cessful wars that had established British power all
over the world, was one of the gloomiest in our history. If in some ways
the England of 1800-20 was ahead of the rest of Europe, in others it
lagged far behind. The Industrial Revolution, which was to turn us from
a nation of peasants and traders into a nation of manufacturers, had
begun; but its chief fruits as yet were increased materialism and
greed, and politically the period was one of blackest reaction. Alone
of European peoples we had been untouched by the tide of Napoleon's
conquests, which, when it receded from the Continent, at least left
behind a framework of enlightened institutions, while our success in the
Napoleonic wars only confirmed the ruling aristocratic families in their
grip of the nation which they had governed since the reign of Anne.
This despotism crushed the humble and stimulated the high-spirited to
violence, and is the reason why three such poets as Byron, Landor, and
Shelley, though by birth and fortune members of the ruling class, were
pioneers as much of political as of spiritual rebellion. Unable to
breathe the atmosphere of England, they were driven to live in exile.

It requires some effort to reconstruct that atmosphere to-day. A
foreign critic [Dr. George Brandes, in vol. iv. of his 'Main Currents of
Nineteenth Century Literature'] has summed it up by saying that England
was then pre-eminently the home of cant; while in politics her native
energy was diverted to oppression, in morals and religion it took the
form of hypocrisy and persecution. Abroad she was supporting the Holy
Alliance, throwing her weight into the scale against all movements for
freedom. At home there was exhaustion after war; workmen were thrown out
of employment, and taxation pressed heavily on high rents and the high
price of corn, was made cruel by fear; for the French Revolution had
sent a wave of panic through the country, not to ebb until about 1830.
Suspicion of republican principles--which, it seemed, led straight to
the Terror--frightened many good men, who would otherwise have been
reformers, into supporting the triumph of coercion and Toryism.
The elder generation of poets had been republicans in their youth.
Wordsworth had said of the Revolution that it was "bliss to be alive" in
that dawn; Southey and Coleridge had even planned to found a communistic
society in the New World. Now all three were rallied to the defence of
order and property, to Church an