William Stebbing

“ Only the student who regards the century as a whole, in its letters, its philosophy, its divinity, and its politics, knows how completely they illustrate each other, and that all considered together would present a microcosm of national life in which might be discerned not only what England was in the days of Bolingbroke and Walpole, but what it had been in the days of Laud, and was to be in those of Canning and Peel. ”

“ We are ready to’ complain of the age for being barren of the political and social reforms in which the nineteenth century has been rich. We do not censure the seventeenth century for such deficiencies, for in those times we never expect to find them supplied. The intermingling of classes which set in with the Revolution, and was encouraged by the Whig régime, gave Parliament, in spite of all its rotten boroughs, a sense that it represented the whole of the nation, and inspired courage to interfere with class interests. ”

“ The student of the art of war has in the career of Marlborough and Frederick the Great a vein he can work without concerning himself with the tortuous intrigues of Harley, or the place-mongering of Newcastle and Bute. The metaphysician can pit the theologians in whom Queen Caroline delighted against each other, without bestowing a thought on the miracles of political man by which Walpole was converting a nation with a majority of its population still loyal to the cause of the Pretender, old or young, into the most absolute faith that the house of Hanover had reigned from before the Conquest. ”

“ We admire the archer and listen with literary delight to the sharp whirr of the arrow; his own age followed it to its mark, and shuddered or mocked at the scream of its victim. Every line of Pope is a witness how, in the eighteenth century, courtiers and citizens, statesmen and men of letters, watched one another in cities ”

“ England has won greater political triumphs in other centuries than the eighteenth, and has produced a nobler literature; but on those who love to talk face to face with another age than their own, there is no period in English history which will fasten a tighter grasp. ”

“ A history of society would he the truest history of the eighteenth century. Its work was the fusion of classes. The English Constitution was formed by a series of struggles from the reign of John to that of William the Third. The reigns of Anne and the Georges could contribute nothing to the history of the Constitution in its broad outlines. Those had already been defined before the century opened; but the full operation of the Constitution was as yet far from ascertained. ”

“ The alliances in the next two reigns with or against France, and with or against Austria, seem to most English men now, as they did to most Englishmen at the times they were contracted, simple devices for wasting English money for the benefit of Dutchmen or Hanoverians. The Septennial Act appears no more than a temporary device for preventing the election of a Tory House of Commons, and Excise Bills, Toleration Acts, and Marriage Acts, show like measures of parochial legislation by the side of the Test and Habeas Corpus Acts of the previous century. ”

“ Trade and manufactures and financing were the social solvent which the last century applied to England. The great landowners bought out the small; but contractors of loans and merchants, and, later in the century, the so-called "nabobs" bought out both. Even borough-mongering, with all its mischievous and immoral scandals, promoted the general tendency by tempering the dominant country-gentleman element in Parliament with the capitalist element. Government by a Whig aristocracy, or oligarchy, gave vogue to the economical aspects of politics which Whiggism had always encouraged. ”

“ The eighteenth century is so much more like the century which followed than those which preceded, that the temptation is natural to compare it with later times rather than the earlier. Thus Mr. Lecky remarks, as we have seen, that "in no respect does the legislation of this period present a more striking contrast to that of the nineteenth century than in the almost complete absence of attempts to alleviate the social condition of the poorer classes, or to soften the more repulsive features of English life." ”

“ On the contrary, the wonder is not that merchants were so short-sighted as not to perceive the advantages of free trade with France, but that the merchants possessed power to rouse the passionate interest of the whole country in the defeat of a measure which they feared might diminish the profits of a class. Mr. Lecky points out the rottenness of a multitude of constituencies. Nothing was done to cure the evil in the eighteenth century; but in the eighteenth century the scandal of rotten boroughs began to be understood and condemned. ”

“ Students of morals, of theology, of politics, of the belles-lettres know what a delusion this is; hut men generally, even when they are readers, are very far from students. It would seem to most persons a paradox, but it would be simple truth, to say that the eighteenth century would be the best period from which to begin the study of the history of England. The real difficulty is that the century is too rich in phases, and that no sooner is attention concentrated on one problem of which the age promises a solution than another and yet another present themselves. ”

“ Lecky says: "A competition of economy reigned in all parties. The questions which excited most interest in Parliament were chiefly financial and commercial ones." A century in which a Parliament, with a majority made up of country gentlemen, attends more closely to finance and trade than to questions of constitutional safeguards and foreign politics, is already on the threshold of current history. ”

“ The interest of the eighteenth century has suffered in comparison with other periods of English history, partly because it presents none of those epochs which belong to constitutional history in the making, and yet more that its life is so complex, and has so many centres of interest as to appear a confused maze to casual observers. ”

“ We may be well satisfied that our lives are set in smoother places than an age which shot Byng for an error of judgment, and connived for a dozen years at the wholesale purchase by a minister of Parliamentary votes, which sat by turns at the feet of Hume and of Wesley, believing now in evil spirits, and now in no spirit at all ”

“ Drunkenness had so lost shame that retailers of gin were in the habit of painting announcements outside their houses that men could be made "drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and should have straw for nothing." Past the middle of the century a panic was aroused by the reform of the calendar, and people thought they had been robbed of eleven days of life. ”

“ The secret of a period furrowed by a reformation or a civil war, can be learned by those who would never have discovered it; it is hard to teach the true character of a period when its charm is the perpetual shifting of its lights and shadows, and the transitions from one stage to another. ”

“ The same minister had a fine taste for art, and understood obscenity to be equivalent to wit. The kingdom was yearly growing in wealth; hut the poor-rates and the amount of able-bodied pauperism kept steadily increasing. It was growing in general intelligence, yet Whitefleld found close to Bristol, the second city in the empire, a population of many thousands "sunk in the most brutal ignorance and vice, and entirely excluded from the ordinances of religion." "Crime was so rampant that," wrote Horace Walpole, "one is forced to travel even at noon as if one were going to battle." ”

“ It is the drama of the nineteenth century which is being rehearsed in the eighteenth. The players do not know their parts; the prompter’s voice breaks the unity of the action there is no audience but the company of the theatre ”

“ The reigns are supposed to be without human interest which saw to their close the careers of Bolingbroke and Chatham, which had moralists like Butler and Johnson, preachers like Whitefield, an economist like Adam Smith, metaphysicians like Hume and Berkeley, jurists like Hardwicke and Mansfield, a musician like Handel, an actor like Garrick, poets in verse or prose, or both, like Sterne and Goldsmith, novelists like Richardson, and Fielding, and Smollett, a historian like Gibbon, a satirist like Swift, a leader of society like Chesterfield, and an administrator like Walpole. ”

“ Wilson was evangelizing the Isle of Man, and Butler reconciling faith and reason; at the same time the minister who controlled the ecclesiastical patronage of England for nearly a generation laid it down as his principle of selection, that he "would no more employ a man to govern and influence the clergy who did not flatter the parsons, than he would make a man chancellor who was constantly complaining of the grievances of the bar, and threatening to rectify the abuses of Westminster Hall." ”

“ John; the Church rears at once a Warburton and a Wesley. Parliament acknowledges the sovereignty, now of a Walpole, now of a Pitt. Country gentlemen believe that absolution by an Episcopalian is essential to salvation, and the immortality of the soul dependent on the intervention of a bishop, yet expect their chaplains to rise with the entrance of the pastry, and to marry their wives’ waiting-maids, or worse; passive obedience is taught as an article of faith, but the heir of the king de jure marches through England and gathers scarcely a recruit to his standard ”

“ The eighteenth century is one of those periods. Therein lies its special value to students of history, and also perhaps the secret of the repulsion it exercises on those who are not. The mass of the people still revered the dogmas which had been living realities in the seventeenth century ”

“ Englishmen who thought it quite natural that the kingdom should mix itself with European politics, and the quarrels of thrones based on enormous armies, continued to declaim against standing armies in England.. ”

“ The kingdom continued to insist on its monopoly of the supply of African slaves to the Spanish West Indies, and its own laws against domestic crimes were as savage as its measures to repress crime were inefficient. ”

“ They scented despotism in Walpole’s wisely-conceived Excise Bill, and plots against their commerce in Bolingbroke’s project for a treaty of free trade with France; but they outlawed three-quarters of the population of Ireland, and did all that in them lay to destroy the whole of its trade. The House of Commons was made up half of placemen. For a member to be reputed inaccessible to a bribe weighed down the odium of a life passed in concerting schemes for subverting the dynasty. "Parliament," says Mr. ”