fame of English art would have suffered both at home and abroad if a
simple, manly lad had not quitted a Scotch manse and sailed from Leith to
London, bringing with him indelible memories of the humour and the pathos
of peasant life, and reproducing them with such graphic fidelity, power,
and tenderness that the whole world has heard of David Wilkie.

The pause between sunset and sunrise, the interregnum which signifies
that a phase in some department of the world's history has passed away as
a day is done, and a new development of human experience is about to
present itself, was over in literature. The romantic period had succeeded
the classic. Scott, Coleridge, Southey (Wordsworth stands alone), Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Campbell, Moore, were all in the field as poets, carrying
the young world with them, and replacing their immediate predecessors,
Cowper, Thompson, Young, Beattie, and others of less note.

Sir Walter Scott had also risen high above the horizon as a poet, and
still higher as a novelist.

A great start in periodical literature was made in 1802 by the
establishment of _The Edinburgh Review_, under Jeffrey and Sydney
Smith, and again in 1817 by the publication of _Blackmoods Magazine_,
with Christopher North for its editor, and Lockhart, De Quincey, Hogg,
and Delta among its earlier contributors. The people's friend, Charles
Knight, was still editing _The Windsor and Eton Express_.

In 1819 Sir Humphry Davy was the most popular exponent of science, Sir
James Mackintosh of philosophy. In politics, above the thunderstorm of
discontent, there was again the pause which anticipates a fresh advance.
The great Whig and Tory statesmen, Charles James Fox and William Pitt,
were dead in 1806, and their mantles did not fall immediately on fit