17th century

“ Another instructive theme which this Institution proposes, on a future occasion, to embrace in its course of lectures, is the history of the 16th century. Passing over the Reformation—the great event certainly of this period—it was about this time that the struggles among the different nations of Europe gave rise, and by degrees gave consolidation, to the system of the balance of power. ”

“ The eighteenth century wrought a vast transformation in England, though, owing to the lack of startling events on English soil, the casual reader of English social history too often thinks of the eighteenth century as a time of stagnation. ”

“ If we consider the condition of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the prevalence of abuses and corruption left by the ignorance or vice of preceding years, and reflect at the same time upon the progressive nature of the people, the practical habit of their minds, and the moral earnestness which they never wholly lost, it is not surprising to find that the century is one of reforms. ”

“ The great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century being stimulated by the example of England into a love of progress, naturally came into collision with the governing classes, among whom the old stationary spirit still prevailed. ”

“ So far have we followed the memorable fifth century, the century, I repeat, in whose first years, if at any time, modern history begins, the century at whose end the existing nations of Europe are still not in being, but at whose beginning they have taken, so to speak, the first feeble steps towards coming into being. ”

“ Properly considered, the eighth century is the most important and memorable which Europe has ever seen. During its course the geographical limits, the ecclesiastical polity, and the feudal system within and under which our western group of nations was destined to live for five or six centuries, were provisionally settled and determined. ”

“ It is surely worth while, therefore, to make an attempt to individualize the centuries, not by affixing to them any arbitrary marks of one’s own, but by taking notice of the distinguishing quality they possess, and grouping round that, as a centre, the incidents which either produce this characteristic or are produced by it. What should we call the present century, for instance? We should at once name it the Century of Invention. ”

“ But the eighteenth century, notwithstanding its nearness in time, and the immense mass of information that we have about it, appears strangely remote, separated from us as it is by the great gulf of the French Revolution. The century of which men still vigorous have known many living representatives impresses us as markedly different in temper and point of view from our own. ”

“ In some cases, as in France, the change in institutions was immediate and sweeping; in others, as in Germany and Italy, the transformation was more gradual; but in all, the old state of things was doomed.
The thirty years or so just preceding the Revolution are those that most concern us in this study, though we shall often have occasion to look back to the early eighteenth century — and sometimes to the seventeenth.
To realize the conditions under which men lived in the eighteenth century is not easy. ”

“ LITERATURE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.—The fifteenth century, usually marked in continental history as the epoch of the Revival of Classical Learning, was not in England a period of erudition or of original invention. The unwise and unjust wars with France, the revolts of the populace, and the furious struggles between the partisans of the rival houses desolated the country, and blighted and dwarfed all intellectual growth. ”

“ For hackneyed as the period of the Wars of the Roses may seem to the superficial reader, no student has yet adequately studied the secret of the age in which the great revolutions of the next century were being prepared—the age which made possible for England the revival of letters and the reformation, which founded her commercial greatness, which revolutionized her industrial system, which cast away the last bonds of feudalism and laid the foundations of the modern State. ”

“ And let those who think the twelfth century too late an age to be interesting, who wish for the law of more primitive times, consider how sound a base for their studies these records are. If once we were certain of our twelfth century we might understand Domesday, if once we understood the state of England on the day when the Confessor was alive and dead, then we might turn with new hopes of success to the Anglo-Saxon dooms and land-books. ”

“ The sixteenth century cannot be compared with the nineteenth century in the variety and scope of scientific discoveries; but, compared with the ages which had preceded it, it was a memorable epoch, marked by the simultaneous breaking up of the darkness of mediaeval Europe, and the bursting forth of new energies in all departments of human thought and action. ”

“ And then those years have comprised the best part of the nineteenth century—a century during which change has been more rapidly at work among all the surroundings of Englishmen than probably during any other century of which social history has to tell. ”

“ Our attention will be drawn toward England as the battle-ground and the seventeenth century as the critical moment of the struggle; we shall see in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that determined the issue; and when our perspective has thus become properly adjusted, we shall begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful was the age that witnessed the Beginnings of New England. ”

“ Our critics and teachers provided, and continue to provide, an artistic education comparable with the historical education provided by our board-schools. People who have been brought up to believe that the history of England is the history of Europe—that it is a tale of unbroken victory, leadership, and power—feel, when they hear of the ascendancy of France or of the House of Austria or of the comparative insignificance of England till the dawn of the eighteenth century, angry first and then incredulous. ”

“ If we could affix to each century as characteristic a presentment as those portraits do of the steel-clad hero of Towton, or the be-wigged, be-buckled courtier of George the Second, our object would be gained. We should see a whole history in a glance at a century’s face. If it were peculiarly marked by nature or accident, so much the more easy would it be to recognise the likeness. If the century was a warlike, quarrelsome century, and had scars across its brow ”

“ In the widespread shifting of levels which has taken place in the last hundred years, affecting directly and indirectly the moral progress of all classes of society, certain important elements have entered which cannot be overlooked in the present discussion, and which in future ages must stand as preëminently characteristic of the nineteenth century and the Anglo-Saxon ascendency. ”

“ The Revolution which had so lately preceded the opening of the century, and the far more pregnant and eventful Revolution which convulsed Europe at its close, had both of them many bearings, though of course in very different ways, upon the development of religious and ecclesiastical thought in this country. ”

“ But puff, puff, they come, and ever a little faster. Do we not 'make history rapidly in these days,' since England and France have entered on their modern career? What place has the nineteenth century in the long list of ages? ”

“ It has been said that the seventeenth century saw Versailles; the eighteenth century saw the Earth; and the nineteenth century saw Humanity. Then the very pertinent question is asked, “Which century will see Life?” ”

“ With the French this continuity was quite common up to the Revolution, and to this day there are many French families, several Italian, and a few German, who can trace their lineage and their connection with particular portions of the soil well beyond the crusading epoch and even to the ninth or early tenth century. But our English aristocracy is exceedingly modern. The bulk of such few families as boast any antiquity at all can barely trace themselves to the Reformation; the mass of those who pose for lineage end in the mist of the seventeenth century. ”

“ The activity of the foremost men of the eighteenth century in the composition of history is too remarkable a circumstance, not to deserve some attempt at explanation. There were historians in previous ages, but in the eighteenth century there was both in France, and afterwards in England, a special and extraordinary development in this direction. ”

“ Pre-Renaissance Period: Incidental historical study made in connection with the study of biography and literature.
2. Renaissance Period: Historical studies pursued as auxiliary to the interpretation of the classics.
3. Post-Renaissance Period in Europe.
(a) Heraldry and local, contemporary historical incidents and events taught in Ritterakedemien after 1648.
(b) In Germany, the systematic study of history in schools really dates from about 1806, though an independent status was given history in the universities (particularly in Göttingen) in the 18th century. ”

“ The general characteristic features of each period are the same, although the provincial character sometimes seems to preponderate; the character of each century, at all events, is the same all over Europe, and may also be easily remembered, and as a matter of fact is never forgotten. ”

“ The first half of the seventeenth century as a whole, compared with the Elizabethan age, was a period of relaxing vigor. The Renaissance enthusiasm had spent itself, and in place of the danger and glory which had long united the nation there followed increasing dissension in religion and politics and uncertainty as to the future of England and, indeed, as to the whole purpose of life. ”

“ The seventeenth century is the period of the dark ages of the history of the United States. But to the world, as society was organized then, that century was something far different. As the sixteenth century was an era of discovery and exploration, the seventeenth was a century of colonization and settlement. ”

“ General histories of England for the period 1760-1801:—Lecky, History of England in the 18th Century, 8 vols., 1879-90, from which much help has been obtained. It is a work to which every historian of the period must be deeply indebted, and though faults may be found with its plan, it holds a high place among our histories for learning, moderation, and philosophical treatment. The history of England is carried down to the outbreak of the war in 1793, that of Ireland to the Union. ”

“ Walsh's book, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, will startle many readers, but we respectfully commend to the open-minded his presentation of that great epoch. A century that witnessed such extraordinary achievements in architecture, in arts and crafts, in education, and in literature and law, as did the Thirteenth, is not to be lightly dismissed or unfavorably compared with periods nearer our own. ”

“ Middle Ages, is a term used in connection with European history to denote the period beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, and closing with the invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the revival of learning in the 15th century. ”

“ Fortunately the nation had been fully formed before the close of the eighteenth century, otherwise the combined influence of English political, social, and religious ascendancy might have swept away every vestige of the fine cultural inheritance of the past. ”

“ In traversing such an extensive and varied field of arduous labour some errors and shortcomings were inevitable, for the history of England in the nineteenth century is the history of the British Empire at its climacteric, of moral and material changes and developments more numerous and perhaps more important than in any former century. ”

“ As we judge the seventeenth century by its work for freedom, and as we test the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the value of their industrialism, so, domestically, the England of the twentieth century will largely stand, or fall, in the estimation of the future by its success, or failure, in dealing with the health and physique, bodily and mental, of the English race. ”

“ The mass of the people in France, especially in towns, is sceptical, and the aristocracy of the ancien régime, who in the eighteenth century bragged about free thought, had come out of the deluge of 1789 as very pious [113] persons, comprehending or divining the inner connection between all the old ideas and emblems of the Faith, of the Monarchy, and of feudal nobility. ”

“ The influences of the old régime, as founded in the seventeenth century, were such as to exalt the importance of the individual; the influences of the new are such as to raise the importance of the mass. ”

“ We shall now proceed to mention three or four of the most distinguished of those societies, which have obtained an historical importance, not merely for the French literature and mental and moral culture of the eighteenth century, but for Europe in general, without however restraining ourselves precisely within the limits of the half century. ”

“ In England the period begins with wars, unrest, and almost chaos; it concludes with a settled dynasty, a reformed religion, and a people united and progressive. Abroad, as well as in England, there is apparent the broad intellectual flood known as the Renaissance, running deep and strong: the renewed desire for knowledge, changes in religious ideals, the discovery of new worlds, both geographical and literary, and the enormous quickening of heart and mind. In England the scene is being prepared for the great age to follow. ”

“ The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. ”