knowledge out of his own brain, the sceptic who had exploded the ancient dogmas, or the freethinker of any shade who rejoiced in the destruction of ecclesiastical tyranny, gloried in his conscious superiority to his forefathers. Whatever was old was absurd, and 'Gothic,' an epithet applied to all medieval art, philosophy, or social order, became a simple term of contempt. Though the sentiment may strike us as narrow-minded, it at least implied a distinct recognition of a difference between past and present. In simpler times, people imagined their forefathers to be made in their own likeness, and naïvely transferred the customs of chivalry to the classical or Hebrew histories. To realise the fact that the eighteenth century differed materially from the eighth was a necessary step towards the modern theory of progressive development. The history of the race suggested so much continuity as is implied in the conflict between reason and authority, instead of being a random series of unconnected events, or of events connected by some supernatural, and therefore inscrutable, agency. The sense that the thoughts and manners of past ages differed materially from those of the present day began by encouraging the belief that men must have been fools in past ages; but it soon led to the reflection that their history might be worth examining. What was the nature of the difference, and what were its causes? An antiquary is naturally a conservative, and men soon began to love the times whose peculiarities they were so laboriously studying. Men of imaginative minds promptly made the discovery that a new source of pleasure might be derived from these dry records.

126. Few cleverer men lived in that century than Horace Walpole, and few shared more fully the spirit of the Voltairian scepticism. But Walpole passed his life as a trifler instead of an active combatant. He was far too well off to be anxious to upset institutions, however corrupt, which gave him such comfortable shelter. He was quite content with the permission to laugh at them. Amongst his other amusements, Walpole took to antiquarianism. Possibly he had caught the contagion from Gray; and he kept up judicious relations with various antiquaries, such as Cole and Virtue. It was part of the natural duty of a born aristocrat to turn

the labours of meaner men to account, and Walpole carried the practice into literature. His anecdotes of painters and royal authors show the skill with which he could extract amusement out of the heavy materials collected by more industrious miners in forgotten history. He hit upon a more fertile device in the 'Castle of Otranto.' His aim was, as he tells us, to combine something of the interests of every-day life with the interest of historical association. The combination is not very skilful, and the product is flimsy enough; but Walpole had made a real discovery. The 'Castle of Otranto' was the parent of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and they broke ground for Scott's creation of the historical novel. Walpole's position is typical. The idle sceptic of the eighteenth century, looking about for a new amusement, found it in the products of industrious antiquarian labour, and dressed it up as a charming new toy. His scheme has been carried out more elaborately by later enquirers, but he has the merit which belongs to the origination of a new intellectual fashion. The Castle of Otranto' is to the literary romanticism what Strawberry Hill was to the modern revival of Gothic architecture. The fundamental vice of insincerity has not been removed from later and more systematic resuscitations of the dead.

127. Other manifestations of the same tendency might be noticed. Chatterton-the marvellous youth-seems to me to be marvellous chiefly from his youth. There is little, if anything, of permanent value in his writings. In one way, however, he showed an acuteness which may, perhaps, be fairly called marvellous. He showed an instinctive knowledgeremarkable in one so young-of the kind of intellectual food for which a demand was springing up in the country. His forgeries illustrate, as they no doubt stimulated, the growing taste for ancient literature. But two other publications of the same period are more remarkable. Every later writer has seen in Percy's Reliques' an impulse of great importance; and an impulse, in some sense even more important, is due to Macpherson's 'Ossian.' Singularly unlike as they are in most respects, there is a relation between the two publications. The ugly side of the modern romanticism is its confusion between fictions and realities, and its futile attempt to revive

old modes of thought and feeling amidst an environment fatal to their real vitality. Walpole's performance begins that business of buff-jerkins and mediæval costumery which offends us in the inferior parts of Scott's writings. Romanticism has, however, its better side in its tendency to produce a true historical sense; and Percy's Ballads were more suggestive of the genuine lesson to be learnt from history. The study might suggest the propriety of falling back upon natural simplicity, instead of attempting to revive the external trappings of extinct social forms. The interest produced by 'Chevy Chase' and Childe Morice' was the interest of finding that our ancestors had been genuine human beings, capable of exploring manly emotions in a straightforward way, instead of an interest in their modes of dressing and swearing.

128. Macpherson's poem is a more singular performance. Its extraordinary effect upon the minds of contemporaries has often been noticed. The fate of a poem which excited the enthusiasm of Goethe and Napoleon, and which nobody can read at the present day, certainly suggests some curious problems. Briefly, we may assume that its vague and gigantesque scenery, its pompous mouthing of sham heroics, its crude attempts to represent a social state when great men stalked through the world in haughty superiority to the narrow conventions of modern life, were congenial to men growing weary of an effete formalism. Men had been talking under their breath and in a mincing dialect so long that they were easily gratified, and easily imposed upon, by an affectation of vigorous and natural sentiment.

129. But what is 'natural'? The question leads us to the third phase of the reaction. The 'return to nature' expresses a sentiment which underlies to some extent both the sentimental and the romantic movements, and which was more distinctly embodied in writers of a higher order. To return to nature is, in one sense, to find a new expression for emotions which have been repressed by existing conventions; or, in another, to return to some simpler social order which had not yet suffered from those conventions. The artificiality attributed to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men were content to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first principles, but dependent

upon a set of special and exceptional conditions; and, again, that in the imaginative sphere the accepted symbols did not express the deepest and most permanent emotions, but were an arbitrary compromise between traditional assumptions and the new philosophical tenets. To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intellectual horizon might be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all times and races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation. The first method, that of the romanticists, aims at increasing our knowledge; the second, that of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on deeper principles.

130. Two great poets at the end of the century gave an English version of the cry for a' return to nature.' Burns and Cowper sounded a new note in our poetry, which was echoed by various writers of inferior power or influence. What was the significance of their appeal? The word 'nature,' as I have often had occasion to remark, is singularly ambiguous. The whole significance of the early controversies of the century may be described by saying that they represent the struggle between the religion of nature and the traditional religion. The result in England was a kind of compromise. The traditional creed won a doubtful victory by concessions which destroyed its own efficacy. The doctrine which emerged was thus Deism, or a religion of nature disguised by traditional phraseology. And yet the revolt against it took again the form of an appeal to nature. Obviously nature was used in different and almost opposite senses. Wordsworth seemed to himself to be the antithesis to Pope, and yet Pope, like Wordsworth, preaches in one sense a worship of nature. I must endeavour, therefore, to define more precisely the difference of conception which led to so vast a discord in practice.

31. The great revolution which was approaching had its social, its æsthetic, its political, and its philosophical aspects. The social movement seems to exhibit most distinctly the efficient causes of the changes, and the meaning of the new war-cry is there the least ambiguous. Briefly, we may say that the social revolution was an attempt to cast off the ossified crust of effete social organs which had become incapable

of discharging their functions. To return to nature was with Rousseau and his followers to get rid of kings, nobles, and priests, who could no longer rule or teach. By sweeping away the accumulated rubbish of obsolete institutions, whose authority rested upon blind instinct instead of reason, we should come upon a pure, simple, reasonable, or 'natural state of society. The state was vaguely conceived as having possibly existed in some remote past; as being preserved in certain primitive and uncorrupted societies of Alpine peasants, or even savage tribes; or as being that purely ideal state which would be made actual if every political or social institution rested upon pure reason, instead of including an arbitrary traditional element. The old doctrine of the social contract fell in with this theory; the contract being regarded as the embodiment of pure reason. In this sense, the return to nature meant little more with Rousseau than the immediate application to human affairs of the abstract theories which Locke had managed to interpret into harmony with the British Constitution. The metaphysical doctrine touched with passion, and applied to actual affairs, was suddenly endowed with destructive power; but there was no direct speculative advance. The theory had descended from the lecture-room into the street, but was not modified in substance. Rousseau's sentimentalism breathed new life into the dead bones; or his followers simply adopted the most convenient phraseology for sanctioning their destructive energies. The doctrine, imported into England by such men as Thomas Paine, excited the wrathful denunciation of Burke's philosophical imagination, but scarcely took root in an uncongenial soil.

132. The English analogue is rather to be sought in the utilitarianism of Bentham, which rejected the old metaphysical method as well as the old traditional doctrine. Englishmen of this school sympathised with the return to nature, so far as they agreed in rejecting the ancient authority; but they would supplant it, not by abstract reasoning, but by a direct appeal to experience. I have sufficiently shown why this appeal was necessarily crude and unsatisfactory. It amounted, for the present, to an assertion that all philosophy was unsatisfactory, and that the only method of discovering political and moral

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