This devoted conscientiousness has strengthened English royalty beyond words. Through sixty years of growing democracy the fact that the throne of England has been filled by Queen Victoria has gone far to re-establish in popular esteem a form of government which it is the fashion to call a thing of the

past.

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In general this Victorian era has been peaceful, but still one which is best typified by the newest title of its sovereign. For during the last sixty years of the nineteenth century England has been quietly asserting itself no longer as an isolated kingdom, but as a world-empire. This imperialism of England seems different from any other which has declared itself since the pristine empire of Rome. It stands not for the assertion of central and despotic authority, but rather for the maintenance of those legal traditions which evince the elasticity of still unbroken vitality. For, speaking broadly, the English Common Law is a system, not of rules, but of principles. Its fundamental notion is that the world should be governed by established custom. So long as its influence was confined to the island where it was developed, to be sure, still seemed impracticably rigid. The American Revolution, however, taught England a lesson which has been thoroughly learned, that when English authority asserts itself in foreign regions, the true spirit of the Common Law should recognise and maintain all local customs which do not conflict with public good. In India, for example, local custom sanctioned many things essentially abominable, — murder, self-immolation, and the like. Such crimes against civilisation the English power has condemned and repressed. Harmless local custom, on the other hand, freedom of worship, peculiarities of land tenure, and whatever harmonises with public order, the English government has maintained as strenuously as in England itself it has maintained the customs peculiar to the mother country. So in Canada it has maintained a hundred forms of old French law ancestral to those provinces. So in

Australia it has maintained many new systems and customs which have grown up in a colony settled since the American Revolution. Its modern state is typified by the fact that in the judicial committee of the Privy Council - whose functions resemble those of the Supreme Court of the United States there are now regularly members from Canada, from India, from Australia, to pronounce in this court of appeal on questions referred to the mother country from parts of the empire where the actual law differs from that of England herself.

The Victorian epoch, then, has begun to explain the true spirit of the English law: whatever the letter, this spirit maintains that throughout the empire, and all the places where the imperial influence extends, the whole force of England shall sustain the differing rights and traditions which have proved themselves, for the regions where they have grown, sound, safe, and favourable to civilised prosperity. The growing flexibility of English government has tended to make dominant in many parts of the world the language and the ideals which we share with England. The progress of imperial England, then, frequently misrepresented, as though it were mere selfish aggression, is really a phase of a world-conflict which the acceleration of intercommunication - steam travel and the electric telegraph has at last made inevitable. Beyond doubt war is terrible; one of our own generals in the Civil War is said to have declared that "War is Hell." At least to the traditional American mind, however, hell hardly yet presents itself as a thing which unaided human ingenuity can certainly avoid; and when war means that the progress of the moral, legal, and political ideals which we share with England either must be checked or must dominate by armed force, minds loyal to our ancestral traditions may fairly begin to question whether tame peace is not worse still.

Historically, then, England began the century as an isolated conservative power. In the reign of King William IV. it

underwent a revolution which its ancestral legal forms proved strong and flexible enough to accomplish without convulsion or bloodshed; and during the long reign of Queen Victoria it has been more and more widely asserting the imperial dominion of the flexibly vital traditions of our Common Law.

II

ENGLISH LITERATURE SINCE 1800

So we come to the literature of England during the nineteenth century. By chance several dates which we have named for other purposes are significant in literary history as well as in political. In 1798, when Nelson fought the battle of the Nile, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their famous volume of "Lyrical Ballads." This little book is commonly regarded as the first important expression of that romantic outburst of poetry which substituted for the formal literary traditions of the eighteenth century those traditions of individual artistic freedom which have persisted until the present time. In brief, the literary emancipation of England, amid blind political conservatism, was almost as marked as the literary conservatism of France, amid revolutionary political changes. The spirit of revolution was everywhere abroad; but in England it more profoundly influenced phrase than conduct, while in France the case was just the reverse. In 1832, the year of the Reform Bill, Scott died; Byron, Shelley, and Keats were already dead; so was Miss Austen; and every literary reputation contemporary with theirs was finally established.

Broadly speaking, the period of English literature which began with the "Lyrical Ballads" and ended with the death of Scott may be divided at 1815, the year of Waterloo. The chief expression which preceded this was a passionate outburst of romantic poetry, maintaining in widely various forms the revolutionary principle that the individual, freed from accidental and conventional trammels, may be trusted to tend toward righteousness; that human nature is not essentially evil but excellent; and that sin, evil, and pain are brought into being

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by those distortions of such human nature which are wrought by hampering, outworn custom and superstition. Though this philosophy may never have been precisely or fully set forth by any one of the English poets who flourished between 1800 and 1815, it pervades the work of all; and this work taken together is the most memorable body of poetry in our language, except the Elizabethan. So far as one can now tell, this school distinguishes itself from the Elizabethan, and from almost any other of equal merit in literary history, by the eclectic variety of its individual members; their passionate devotion to the ideal of freedom in both thought and phrase made these new poets differ from one another almost as conspicuously as the poets of the eighteenth century were alike. For all this, as one reads them now, a trait common throughout their work grows salient. Despite the fervour of their revolutionary individualism, Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron and Shelley and the rest agreed in eagerly looking forward to an enfranchised future in which this world was to be incalculably better and nobler than in the tyrant-ridden past. This was the dominant sentiment of English literature from the battle of the Nile to that of Waterloo.

Between Waterloo and the Reform Bill, which was passed in the year when Scott died, a new phase of feeling dominated the literature of England. Though something of this elder spirit of hope lingered, the most considerable fact was the publication of all but the first two of the Waverley Novels. The contrast between these and the preceding poetry is strongly marked. What gave them popularity and has assured them permanence is the fervour with which they retrospectively assert the beauty of ideals which even in their own time had almost vanished. If the first outburst of English literature in the nineteenth century was a poetry animated by aspiration toward an ideal future, the second period of that literature, embodied in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, dwelt in carelessly dignified prose on the nobler aspects of a real past.