A History of English Literature

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usual reformer's reward. Though he soon made himself 'the brains of the Whig party,' which at times nothing but his energy and ability held together, and though in consequence he was retained in Parliament virtually to the end of his life, he was never appointed to any office except that of Paymaster of the Forces, which he accepted after he had himself had the annual salary reduced from L25,000 to L4,000, and which he held for only a year. During all the early part of his public career Burke steadily fought against the attempts of the King and his Tory clique to entrench themselves within the citadel of irresponsible government. At one time also he largely devoted his efforts to a partly successful attack on the wastefulness and corruption of the government; and his generous effort to secure just treatment of Ireland and the Catholics was pushed so far as to result in the loss of his seat as member of Parliament from Bristol. But the permanent interest of his thirty years of political life consists chiefly in his share in the three great questions, roughly successive in time, of what may be called England's foreign policy, namely the treatment of the English colonies in America, the treatment of the native population of the English empire in India, and the attitude of England toward the French Revolution. In dealing with the first two of these questions Burke spoke with noble ardor for liberty and the rights of man, which he felt the English government to be disregarding. Equally notable with his zeal for justice, however, was his intellectual mastery of the facts. Before he attempted to discuss either subject he had devoted to it many years of the most painstaking study--in the case of India no less than fourteen years; and his speeches, long and highly complicated, were filled with minute details and exact statistics, which his magnificent memory enabled him to deliver without notes. His most important discussions of American affairs are the 'Speech on American Taxation' (1774), the 'Speech on Conciliation with America' (1775), both delivered in Parliament while the controversy was bitter but before war had actually broken out, and 'A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol' (1777). Burke's plea was that although England had a theoretical constitutional right to tax the colonies it was impracticable to do so against their will, that the attempt was therefore useless and must lead to disaster, that measures of conciliation instead of force should be employed, and that the attempt to override the liberties of Englishmen in America, those liberties on which the greatness of England was founded, would establish a dangerous precedent for a similar course of action in the mother country itself. In the fulfilment of his prophecies which followed the rejection of his argument Burke was too good a patriot to take satisfaction. In his efforts in behalf of India Burke again met with apparent defeat, but in this case he virtually secured the results at which he had aimed. During the seventeenth century the English East India Company, originally organized for trade, had acquired possessions in India, which, in the middle of the eighteenth century and later, the genius of Clive and Warren Hastings had increased and consolidated into a great empire. The work which these men had done was rough work and it could not be accomplished by scrupulous methods; under their rule, as before, there had been much irregularity and corruption, and part of the native population had suffered much injustice and misery. Burke and other men saw the corruption and misery without realizing the excuses for it and on the return of Hastings to England in 1786 they secured his impeachment. For nine years Burke, Sheridan, and Fox conducted the prosecution, vying with one another in brilliant speeches, and Burke especially distinguished himself by the
warmth of sympathetic imagination with which he impressed on his audiences the situation and sufferings of a far-distant and alien race. The House of Lords ultimately acquitted Hastings, but at the bar of public opinion Burke had brought about the condemnation and reform, for which the time was now ripe, of the system which Hastings had represented. While the trial of Hastings was still in progress all Europe was shaken by the outbreak of the French Revolution, which for the remainder of his life became the main and perturbing subject of Burke's attention. Here, with an apparent change of attitude, for reasons which we will soon consider, Burke ranged himself on the conservative side, and here at last he altogether carried the judgment of England with him. One of the three or four greatest movements in modern history, the French Revolution exercised a profound influence on English thought and literature, and we must devote a few words to its causes and progress. During the two centuries while England had been steadily winning her way to constitutional government, France had past more and more completely under the control of a cynically tyrannical despotism and a cynically corrupt and cruel feudal aristocracy. [Footnote: The conditions are vividly pictured in Dickens' 'Tale of Two Cities' and Carlyle's 'French Revolution.'] For a generation, radical French philosophers had been opposing to the actual misery of the peasants the ideal of the natural right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and at last in 1789 the people, headed by the lawyers and thinkers of the middle class, arose in furious determination, swept away their oppressors, and after three years established a republic. The outbreak of the Revolution was hailed by English liberals with enthusiasm as the commencement of an era of social justice; but as it grew in violence and at length declared itself the enemy of all monarchy and of religion, their attitude changed; and in 1793 the execution of the French king and queen and the atrocities of the Reign of Terror united all but the radicals in support of the war against France in which England joined with the other European countries. During the twenty years of struggle that followed the portentous figure of Napoleon soon appeared, though only as Burke was dying, and to oppose and finally to suppress him became the duty of all Englishmen, a duty not only to their country but to humanity. At the outbreak of the Revolution Burke was already sixty, and the inevitable tendency of his mind was away from the enthusiastic liberalism which had so strongly moved him in behalf of the Americans and the Hindoos. At the very outset he viewed the Revolution with distrust, and this distrust soon changed to the most violent opposition. Of actual conditions in France he had no adequate understanding. He failed to realize that the French people were asserting their most elementary rights against an oppression a hundred times more intolerable than anything that the Americans had suffered; his imagination had long before been dazzled during a brief stay in Paris by the external glitter of the French Court; his own chivalrous sympathy was stirred by the sufferings of the queen; and most of all he saw in the Revolution the overthrow of what he held to be the only safe foundations of society--established government, law, social distinctions, and religion--by the untried abstract theories which he had always held in abhorrence. Moreover, the activity of the English supporters of the French revolutionists seriously threatened an outbreak of anarchy in England also. Burke, therefore, very soon began to oppose the whole movement with all his might. His 'Reflections on the Revolution in France,' published in 1790, though very one-sided, is a most powerful model of reasoned denunciation and brilliant eloquence; it had a wide influence and restored Burke to harmony with the great majority of his countrymen. His remaining years, however, were increasingly gloomy. His attitude caused a hopeless break with the liberal Whigs, including Fox; he gave up his seat
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A History of English Literature Rob
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I. PERIOD I. THE BRITONS AND THE AN
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Sympathy of the author for his char
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story; (3) a Rising Action; (4) a M
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is no proper connection either in s
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THE NOVEL. 'Sir Roger de Coverly,'
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CHAPTER I PERIOD I. THE BRITONS AND
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points on the eastern and southern
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may be mostly performed all at once
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Northumbria (Yorkshire and Southern
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CHAPTER II PERIOD II. THE NORMAN-FR
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and Anglo-Saxon were spoken separat
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eality the men of the Middle Ages w
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now. The next is the first stanza o
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northern Scots and Picts, and how t
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artist, who lived a century and mor
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'MANDEVILLE'S VOYAGE.' One of the e
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of prose tales, 'The Decameron' (Te
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sometimes even with the minuteness
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cherished by the Protestants for it
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transmitted, portions, as it were,
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full health in a later book a knigh
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emote spots down almost to the pres
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guild (though sometimes two or thre
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man. It shows how he yields to temp
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applications. Scientific investigat
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Lollardism, which had nearly been c
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Tyndale, a zealous Protestant contr
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5. Still another, minor, innovation
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later Renaissance craze, then rampa
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Ireland, where in satirical poems h
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inharmonious element in the otherwi
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authors so marked; almost every wri
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verse as ruggedly condensed (often
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to be reabsorbed into tragedy, of w
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zest for the beautiful. It is rich
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just to the north of the 'city,' on
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playwright and a good, though not a
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sure, with an unconventionality, ma
Page 79 and 80: BEN JONSON. The second place among
Page 81 and 82: 3. Jonson's self-satisfaction and h
Page 83 and 84: alone or to Fletcher and other coll
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Page 91 and 92: The life of Henry Vaughan [Footnote
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Page 99 and 100: the demonstrable. Hence the charact
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Page 103 and 104: or at least the couplets, generally
Page 105 and 106: consists throughout partly in the c
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Page 113 and 114: their interests; the superior skill
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Page 117 and 118: Rosicrucian sylphs. In its adaptati
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Page 121 and 122: vain man's boast.' 'Wind the shrill
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Page 147 and 148: Allworthy, intended as an example o
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Page 169 and 170: The music, yearning like a God in p
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a state of intellectual, social, an
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disproved the whole dogmatic and do
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Arnold's doctrine, of course, was n
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even only doubtfully poetic. The in
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their support until their poetry be
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the full all its possibilities. Evi
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and a delicate genius in sound-modu
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lived in London with her mother in
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the first two, 'A Christmas Carol'
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WILLIAM M. THACKERAY. Dickens' chie
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Maggie in 'The Mill on the Floss.'
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very influential expressions of his
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STEVENSON. Robert Louis Stevenson (
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Froude too this results in exaggera
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THOMSON'S SEASONS. Astor ed., Crowe
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6. CHAUCER'S POEMS. Two or three da
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_For the third day,_ finish the pla
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the men of the royal family; but Pr
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17. The Rest of the Dramatists to 1
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qualities. How far has the book a p
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that make Gray's 'Elegy' a great po
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written discussions, or may be assi
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http://promo.net/pg These Web sites
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http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.h
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[*] The eBook, when displayed, is c
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