disqualification was maintained; the game-laws and the rotten-borough
system, which conferred on the nobility and gentry arbitrary power
over the purse and person of the commonalty, were determinedly upheld;
counsel was only nominally allowed to the defendant in criminal cases;
chancery withheld or plundered without resistance or appeal; and there
can be no doubt that life and property were better protected by law
in France at the fall of the First Napoleon than in Great Britain.
Nevertheless, the movement had begun in the latter country forty years
before. A generation had passed since the battle of Culloden, and the
island was at length indissolubly and efficiently one. It shared fully
in the intellectual impulse of the day. Victorious in all its latest
struggles and freed from all sources of internal danger, it might
naturally have been expected to enter at once on a career of
improvement more marked than in the case of its neighbors. It is not
easy to assign reasons for failure in this respect, unless we seek
them in disgust at the subsequent dismemberment and disturbance of
the empire by the fruits of popular agitations in America, Ireland
and France. The reaction due to such causes was probably sufficient
to defeat all liberal efforts. The leading English writers of the
Revolutionary period were strong Tories. Such were Johnson, the Lake
poets after their brief swing to the opposite extreme, and Scott.
All these except the first belong as well to the time of successful
reform, and Johnson may be claimed by the eighteenth century; which
serves to illustrate the blight cast upon British literature by the
prolonged resistance of British statesmen to the prevailing current--a
resistance which took its keynote from the dying recantation and
protest of the Whig Chatham.

The opening of the epoch, then, was as marked in Great Britain as
elsewhere. Only in special fields she afterward fell behind, and lost