e is
the organic inevitable growth of the other. The England which fought
at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at
Marston Moor and Dunbar. Chatham rescued it from a deeper abasement
than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier
parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell.
Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less
earnestly reverent, when rightly studied. Even its scepticism, its
fiery denials, or vehement inquiry--a Woolston's, for instance, or a
Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's[6] long
afterwards--spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal
ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and
utter death. And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary
outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or
constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras
comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the
great period of the _Aufklaerung_ in Germany. Kant acknowledged his
indebtedness to Hume. Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are
in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.

Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, the
_Decline and Fall_, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last
victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles
of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the
ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the
Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell
to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the
palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian
scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills. An epic in prose--and every
one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a
sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point
of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against
superstition, bigotry, and religious wrong.

David Hume's philosophy was more read[7] in France than in Scotland or
England, but Hume wrote one book here widely read, his _History of
England_. It has been superseded, but it did what it aimed at doing.
There are certain books which, when they have done their work, are
forgotten, the _Dialectique_ of Ramus, for instance. This is not to be
regretted. Hume's _History of England_ is one of t