of the
previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly
awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely
logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its
entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden
shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made
only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was
involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one could
feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and
Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for
thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is
nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes.
The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is
attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the
French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would
have been a supreme achievement.

II

The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John Brown's
_Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_ is largely
forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was
at once translated into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in
the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of
comment upon the _Characteristics_ of Shaftesbury. His book is too
evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with reverence, to
make us doubt its derivation. There is the same reliance upon Livy and
Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking generalization; though the
argument upon which Brown's conclusions are based is seldom given,
perhaps because his geometric clarity of statement impressed him as
self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are an essay upon the depravity of
the times. He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering
sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing
so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the
universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would
not have rejected. He deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men
trifle with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would,
appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become
nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the
theatre, and the arts have all of them lost thei