s' is their
favourite self-designation, scholars and gentlemen, with rather more of
the gentlemen than the scholars--living in the capital, which forms a
kind of island of illumination amid the surrounding darkness of the
agricultural country--including men of rank and others of sufficient
social standing to receive them on friendly terms--meeting at
coffee-houses and in a kind of tacit confederation of clubs to compare
notes and form the whole public opinion of the day. They are conscious
that in them is concentrated the enlightenment of the period. The class
to which they belong is socially and politically dominant--the advance
guard of national progress. It has finally cast off the incubus of a
retrograde political system; it has placed the nation in a position of
unprecedented importance in Europe; and it is setting an example of
ordered liberty to the whole civilised world. It has forced the Church
and the priesthood to abandon the old claim to spiritual supremacy. It
has, in the intellectual sphere, crushed the old authority which
embodied superstition, antiquated prejudice, and a sham system of
professional knowledge, which was upheld by a close corporation. It
believes in reason--meaning the principles which are evident to the
ordinary common sense of men at its own level. It believes in what it
calls the Religion of Nature--the plain demonstrable truths obvious to
every intelligent person. With Locke for its spokesman, and Newton as a
living proof of its scientific capacity, it holds that England is the
favoured nation marked out as the land of liberty, philosophy, common
sense, toleration, and intellectual excellence. And with certain
reserves, it will be taken at its own valuation by foreigners who are
still in darkness and deplorably given to slavery, to say nothing of
wooden shoes and the consumption of frogs. Let us now consider the
literary result.

I may begin by recalling a famous controversy which seems to illustrate
very significantly some of the characteristic tendencies of the day. The
stage, when really flourishing, might be expected to show most
conspicuously the relations between authors and the society. The
dramatist may be writing for all time; but if he is to fill a theatre,
he must clearly adapt himself to the tastes of the living and the
present. During the first half of the period of which I am now speaking,
Dryden was still the dictator of the literary world; and Dryden had
adopted Congre