eer of
improvement more marked than in the case of its neighbors. It is not
easy to assign reasons for failure in this respect, unless we seek
them in disgust at the subsequent dismemberment and disturbance of
the empire by the fruits of popular agitations in America, Ireland
and France. The reaction due to such causes was probably sufficient
to defeat all liberal efforts. The leading English writers of the
Revolutionary period were strong Tories. Such were Johnson, the Lake
poets after their brief swing to the opposite extreme, and Scott.
All these except the first belong as well to the time of successful
reform, and Johnson may be claimed by the eighteenth century; which
serves to illustrate the blight cast upon British literature by the
prolonged resistance of British statesmen to the prevailing current--a
resistance which took its keynote from the dying recantation and
protest of the Whig Chatham.

The opening of the epoch, then, was as marked in Great Britain as
elsewhere. Only in special fields she afterward fell behind, and lost
something like half the century. In others she kept abreast, or even
in advance.

Criticism was not content to exercise its new powers and apply its
newly-framed laws exclusively in the investigation of any branch of
philosophy. It brought them to bear upon the arts. The discovery of
the buried cities of Campania aided in attracting renewed attention to
the art-stores of Italy, ancient and modern. The principles of taste
and beauty which they illustrated were searchingly analyzed and
carefully explained. Painting and sculpture began slowly to emit their
rays through the eclipse of more than a century. The allied art shared
in this second and secondary renaissance. Haydn was in full fruit,
Mozart ripening, and Music watched, in the cradle of Beethoven, her
budding Shakespeare. A fourth Teuton was studying the symphonies of
the spheres; and within the first five years of the century, while
the "crowning mercy" of Yorktown was maturing, a planet that had never
before dawned on the eye of man took its place with the ancient six,
and "swam into the ken" of Herschel.

We have said enough to vindicate our assumed chronology and justify
our readjustment of the calendar. Europe may well be invited to
celebrate her own political, social and material centennial in 1876,
as truly as that of America. Her intellectual revival indisputably
contributed, through Franklin, Laurens, the Lees and others