new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the
first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in
the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.

So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single
source, the French influence is the effective cause of change. Voltaire
and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's
administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw.
Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the
good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution,
and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience. Yet
when he came, in 1762, to publish the _Contrat Social_ it was obvious
that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real meaning of their
work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English
institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the
simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and
one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a
general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of
English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing--less
admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas
Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments,
all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a
magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an
immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to
Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was
a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had
partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a
discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs. Its analysis as a
connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil
Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was