ce,
the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review.
_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies, published stories,
poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which
enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.

Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the
English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one
communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half
of the 18th century, and in particular {225} with the writings of Goethe,
Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French
Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th
century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian in
the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words, the German
writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than
with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for
literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's
time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to
domesticate the diction of German prose. But the nature and extent of
this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the
authors of the time one by one.

The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more obvious
and immediate. When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm among the
friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly less intense
than in France. It was the dawn of a new day: the shackles were stricken
from the slave; all men were free and all men were brothers, and radical
young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar of the Paris mob.
Wordsworth's lines on the _Fall of the Bastile_, Coleridge's _Fall of
Robespierre_ and _Ode to France_, and Southey's revolutionary drama, _Wat
Tyler_, gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the English
democracy. In after life Wordsworth, looking back regretfully to those
years of promise, {226} wrote his poem on the _French Revolution as it
appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven. Oh times
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance."

Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at
Cambridge, s