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.

These two phases of English literature roughly correspond with the Regency and the reign of William IV. The literature which has ensued will probably be known to the future as Victorian; and it is still too near us for any confident generalisation. But although there has been admirable Victorian poetry, of which the most eminent makers seem to have been Tennyson and the Brownings; and although in its own time serious Victorian prose, of which perhaps the most eminent makers were Ruskin and Carlyle, has seemed of paramount interest, there is probability that posterity may find the most characteristic feature of Victorian literature to have been that school of fiction which brought the English novel to a point of development comparable with that of the Elizabethan drama. It is almost literally to the reign of Queen Victoria that we owe the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and the numberless lesser novelists and story-tellers whose work has been the chief reading of the English-speaking world, down to the days of Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.

The first and the most widely popular of Victorian novelists was Dickens, whose work began less than five years after Scott's ended. The contrast between them is among the most instructive in literary history. Scott's ideal was always that of a gentleman; Dickens's, with equal instinctive honesty of feeling, was that of the small trading classes. Whatever merits Dickens had, and these were great and lasting, he fatally lacked one grace which up to his time the literature of his country had generally preserved, — that of distinction. The other novelists who soon arose differed from Dickens in many ways, often possessing a sense of fact far more true than his, and sympathies more various. least in their comparative lack of distinction, however, they have been more like him than like the men of letters of any preceding period. They have generally dealt, too, with matters of nearly contemporary fact. In brief, the dominant note

At

of Victorian fiction, which is probably the dominant fact of Victorian literature, is a note of triumphant democracy.

Broadly speaking, then, we may say that up to the time of the Reform Bill the English literature of the nineteenth century expressed itself first in that body of aspiring poetry which seems the most memorable English utterance since Elizabethan times, and secondly in those novels of Sir Walter Scott, which, dealing romantically with the past, indicate the accomplishment of a world revolution; and that since the Reform Bill decidedly the most popular phase of English literature has been prose fiction dealing with contemporary life. It is beyond our purpose to emphasise the growth of science meanwhile, a growth which has corresponded with such material changes as are typified by the use of steam and electricity. But many now think that in time to come the most lasting name of the Victorian epoch will, after all, be that of Charles Darwin.

Slight as this sketch of English literature in the nineteenth century has been, it is sufficient for our purpose, which is only to remind ourselves of what occurred in England during the century when something which we may fairly call literature developed in America.

III

AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1800

MR. HENRY ADAMS shows how amid the constant growth of democracy, amid practical assertion of the power which resides in the uneducated classes, and which our Constitution made conscious, our national life began with bewildering confusion. To the better classes, embodied in the old Federalist party, this seemed anarchical; the election of Mr. Jefferson they honestly believed to portend the final overthrow of law and order. Instead of that, one can see now, it really started our permanent progress. Among the early incidents of this progress was the purchase of Louisiana, which finally established the fact that the United States were to dominate the North American continent. So complete, indeed, has our occupation of this continent become that it is hard to remember how in 1800 the United States, at least so far as they were settled, were almost comprised between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic. In less than one hundred years we have colonised, and to a considerable degree civilised, the vast territory now under our undisputed control; and the fact that the regions which we have colonised have chanced to be contiguous to the regions which were first under our sovereignty has only concealed without altering the truth that the United States have proved themselves the most successful colonising power in modern history.1

Our colonial growth, or expansion, call it what you will, -began with the purchase of Louisiana. Nine years later,

1 See an article by Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell in the "Atlantic" for February, 1899.

under President Madison, came that second war with England which, while unimportant in English history, was very important in ours. The War of 1812 asserted our independent nationality, our ability to maintain ourselves against a foreign enemy, and, above all, our fighting power on the sea, of which fresh evidence was given during the brief but crucial war with Spain in 1898. The War of 1812, besides, the only foreign war in our history except this recent Spanish one, did much to revive and strengthen the Revolutionary conviction of our essential alienation from England. Before that war broke

out there were times when it seemed almost as likely to arise with France. It was an incident, we can now see, of that death-grapple wherein England was maintaining against continental Europe incarnate in Napoleon those traditions of Common Law which we share with her. America had felt the arbitrary insolence of Napoleon, as well as that of England; neutrality proved impossible. We chanced to take the French side. Thereby, whatever we gained, — and surely our strengthened national integrity is no small blessing, we certainly emphasised and prolonged that misunderstanding with the mother country which still keeps disunited the two peoples who preserve the Common Law.

The next critical fact in our history was the assertion in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine. In brief, this declares that the American continent is no longer a region where foreign powers may freely colonise; that from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn American soil is as fully controlled by established governments as is Europe itself; that the chief political power in America is the United States; and that any attempt on the part of a foreign power to establish colonies in America, or to interfere with the governments already established there, will be regarded by the United States as an unfriendly act. This virtual declaration of imperial dominance in a whole hemisphere has generally been respected. Except for the transitory empire of Maximilian in Mexico, established