century.

Yet the list can hardly be read without creating feelings of surprise and regret. From 1815 to 1861 the Crown created some scores of peerages, yet the greatest names will The greatest rarely be found amongst the peers who were thus men of the created by the Crown. It bestowed ribands, garters, baronetcies, knighthoods, and inferior honours by hundreds, yet many of the greatest men lived and died without such distinction. Ministers had places and pensions for a selected few, yet the greatest names will not be found among the officeholders and the pensioners. The people have contributed their donations to erect statues and monuments to some of their heroes, yet the greatest men have in rare instances had their memory thus preserved to us in marble or brass.

For the true founders of modern England are its inventors and engineers; and the great inventors and engineers of England have been men of lowly birth who have neither coveted nor received titles and rewards. By their works alone they are known, by their works alone will they be remembered. Yet, if true greatness may be measured by a man's achievements, what man is there in the eighteenth century who stands so high as James Watt? What man in the nineteenth century can be named in the same category with George Stephenson? What other two men have exerted so great and salutary an influence on the fortunes and prosperity of modern England?

Foremost, then, among the worthies of modern England are her inventors and her engineers; and foremost among these are Watt and Stephenson. Next to these should probably be mentioned the men who have influenced thought and legislation by their writings. The great authors of an age, however, rarely or never influence its contemporary thought. The authors who exerted the chief influence on English history from 1815 to 1861 were born and worked in the eighteenth century; and foremost among them, and therefore foremost in the second category among the nation's worthies, were Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham.

There is, however, a third company of great men to whom modern England is largely indebted, composed of those

persons who have worked for the good of their fellow-men. Howard, Wilberforce, Buxton, Romilly, Matthew, Owen, Ashley, are perhaps the leading persons in the small company of worthies which is included in the third category of the chief benefactors of modern England.

· Beside these, again, stand the little company of great statesmen who have promoted the nation's progress by their measures or increased its happiness by their policy. Four men who lived in the period of which I am treating, Grey, Peel, Cobden, and Russell, stand out prominent among these. among the four, the name of greatest mark is that of Peel.

But,

I have thus endeavoured, in a few sentences, to summarise the chief lessons to be deduced from the history of modern England, and to name the chief actors who have borne their part in the drama. The narrative, rightly understood, should inspire a consolation and a hope. Men there are who abandon themselves to doubt and despair from a conscious inability either to understand or relieve the vast mass of misery around them. Such men may, to some extent, be consoled by the reflection that, if thousands of their fellowcreatures are annually born in shame and reared in vice, the condition of the poor, miserable though it still be, is infinitely better than it was in 1842. Such men may perhaps be encouraged to hope that moral welfare, like material prosperity, is subject to the laws of evolution, which are as certain as they are slow in their working. Thus, strengthened by contemplating the improvement of the past, they may brace themselves for the struggle which still lies before them in the future; and carrying on the work of Watt and Stephenson, of Smith and Bentham, of Howard and Ashley, of Peel and Russell, they may labour, like these and other great men, for the furtherance of the common weal.

INDEX.

INDEX.