9-81. Johnson's Lives of the Poets
1783. Treaty of Paris | 1783. Blake's Poetical Sketches
| 1785. Cowper's The Task
| The London Times
1786. Trial of Warren Hastings |
| 1786. Burns's first poems (the
| Kilmarnock Burns)
| Burke's Warren Hastings
1789-1799. French Revolution |
| 1790. Burke's French Revolution
| 1791. Boswell's Life of Johnson
1793. War with France |
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CHAPTER X

THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM (1800-1850)

THE SECOND CREATIVE PERIOD OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The first half of the nineteenth century records the triumph of Romanticism
in literature and of democracy in government; and the two movements are so
closely associated, in so many nations and in so many periods of history,
that one must wonder if there be not some relation of cause and effect
between them. Just as we understand the tremendous energizing influence of
Puritanism in the matter of English liberty by remembering that the common
people had begun to read, and that their book was the Bible, so we may
understand this age of popular government by remembering that the chief
subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common men
and the value of the individual. As we read now that brief portion of
history which lies between the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the
English Reform Bill of 1832, we are in the presence of such mighty
political upheavals that "the age of revolution" is the only name by which
we can adequately characterize it. Its great historic movements become
intelligible only when we read what was written in this period; for the
French Revolution and the American commonwealth, as well as the
establishment of a true democracy in England by the Reform Bill, were the
inevitable results of ideas which literature had spread rapidly through the
civilized world. Liberty is fundamentally an ideal; and that
ideal--beautiful, inspiring, compelling, as a loved banner in the wind--was
kept steadily before men's minds by a multitude of books and pamphlets as
far apart as Burns's _Poems_ and Th