servative chamber of Parliament, was unprepared to pass the Reform Bill; the House of Commons, representing, it believed, the ardent conviction of the country, was determined that the Bill should be passed. Thereupon the King was persuaded to inform the Lords that in case they persisted in voting against the measure he should create new peers enough to make a majority of the House. This threat brought the conservative peers to terms. They did not vote for the measure, but under the leadership of the Duke of Wellington they walked out of the House in silent protest. A revolutionary threat on the part of the King had accomplished under constitutional forms a peaceful revolution.

Era.

Five years later King William IV was dead. Then The Vicbegan the reign of the most tenderly human sovereign in orian English history. For nearly sixty-four years, in the full blaze of public life, she did unfalteringly what she deemed her duty. This devoted conscientiousness has greatly strengthened English royalty. The fact that through sixty years of growing democracy the throne of England was filled by Queen Victoria has gone far to re-establish in popular esteem a form of government which it is our fashion to call a thing of the past.

In general this Victorian era was peaceful, but still one which is best typified by the latest title of its sovereign. For during the last sixty years of the nineteenth century England was 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 antique empire of Rome. It stands not for the assertion of central and despotic authority, but rather for the maintenance of government by

The Com

mon Law in the Colonies.

established custom. The English Common Law is a system not of rules, but of principles. So long as its influence was confined to the island where it was developed, to be sure, it still seemed impracticably rigid. The American Revolution, however, taught England a lesson now thoroughly learned, that when English authority asserts itself in foreign regions, the true spirit of the Common Law should recognize 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 civilization the English power has condemned and repressed. Harmless local custom, on the other hand,-freedom of worship, peculiarities of land tenure, and whatever harmonizes 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 favorable to civilized prosperity.

Historically, to sum up, England began the nine- Summary. teenth 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 more and more widely asserted the imperial dominion of the flexibly vital traditions of our Common Law.

From the
Lyrical

Ballads to

of Scott.

II

ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1800 TO 1900

REFERENCES

In addition to the general authorities may be named C. H. Herford, The Age of Wordsworth, London: Bell, 1897; Hugh Walker, The Age of Tennyson, London: Bell, 1897; A. E. Hancock, The French Revolution and the English Poets, New York: Holt, 1899.

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 also in literary history. In 1798, when Nelson fought the battle of the Nile, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their famous Lyrical Ballads, the first important expression of the revived romantic spirit in English literature. 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.

The period of English literature which began with the Lyrical Ballads and ended with the death of Scott may be the death roughly 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 human beings left to themselves may be trusted to tend toward righteousness; and that sin, evil, and pain are brought into being by those distortions of human nature which are wrought by 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 fact that the passionate devotion of these new poets to the ideal of freedom in both thought and phrase made them almost as different from one another as the poets of the eighteenth century were alike. For all this, as one reads them now, one perceives a trait common throughout their work. Despite the fervor of their revolutionary individualism, Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron and Shelley and the rest agreed eagerly in looking forward to an enfranchised future in which this world was to be far better than in the tyrant-ridden past. This was the dominant sentiment of English literature from the battle of the Nile to that of Waterloo.

Waverley

Between Waterloo and the Reform Bill, a new phase of The feeling dominated the literature of England. Though Novels. 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 impressive. What gave them popularity and has assured them permanence is the fervor with which they retrospectively assert the beauty of ideals which even in their own time were almost extinct. The first outburst of English literature in the nineteenth century was a poetry animated by aspiration toward an ideal future; the second phase of that literature, expressed by 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 cor