pulled down), or of Bond Street as it was in the days of the
Loungers (an extinct race), or of St. James's Street as it was when
Mr. Fox and his party tried to make 'political capital' out of the
dissipation of an heir apparent, we seem to be reading not of the
places we know so well, but of very distant and unlike localities.
Or let anyone think how little is the external change in England
between the age of Elizabeth and the age of Anne compared with the
national change. How few were the alterations in physical condition,
how few (if any) the scientific inventions affecting human life
which the later period possessed, but the earlier did not! How hard
it is to say what has caused the change in the people! And yet how
total is the contrast, at least at first sight! In passing from
Bacon to Addison, from Shakespeare to Pope, we seem to pass into a
new world.

In the first of these essays I spoke of the mode in which the
literary change happens, and I recur to it because, literature being
narrower and more definite than life, a change in the less serves as
a model and illustration of the change in the greater. Some writer,
as was explained, not necessarily a very excellent writer or a
remembered one, hit on something which suited the public taste: he
went on writing, and others imitated him, and they so accustomed
their readers to that style that they would bear nothing else. Those
readers who did not like it were driven to the works of other ages
and other countries,--had to despise the 'trash of the day,' as they
would call it. The age of Anne patronised Steele, the beginner of
the essay, and Addison its perfecter, and it neglected writings in a
wholly discordant key. I have heard that the founder of the 'Times'
was asked how all the articles in the 'Times' came to seem to be
written by one man, and that he replied--'Oh, there is always some