as slow and often dangerous. The
"flying-machine," or coach, between London and Sheffield was fully three
days on its journey. During the first fourteen years of the reign 452
acts were passed for repairing roads, but for some time little progress
was made. Many and bitter are the complaints made by Arthur Young, the
eminent agriculturist, of the roads on which he travelled in 1769-70.
One turnpike road was a bog with a few flints scattered on top, another
full of holes and deep ruts, while "of all the cursed roads which ever
disgraced this kingdom" that between Tilbury and Billericay was, he
says, the worst, and so narrow that when he met a waggon, the waggoner
had to crawl between the wheels to come to help him lift his chaise over
a hedge. During the last quarter of the century a vast change was
effected; good roads became general, and coaches with springs and
otherwise well appointed ran between London and most considerable towns,
and between one large town and another. From 1784 many of these coaches
carried the mails, and letters posted in Bath were delivered in London
seventeen hours later.

[Sidenote: _POETRY._]

The wider outlook acquired by travel contributed to an increase of
intellectual activity, and improved means of internal communication
assisted the dissemination of books. People read more; many instructive
books met with a large sale, and circulating libraries were established
in the larger towns. In literature the period is marked by an advance in
the transition from artificiality of thought, and still more of
expression, to what was natural and spontaneous. Antiquity began to
attract, and romanticism gradually gained ground. Thomson, who led the
flight of poetry from the gilded house of bondage, wrote at an earlier
time than ours. For us the new feeling is illustrated by the popularity
of _Ossian_, Bishop Percy's _Reliques_, Gray's romantic lyrics, and the
pseudo-antique poems of Chatterton, a Bristol lad who killed himself in
1770. Goldsmith's poetry belongs to the old school, for he was a
follower of Johnson, a strenuous opponent of the new romanticism. The
poetry of Cowper, an ardent lover of nature, whose first volume appeared
in 1781, though usually conventional in expression, is always sincere
and sometimes exquisite. Crabbe, a story-teller and preacher, wrote some
true poetry, along with much that is prosaic: rarely moved by an
inspiration drawn from nature to desert the conventional couplet,