in his own lifetime passed over English taste. "We have at present,' he wrote in 1770, three exhibitions. One West, who paints history in the taste of Poussin, gets 300l. for a piece not too large to hang over a chimney. . . . The rage to see these exhibitions is so great that sometimes one cannot pass through the streets where they are. It is incredible what sums are raised by mere exhibitions of anything; a new fashion and to enter at which you pay a shilling or half-a-crown. Another rage is for prints of English portraits. I have been collecting them for about thirty years, and originally never gave for a mezzotinto above one or two shillings. The lowest are now a crown; most from half-a-guinea to a guinea. . . . Scarce heads in books not worth threepence will sell for five guineas. Then we have Etruscan vases made of earthenware in Staffordshire, from two to five guineas, and ormolu, never made here before, which succeeds so well that a tea-kettle, which the inventor offered for one hundred guineas, sold by auction for one hundred and thirty.' The pictures of the old foreign masters had risen in equal proportion. Two thousand pounds were given for a picture of Guido, and the price of old paintings had tripled or quadrupled in a single lifetime.2

While the great artistic development was giving a new ply to popular taste in England and attracting to the pursuit of art a rapidly increasing and often an excessive stream of students,3 there was a corresponding movement in the spheres of literature and science. Whatever controversy there might be about the comparative value of the additions made to human knowledge in the eighteenth and in preceding centuries, there could be no question of the fact that the eighteenth century was preeminently the century of the diffusion of knowledge. The great discovery of the lightning conductor by Franklin, as well as his admirable history of electricity, gave an immense popularity to this branch of science, and the marvellous discoveries of the French chemists, the impulse which Buffon had given to the

study of natural history, and the example of the scientific enthusiasm which ran so high in the world of fashion at Paris had all their influence in England. 'Natural history,' Horace Walpole wrote in 1770, 'is in fashion.' Goldsmith, with the smallest possible knowledge of the subject, found it profitable to place his graceful pen at its service, and his Animated Nature' had probably some considerable influence in extending the taste. Dr. Hill, who had been appointed by George III. gardener at Kensington, was one of the first persons who put scientific knowledge in a popular shape by the system of publishing in numbers. Walpole says he made fifteen guineas a week by working for wholesale dealers, and that he was employed at the same time on six voluminous works on botany, husbandry, &c., which were published weekly. The many popular scientific works of Priestley greatly assisted the movement. A taste for public lectures now sprang up, and a great literature of compilations arose. The Encyclopædia Britannica,' which was completed in 1797, though far inferior in genius and influence to the corresponding work in Paris, was incomparably superior to any similar work which had appeared in England, and numerous systematic works were written on particular sciences, alphabetically arranged in the form of dictionaries."

There was still a great want in London of really public libraries accessible to all students. The library belonging to the Chapter of Westminster, the library of Sion College, and the library of Archbishop Tenison, it is true, already existed, and in the course of the century a considerable library was accumulated by the Royal Society; but the British Museum, though rich in manuscripts, was still miserably poor in printed books, and Gibbon complained bitterly that an English writer who undertook to treat any large historical subject was reduced to the necessity of purchasing the books which must form the basis of his work, and that the greatest city of the world was still destitute of a public library.'5 Circulating libraries, however, which have had a great importance in the diffusion of literary

I Walpole to Mann, ii. 96.

* Walpole to Zouche, Jan. 3, 1761. 'See an interesting review of this branch of literature in Miller's Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, iii. 109-116.

Ashton's Queen Anne, p. 294. Edwards' History of Libraries, i. 774. See too a speech of Wilkes on the state of libraries in England, Parl. Hist. xix. 188-192.

tastes, belong especially to the latter half of the eighteenth century. The exact date of their origin is disputed, but they certainly existed a few years before the middle of the century, and in its last thirty years they multiplied rapidly, not only in London, but in the provincial towns. In 1800 it is stated that there were not less than a thousand circulating libraries in Great Britain.1 Book clubs and societies were at the same time formed. All important controversies became in their style and method more popular, and a vast literature of novels sprang into existence, at once producing and representing a greatly increased love of reading.

Much attention was also paid to children's literature. Very few books in any age or country have exercised so great an empire over the tastes and sympathies of many successive generations of boys as 'Robinson Crusoe,' which was published in 1719, or as 'Sandford and Merton,' which was published in instalments between 1783 and 1789, and it was in the eighteenth century that the fairy visions of the 'Arabian Nights' were first thrown open to the English imagination. Nor should we forget the many books for little children which were published shortly after the middle of the century by Newberry, Griffith Jones and his brother. 'Goody Two Shoes,' 'Giles Gingerbread,' 'Tommy Trip,' and a crowd of other little masterpieces, combining in different degrees amusement and instruction, replaced the rude chapbooks which had formerly been hawked about and were the forerunners and the models of a vast literature which is not one of the least characteristic and important products of the nineteenth century.2

The blue-stocking clubs, which were so popular about 1781, were signs of the desire of ladies of fashion to give a more serious and literary character to female society, and the admirable letters of Lady Mary Montagu, Mrs. Montagu, and Mrs. Delany show the high level of intelligence to which they sometimes attained. The unprecedented multiplication of

See Miller's Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, iii. 304; Buckle's History of Civilisation, i. 392, 393; Forsyth's Novels of the Eighteenth Century, p. 156; Annual Register, 1761, p. 207.

2 Much information relating to Newberry and his publications has lately been collected by Mr. Charles Welsh in his Bookseller of the Last Century.

female authors was a significant feature of the time. It reflected that steady improvement of female education which had been in progress through the century, and it had a great influence in banishing coarseness from English literature, in stimulating those branches of it which are most in harmony with female aptitudes and tastes, and in destroying the foolish prejudice which had long treated serious studies as unbecoming in a woman. Of the female literature of the eighteenth century, it is true, very little remains. The history of Mrs. Macaulay, which Walpole classed with the histories of Robertson, and which Madame Roland pronounced to be hardly inferior to Tacitus, has long since sunk into a darkness as black as that which covers the equally famous 'Botanic Garden' of Darwin, and the still more popular Meditations' of Hervey. Few modern readers turn the pages of Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Radcliffe, Miss Seward, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Trimmer, or the learned Mrs. Carter; and the beautiful lines of Mrs. Barbauld, which still linger in the memory of thousands, were written in extreme old age and long after the century had closed. Some of these writers played a useful, though subordinate and ephemeral, part in the great religious and educational movements of their time. Others were in their day deservedly popular novelists; but they have been displaced by changing tastes and by the ever increasing throng of their successors. The Rights of Woman' of Mary Wollstonecroft, however, still retains some historic interest as perhaps the first English example of a class of literature and speculation which has since become very prominent. The Evelina' of Miss Burney will long be read as the most faithful picture of the fashionable amusements of its generation; and the last years of the century produced the earliest writings of Maria Edgeworth, who as a novelist may be justly placed in the same high rank as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.

The manners of the gentry all over the country were steadily and rapidly assimilating. The distinction between the nobility and the other gentry, and the immense distinction between town and country were both diminishing. In the middle of the eighteenth century there were still thousands of country gentlemen who had scarcely ever been farther from their homes than their county town, while among the poor the habits of

life had been for generations almost unchanged. Among them at least there was as yet no religious scepticism, no political agitation, no class antagonism, scarcely any curiosity about the outer world, and, until sixty or seventy years of the century had passed, singularly little social or economical change. The standard of material well-being was on the whole high and steady, and life glided on smoothly and uneventfully amid the same landmarks. It was common in country districts for a Sunday suit to descend from father to son. It was put on when the church bell rang and carefully put aside when the service had concluded, and in this way dresses of far bygone generations were still in actual use. Many years after the middle of the eighteenth century, it was stated that beaver hats made in the reign of Charles II. might be often seen in the village churches.' The reprobation, half prejudice, half duty, with which all prolonged visits of a country gentleman to the metropolis were regarded had once been one of the strongest of English feelings. It may be seen in the laws against the increase of London; in the early opposition to stage coaches; in the apprehensions which no less a man than Swift expressed of the social evils that would result from annual meetings of Parliament. But with the improvement of roads and public conveyances the whole type of country life was rapidly changing. The weekly stage coach now brought down the latest London fashions to the remote country village. An annual visit to London or to a seaside wateringplace became the ambition of every county family. London actors appeared in the neighbouring county town. Provincial circulating libraries brought down London books, and the provincial press was year by year rising in importance. Before the close of the eighteenth century there were already more than seventy provincial newspapers in England.2

We have already seen the signs of this change in the first half of the century, and as early as 1761 a writer has given a vivid picture of its progress. It is scarce half a century ago,' he says, 'since the inhabitants of the distant counties were regarded as a species almost as different from those of the metropolis as the natives of the Cape of Good Hope.

1 Annual Register, 1769, p. 142.

Andrews' History of British Journalism, i. 274.

Their