gained enormously in prestige abroad, now turned
to the work of reform at home. The destruction of the African slave trade;
the mitigation of horribly unjust laws, which included poor debtors and
petty criminals in the same class; the prevention of child labor; the
freedom of the press; the extension of manhood suffrage; the abolition of
restrictions against Catholics in Parliament; the establishment of hundreds
of popular schools, under the leadership of Andrew Bell and Joseph
Lancaster,--these are but a few of the reforms which mark the progress of
civilization in a single half century. When England, in 1833, proclaimed
the emancipation of all slaves in all her colonies, she unconsciously
proclaimed her final emancipation from barbarism.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE. It is intensely interesting to note
how literature at first reflected the political turmoil of the age; and
then, when the turmoil was over and England began her mighty work of
reform, how literature suddenly developed a new creative spirit, which
shows itself in the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats,
and in the prose of Scott, Jane Austen, Lamb, and De Quincey,--a wonderful
group of writers, whose patriotic enthusiasm suggests the Elizabethan days,
and whose genius has caused their age to be known as the second creative
period of our literature. Thus in the early days, when old institutions
seemed crumbling with the Bastille, Coleridge and Southey formed their
youthful scheme of a "Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna,"--an
ideal commonwealth, in which the principles of More's _Utopia_ should be
put in practice. Even Wordsworth, fired with political enthusiasm, could
write,

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.

The essence of Romanticism was, it must be remembered, that literature must
reflect all that is spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man, and be
free to follow its own fancy in its own way. We have already noted this
characteristic in the work of the Elizabethan dramatists, who followed
their own genius in opposition to all the laws of the critics. In Coleridge
we see this independence expressed in "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient
Mariner," two dream pictures, one of the populous Orient, the other of the
lonely sea. In Wordsworth this literary independence led him inward to the
heart of common things. Following his own instinct, as Shakespeare does, he
too