet. For my part, I go so far as to admit that to be poetry which is quite intelligible, even if it have no subtlety, mystery, or inner meaning at all. Much as I prefer Shelley, I will not deny that Pope is a a poet. Tennyson perhaps would never have run so near commonplace as do stanzas here and there in the famous "Elegy," but does any one doubt that Gray's "Elegy " is poetry? And though Wordsworth is a greater man than Cowper, it is possible, had there never been a "Task," that there might never have been an "Excursion." The poetry of of the century is below our lofty English average, but it is not contemptible; and when it is good it has some rare qualities indeed. In the poetry of the century are three distinct types: first, that of Pope; next, that of which the "Elegy" is the masterpiece; lastly, the songs of Burns. Now the first belongs to the age of Louis XIV. The second is the typical poetry of the century. The third is but the clarion that heralds the revolutionary outburst which gave us Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Schiller. Cowper in part belongs to the three types; he is the connecting link between them all: touching Pope by his easy mastery of rime, akin to Gray by his exquisite culture and grace, foretelling Wordsworth and Shelley by his moral and social earnestness. If the century produced little true poetry, it produced some little that is very good, and a good deal which has some very fine qualities. "The Rape of the Lock" is a poem in a class by itself, and Pope wrote other pieces of magical skill and verve. Goldsmith's poems would please us more if he had not bettered them himself in his own prose. Burns wrote the most ringing songs in our literature. Cowper is a true poet of a very rare type, one of the most important in the development of English poetry. And Gray's "Elegy" is better known and more widely loved than any single poem in our language. All this should be enough to save the age of prose from the charge of being prosaic. In the best poetry of the century (at least after Pope's death) there is a new power, a new poetic field, a new source of poetry. The new source of poetry is the people; its new field is the home; the new power within it is to serve the cause of humanity. It told the short and simple annals of the poor. It is a field unknown to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, or Pope. But Goldsmith has it in his heart of hearts; such men as Thomson and Collins and Beattie and Crabbe have it, though they | painting and sculpture, the arts of the few, remain on the lower ranges at their best; never have done or can do. It touches Burns is the very prophet of it; and it the heart and the character as the arts of glows in a gentle hermit-like way in every form have never sought to do, at least in murmur of Cowper's tender soul. "The the modern world. When we test the Task" is by reason of this one of the civilization of an age by its art, we should landmarks of our literature, though its look to its music next to its poetry, and own nobler progeny may have lessened its sometimes even more than to its poetry. charm to us. It is because the original Critics who talk about the debasement of charm is still as fresh as ever, that we may the age when churchwardens built those call the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard mongrel temples must assuredly be deaf. the central poem of the age. Our young Those churchwardens and the rest of the word-mongers and unutterables will tell us congregation wept as they listened to to-day that its moralizing is as obvious as Handel and Mozart. One wearies of a tombstone, that its melody is rudimen- hearing how grand and precious a time is tary and its epithets almost trivial. Yes! ours, now that we can draw a cornflower and for that reason it has sunk into the right. soul of all who speak the English tongue; Music is the art of the eighteenth cenit has created the new poetry of the cot- tury, the art wherein it stands supreme in tage; its very surrender of brilliancy, sub-the ages; perfect, complete, and selftlety, or novelty, is its strength. The created. The whole gamut of music (exsustained undertone of pathos, the magi- cept the plain song, part song, dance, and cal unity of its thought and its coloring, mass) is the creation of the eighteenth the simple humanity of it, all these make century: opera, sonata, concerto, symthe "Elegy "the poem of the eighteenth phony, oratorio; and the full uses of instrucentury, the voice of the humane age at its mentation, harmony, air, chorus, march, best. and fugue, all belong to that age. If one thinks of the pathos of those great songs, of the majesty of those full quires, of the inexhaustible melody of their operas, and all that Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, and the early years of Beethoven gave us, it is strange to hear that that age was dead to art. Neither the age which gave us the Madonnas and the Sistine, nor the age which gave us Reims and Westminster Abbey, nor even the age which gave us the Parthenon, did more for humanity than the age to which we owe the oratorios, and the operas, the sonatas, symphonies, and masses of the great age of music. Poetry is the central art; but it is not all art and the art of the century deserves a word. We may give up architecture at once. People were so much absorbed in making their homes comfortable within, that they seemed blind to ugliness elsewhere; and if Mr. Ruskin is certain that Satan had to do with the churches of the Georgian era, there is no means of disproving it. But Reynolds remains the greatest English painter; Gainsborough and Romney have not been surpassed in their own line; Hogarth remains still our greatest humorist with the pencil; Garrick is still our greatest actor; Flaxman is still our greatest sculptor; and it is well to remember that Turner was of the Royal Academy before the century was out. But besides all these, Crome, Stothard, Blake, Bewick, Chippendale, Wedgwood, and Bartolozzi worked in the century and in their given lines these men have never been surpassed. There is another art which lies closer to civilization than any art but poetry. Music is a better test of the moral culture of an age than its painting, or its sculpture, or even its architecture. Music, by its nature, is ubiquitous, as much almost as poetry itself, in one sense more so, for its vernacular tongue is common to mankind. Music in its nature is social, it can enter every home, it is not the privilege of the rich; and thus it belongs to the social and domestic life of a people, as Not merely was music of the highest order produced, not merely did that age create almost all the great orders of music, but the generation gave itself to music with a passion such as marks all ages wherein art reaches its zenith. When Handel and Buononcini, Gluck and Piccinni, Farinelli and Caffarelli, divided the town, it was not with the languid partisanship which amuses our leisure, but with the passions of the Red and Green factions in the Circus of Byzantium. England, it is true, had few musicians of its own; but Handel is for practical purposes an English musician, and the great Italian singers and the great German masters were never more truly at home than when surrounded by English admirers. Our people bore their fair share in this new birth of art, especially |