graphy of dull English middle-class life by Anthony Trollope; the vigorous and purposeful stories of Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, and Mrs. Gaskell; the clever and amusing caricatures and romances of Charles Lever; the admirable pictures of country and country-town society, which, with too great an admixture of didactic reflection, mark the work of Marian Evans (1819-1880), who wrote as George Eliot; the showy and popular but hollow and unreal novels of Lord Lytton, and the fantastic novels of Disraeli, some of which, despite their exaggeration and affectation, will survive on account of the shrewdness of their political aim, and the light they throw on the character of their writer. Foremost among recent writings stand the popular but thoroughly artistic essays and tales of Robert Louis Stevenson and the great work of the poet George Meredith, whose brilliant and thoughtful novels will never lack admirers and readers. Nor should we forget the vigorous and patriotic tales and songs of Rudyard Kipling, who has done such excellent service in stimulating public interest in India, the army, and the colonies.

Magazines and

33. The growth of periodicals and of the newspaper press is the sign of a large class of people fond of reading, but not able or willing to read deeply. In 1802 a group Newspapers. of young men of letters living at Edinburgh, then an intellectual centre hardly second to London, founded the Whig Edinburgh Review, to which Macaulay contributed his famous Essays. In 1818 the Tories started the opposition Quarterly Review. Blackwood's Magazine was founded in 1817, the organ of the poet-professor John Wilson, and Scott's son-in-law and biographer John Lockhart; and the equally brilliant Fraser's Magazine (1830-1882), with its wonderful body of contributors, came a few years later with many other monthlies. In London the Times newspaper, started in 1788, and edited between 1815 and 1877 by Barnes and Delane, having exposed a series of commercial frauds, gained a wonderful influence and shrewd power of forecasting opinion. The first daily paper in Scotland was started in 1847. The reduction of the newspaper stamp to a penny in 1836, and its abolition altogether in 1855, caused a great growth of the provincial press, daily papers now cropping up in all the large towns, and rivalling the London ones. The Scotsman, the Manchester Guardian (twice a week), the Leeds and Liverpool Mercuries, and the Northern Star (once the Chartist organ), previously leading local weeklies, soon became daily papers. A new departure began with the London Daily News in 1846,

edited for a time by Charles Dickens, the first cheap daily paper, which in 1868 was first sold for a penny. The cheapening process went on until few papers cost more than a penny, and many a halfpenny. Charles Knight's excellent Penny Magazine (1832-1846), published for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, and the Dublin Magazine were the first cheap magazines. In 1850 Dickens's Household Words was published every week. In 1865 George Henry Lewes, a writer on philosophical and scientific subjects, started the Fortnightly Review for the free discussion of serious subjects by known writers, and his example has been followed by a number of imitators. A crowd of cheap magazines, mostly consisting of tales and light articles, now floods the literary market. Of late years there has been an immense increase in the number of papers devoted to special branches of science and sport, several of which are of much excellence.

34. The circle of educated or partly educated readers, for all that is now written, has been immensely widened by the diffusion of education. Early in the century Elementary most of the old grammar and charity schools Education. had sunk very low, and few children of the English, and none of the Irish, lower classes had any education, though in Scotland a plan projected by John Knox and the Reformers had been a reality since 1696, and every parish had had its school for over a century. A new departure was made with the efforts of Bell and Lancaster, and the National Society started in 1811, on Church principles, to rival the "undenominational” British and Foreign School Society begun in 1804. But at first their operations were on a small scale, though a new period begins in 1833, when public money was first granted for elementary education. In 1839 the rudiments of an Education Department appear, and the earnest efforts of Dr. Kay, afterwards Sir James KayShuttleworth, the secretary to the Committee of Council on Education, gradually built up the best system circumstances allowed. But religious animosities long stopped the way of further progress. In 1839 the bishops prevented the establishment of a Government Training School, so that the whole work was thrown on the two societies. In 1843 the Dissenters stopped in the same way the education clauses in Graham's Factory Bill, and soon afterwards, led by John Bright, strongly opposed the progressive Minute of 1846, because they saw it would help on church schools most, as the zeal of the clergy was, and remained

till 1870, the most effective means of supplying popular education. Nevertheless, the number of children in National and British schools continued to grow, and the State grants mounted up in 1861 to three-quarters of a million a year. In 1861 Robert Lowe, then Vice-President of the Education Committee, brought in the new code with its plausible but baleful system of so-called "payment by results." In 1870 Forster's Education Act supplemented the labours of the voluntary educators by establishing schoolboards, compulsion, and a really national system. The result was that the million children receiving elementary education in 1870 was raised by 1885 to over three millions. In Ireland the system adopted has been different, and progress much slower.

England had now a system of primary education, but secondary education remained in the old chaos, though Secondary much was gradually done to better the state of Education. individual public and grammar schools. Public School Education received a new start with the labours of Thomas Arnold at Rugby, and in 1868 the Public Schools Act reformed seven of the greatest historical English Schools. In 1869 the Endowed Schools Act began the reform of the grammar schools, and, in the long-run, much improved secondary education. A " 'payment by results" system was started by the Disraeli Government in Ireland, and in 1889 an Act was passed to promote intermediate education in Wales. Of late years many Technical Schools for the promotion of skill in handicrafts and in applied science have been set up, especially in the great towns, and the Town and County Councils have been enabled to spend large sums of public money in establishing and conducting them. The Universities were casting off the slumber of the eighteenth century. The Tractarian and Liberal moveThe Univer- ments after 1830 made Oxford full of real intellectual life, and, more gradually, Cambridge, never sunk so low as Oxford, became a centre of zealous study. But the corruptions of generations could only be cleared away by force, and the large changes thought needful to bring the ancient seats of learning abreast of modern times were sought for from external sources. 1854 Oxford and Cambridge were reformed by Royal Commissions. The monopoly of power of the heads of houses, the clerical, local, and celibate restrictions in the Colleges, the dependence of the University on the Colleges composing it, were assailed, while the Universities themselves

sities.

In

had already begun to bring in new studies, such as History and Natural Science. A new spirit now came over Oxford and Cambridge, which for good and evil has since endured, and was strengthened by the abolition of religious tests in 1871, and the second commission in 1877, though the outside reformers worked without method or policy, and in some ways did distinct harm. Competition has awakened the slumber of students, but has often led them aside from the real ends of all study.

In George IV.'s reign the London University was started by Brougham and Grote, to open out higher education to non-Churchmen, while the Church started King's College in opposition. A Charter to confer degrees was given to both in 1835, but unluckily the London University, as the degreegiving body was called, afterwards became a mere place for examining all comers, though Brougham's foundation continued to flourish as University College. The four Scotch Universities, poor and unorganised, but full of rough and vigorous intellectual life, and sometimes taught by men of the greatest eminence, though for the mass of their students rather higher popular schools than seats of the highest culture, were very partially reformed in 1858. In Ireland religious and political difficulties have retarded the progress of higher education. Trinity College, Dublin, despite the abolition of religious tests, retains largely its Protestant character. A retrograde step was taken in 1880, when the Queen's University was superseded by the Royal University, a simple examining body. In recent days local colleges, now fast winning State support, have been started in most of the larger towns, and have done a useful work in popularising higher culture, and in some cases have become great centres of serious study and research, notably in the newer branches of education, such as natural science, history, and philology. Owens College, Manchester, the oldest, wealthiest, and largest of these, has been united with its neighbours, University College, Liverpool, and the Yorkshire College, Leeds, to form the new Victoria University. In 1893 the three university colleges set up by the State in Wales have been similarly federated in the Welsh University, and in 1900 strong efforts are being made to establish a university in place of Mason's College, Birmingham.

BOOK XI.

INDIA AND THE COLONIES.

1760-1900,

INTRODUCTION.

THE history of the English race has long ceased to be simply the history of a small corner of North-Western Europe. For the last two centuries a constant Expansion of England has been going on which is from many points of view the most striking fact of our recent history.

In the seventeenth century England was only one of several European colonising and trading powers. The Revolution of 1688 saw her already striving for the first place. Portugal and Holland, the first countries of modern Europe to found trading Empires, now became her dependants. The wars of the eighteenth century effectually got rid of the more formidable rivalry of France and Spain.

The English triumph brought about two great results. It led to the establishment of a vast dependency in India. It resulted in the settlement of a great series of English colonies all over the world.

The loss of America, though it split for ever the British race in twain, hardly seemed to check this development. During the very years in which America was winning her independence, Warren Hastings was building up the British Empire in India. A New Colonial Empire, won by force from less successful foreign colonists, or settled in wildernesses hitherto untrodden by civilised man, now grew up with wonderful rapidity.

We have now to see how during the period between the early years of George III. and the present day British India and the New Colonial Empire came into being.