igned in his stead.

And yet the reign of the fourth George as king was marked by returning
national prosperity,--owing not to the efforts of statesmen and
legislators, but to the marvellous spread of commerce and manufactures,
resulting from the establishment of peace, thus opening a market for
British goods in all parts of the world.

This period of the fourth George's rule, as regent and king, was also
remarkable for the appearance of men of genius in all departments of
human thought and action. As the lights of a former generation sank
beneath the horizon, other stars arose of increased brilliancy. In
poetry alone, Byron, Scott, Rogers, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth,
Moore, Campbell, Keats, would have made the age illustrious,--a
constellation such as has not since appeared. In fiction, Sir Walter
Scott introduced a new era, soon followed by Bulwer, Dickens, and
Thackeray. In the law there were Brougham, Eldon, Lyndhurst,
Ellenborough, Denman, Plunkett, Erskine, Wetherell,--all men of the
first class. In medicine and surgery were Abernethy, Cooper, Holland. In
the Church were Parr, Clarke, Hampden, Scott, Sumner, Hall, Arnold,
Irving, Chalmers, Heber, Whately, Newman. Sir Humphry Davy was
presiding at the Royal Society, and Sir Thomas Lawrence at the Royal
Academy. Herschel was discovering planets. Bell was lecturing at the new
London University, and Dugald Stewart in the University of Edinburgh.
Captain Ross was exploring the Northern Seas, and Lander the wilds of
Africa. Lancaster was founding a new system of education; Bentham and
Ricardo were unravelling the tangled web of political economy; Hallam,
Lingard, Mitford, Mills, were writing history; Macaulay, Carlyle, Smith,
Lockhart, Jeffrey, Hazlitt, were giving a new stimulus to periodical
literature; while Miss Edgeworth, Jane Porter, Mrs. Hemans, were
entering the field of literature as critics, poets, and novelists,
instead of putting their inspired thoughts into letters, as bright women
did one hundred years before. Into everything there were found some to
cast their searching glances, creating an intellectual activity without
previous precedent, if we except the great theological discussions of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even shopkeepers began to read
and think, and in their dingy quarters were stirred to discuss their
rights; while William Cobbett aroused a still lower class to political
activity by his matchless style. All philanthropic, ed