CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.


The claim which the intellectual and religious life of England in the
eighteenth century has upon our interest has been much more generally
acknowledged of late years than was the case heretofore. There had been,
for the most part, a disposition to pass it over somewhat slightly, as
though the whole period were a prosaic and uninteresting one. Every
generation is apt to depreciate the age which has so long preceded it as
to have no direct bearing on present modes of life, but is yet not
sufficiently distant as to have emerged into the full dignity of
history. Besides, it cannot be denied that the records of the eighteenth
century are, with two or three striking exceptions, not of a kind to
stir the imagination. It was not a pictorial age; neither was it one of
ardent feeling or energetic movement. Its special merits were not very
obvious, and its prevailing faults had nothing dazzling in them, nothing
that could be in any way called splendid; on the contrary, in its weaker
points there was a distinctly ignoble element. The mainsprings of the
religious, as well as of the political, life of the country were
relaxed. In both one and the other the high feeling of faith was
enervated; and this deficiency was sensibly felt in a lowering of
general tone, both in the domain of intellect and in that of practice.
The spirit of feudalism and of the old chivalry had all but departed,
but had left a vacuum which was not yet supplied. As for loyalty, the
half-hearted feeling of necessity or expedience, which for more than