act of the
revolutionary war abroad and the coercive policy thereby necessitated at
home may have somewhat postponed the appearance of the new kind of
periodical, in all shapes from quarterly to daily, which was to be so
great a feature of the next age; but the same causes increased the
desire for it and prepared not a few of its constituents. It is
impossible for any tolerably careful reader not to notice how much more
"modern," to use an unphilosophical but indispensable term, is the
political satire both in verse and prose, which has been noticed in the
first chapter of this book, than the things of more or less the same
kind that immediately preceded it. It was an accident, no doubt, that
made the _Anti-Jacobin_ ridicule Darwin's caricature of eighteenth
century style in poetry; yet that ridicule did far more to put this
particular convention out of fashion than all the attacks of the same
paper on innovators like Coleridge (who at that time had hardly
attempted their literary innovations) could do harm. The very interest
in foreign affairs, brought about by the most universal war that had
ever been known, helped to introduce the foreign element which was to
play so large a part in literature; and little affection as the critic
may have for the principles of Godwin or of Paine, he cannot deny that
the spirit of inquiry, the rally and shock of attack and defence, are
things a great deal better for literature than a placid contentment with
accepted conventions.

Theology indeed may share with drama the reproach of having very little
that is good to show from this time, or indeed for a long time to come.
For the non-conformist sects and the Low Church party, which had
resulted from the Evangelical movement in the earlier eighteenth
century, were, the Unitarians excepted, for the most part illiterate.
The Deist controversy had ceased, or, as conducted against Paine,
required no literary skill; and the High Church movement had not begun.
Philosophy, not productive of very much, was more active; and the
intensely alien and novel styles of German thought were certain in time
to produce their effect, while their working was in exact line with all
the other tendencies we have been surveying.

In short, during these twenty years, literature in almost all its parts
was being thoroughly "boxed about." The hands that stirred it were not
of the strongest as yet, they were absolutely unskilled, and for the
most part they had not