n an accumulated sense of _justice._ I do not see how any
student of 18th century literature can deny its writers--Berkeley
or Hume or Gibbon--Congreve or Sheridan--Pope or Cowper--Addison
or Steele or Johnson--Burke or Chatham or Thomas Paine--their
meed for this, or, if he be an artist, even his homage.

But it remains true, as your instinct tells you, and as I have
admitted, that they achieved all this by help of narrow and
artificial boundaries. Of several fatal exclusions let me name
but two.

In the first place, they excluded the Poor; imitating in a late
age the Athenian tradition of a small polite society resting on a
large and degraded one. Throughout the 18th century--and the
great Whig families were at least as much to blame for this as
the Tories--by enclosure of commons, by grants, by handling of
the franchise, by taxation, by poor laws in result punitive
though intended to be palliative, the English peasantry underwent
a steady process of degradation into serfdom: into a serfdom
which, during the first twenty years of the next century, hung
constantly and precariously on the edge of actual starvation. The
whole theory of culture worked upon a principle of double
restriction; of restricting on the one hand the realm of polite
knowledge to propositions suitable for a scholar and a gentleman,
and, on the other, the numbers of the human family permitted to
be either. The theory deprecated enthusiasm, as it discountenanced
all ambition in a poor child to rise above what Sir Spencer Walpole
called 'his inevitable and hereditary lot'--to soften which and
make him acquiescent in it was, with a Wilberforce or a Hannah
More, the last dream of restless benevolence.

VI

Also these 18th century men fenced off the whole of our own
Middle English and medieval literature--fenced off Chaucer and
Dunbar, Malory and Berners--as barbarous and 'Gothic.' They
treated these writers with little more consideration than Boileau
had thought it worth while to bestow on Villon or on Ronsard--
_enfin Malherbe_! As for Anglo-Saxon literature, one may, safely
say that, save by Gray and a very few others, its existence was
barely surmised.

You may or may not find it harder to forgive them that they ruled
out moreover a great part of the literature of the preceding
century as offensive to urbane taste, or as they would say,
'disgusting.' They disliked it mainly, one suspects, as one age
revolts from the fashion of another--as so