ities were not more
than respectable, but under Walpole and the monarch whom he served
literature was disregarded, and the Minister was content to make use of
hireling writers for whatever dirty work he required; spending in this
way, it is said, L50,000 in ten years.

It was far better in the long run for men of letters to be free from the
servility of patronage, but there was a wearisome time, as Johnson and
Goldsmith knew to their cost, during which authors lost their freedom in
another way, and became the slaves of the booksellers. It is pleasant to
observe that the last noteworthy act of patronage in the century was one
that did honour to the patron without lessening the dignity and
independence of the recipient. Literature owes much to the noblest of
political philosophers for discovering and fostering the genius of one
of the most original of English poets, and every reader of Crabbe will
do honour to the generous friendship of Edmund Burke.

II.

The lowest stage in our national history was reached in the Restoration
period. The idealists, who had aimed at marks it was not given to man to
reach, were superseded by men with no ideal, whether in politics or
religion. The extreme rigidity in morals enjoined by State authority in
Cromwell's days, when theological pedantry discovered sin in what had
hitherto been regarded as innocent, led, among the unsaintly mass of
the people, to a hypocrisy even more corrupting than open vice, and the
advent of the most publicly dissolute of English kings opened the
floodgates of iniquity. The unbridled vice of the time is displayed in
the Restoration dramatists, in the Grammont memoirs, in the diary of
Pepys, and also in that of the admirable John Evelyn, 'faithful among
the faithless.' Charles II. was considered good-natured because his
manners, unlike those of his father, were sociable, and unrestrained by
Court etiquette. Londoners liked a monarch who fed ducks in St. James's
Park before breakfast; but an easy temper did not prevent the king from
sanctioning the most unjust and cruel laws, and it allowed him to sell
Dunkirk and basely to accept a pension from France. The corruption of
the age pervaded politics as well as society, and the self-sacrificing
spirit which is the salt of a nation's life seemed for the time extinct
among public men.

When Dutch men-of-war appeared at the Nore the confusion was great, but
there were few resources and few signs of energy in the m