oughts and impulses of the time. The problem for the
coming period was therefore marked out. The man of letters had to
develop a living literature by becoming a representative of the ideas
which really interested the whole cultivated classes, instead of writing
merely for the exquisite critic, or still less for the regenerating and
obnoxious section of society. That indeed, I take it, is the general
problem of literature; but I shall have to trace the way in which its
solution was attempted in the next period.

III

(1714-1739)

The death of Queen Anne opens a new period in the history of literature
and of politics. Under the first Georges we are in the very heart of the
eighteenth century; the century, as its enemies used to say, of coarse
utilitarian aims, of religious indifference and political corruption;
or, as I prefer to say, the century of sound common sense and growing
toleration, and of steady social and industrial development.

To us, to me at least, it presents something pleasant in retrospect.
There were then no troublesome people with philanthropic or political or
religious nostrums, proposing to turn the world upside down and
introduce an impromptu millennium. The history of periods when people
were cutting each other's throats for creeds is no doubt more exciting;
but we, who profess toleration, ought surely to remember that you
cannot have martyrs without bigots and persecutors; and that
fanaticism, though it may have its heroic aspects, has also a very ugly
side to it. At any rate, we who come after a century of revolutionary
changes, and are often told that the whole order of things may be upset
by some social earthquake, look back with regret to the days of quiet
solid progress, when everything seemed to have settled down to a quiet,
stable equilibrium. Wealth and comfort were growing--surely no bad
things; and John Bull--he had just received that name from
Arbuthnot--was waxing fat and complacently contemplating his own
admirable qualities. It is the period of the composition of 'Rule
Britannia' and 'The Roast Beef of Old England,' and of the settled
belief that your lusty, cudgel-playing, beer-drinking Briton was worth
three of the slaves who ate frogs and wore wooden shoes across the
Channel. The British constitution was the embodiment of perfect wisdom,
and, as such, was entitled to be the dread and envy of the world. To the
political historian it is the era of Walpole; the huge mass