1819, after some further changes, it was increased by Mr. Vansittart to the enormous amount of 56s. per cwt., or 6d. per lb., a rate which, while it was maintained, proved highly injurious to the manufacture, diminished the exports of woollen goods, and producing other evils which lasted, in some degree, even after its repeal. Until the year 1814, most of the foreign wool imported was brought from Spain; but since that time Germany, which during the war had supplied a very trifling quantity, has yielded a very large supply. Among other branches of our textile manufactures, that of hosiery made considerable progress during this period. It was estimated in 1812 that there were then about 29,590 stocking-frames at work in the united kingdom, whereas thirty years earlier the number had been estimated at only about 20,000.* Probably about one-third of those employed in 1812 were used for making cotton hose. The bobbin-net manufacture was another branch of industry which rose to great importance during this period, in consequence of numerous ingenious inventions, of which the most prominent was the improved lace-frame, patented in 1809 by Mr. John Heathcote, of Loughborough, a machine which has occasioned such extraordinary perfection and cheapness in this beautiful manufacture as to all but exterminate the old manufacture of pillow-lace. Of the progress of calico-printing, without pausing to notice the improvements introduced in the process, which were, however, far from unimportant, it may suffice to state that the quantity printed in 1820, though somewhat lower than in one or two previous years, was 5,456,196 pieces, which, at an average duty of 5s. per piece, yielded a duty of 1,614,049/. From almost the infancy of the art of printing, the printing-press had been the subject of but few improvements; and about the commencement of the nineteenth century it was a machine of very rude construction and limited efficiency. Lord Stanhope, who devoted much attention to the improvement of the typographic art, introduced an admirable machine about that time, which, without any material deviation from the principle of the old wooden printing-press, was very superior to it in power, as well as in compactness and convenience, and which was formed wholly of iron; and his press, which still continues in reputation under the name of the Stanhope press, became the prototype of an almost endless variety of iron presses, all of them so vastly superior to the old wooden press, that, in the few instances in which that is yet used, it is only employed for printing proofsheets, or for similar inferior purposes. Plans had been suggested even before the close of the eighteenth century for printing by means of cylinders, which should have a continuous action, capable of producing many more impressions in a given time than the alternating action of *Porter's Progress of the Nation, i. 244, 245. the common press, and also offering greater facilities for the use of automatic power; and William Nicholson, the editor of the Philosophical Journal,' obtained a patent for such a machine about the year 1790. It was not, however, till several years later that, after a long series of experiments, a practical machine was brought into operation, by the ingenuity of M. König, a native of Saxony, aided by the enterprise of Messrs. Thomas Bensley, George Woodfall, and Richard Taylor, extensive printers in London. They succeeded as early as April, 1811, in producing a machine with which 3000 copies of sheet H of the New Annual Register for 1810 were printed, this being the first portion of a book ever printed solely by an automatic machine; and, after many further experiments, a machine was constructed for printing the "Times' newspaper, the number of which for the 29th of November, 1814, announced to its readers that it was the first sheet of paper ever printed by steamimpelled machinery. Of the subsequent extension, or the remarkable results, of this grand improve ment it is needless to say anything; but it may be well to add the dates which mark the earliest applications in this country, on an extensive scale, of another invention of perhaps equal importance in facilitating the extension of cheap literature, the art of stereotyping, of which some notices are given in the preceding Book. The revival and prac tical application of this art was effected in a great measure by the exertions of Earl Stanhope; and after it had been brought to comparative perfection at his seat at Chevening, in Kent, it was communicated to the universities of Cambridg and Oxford, at which places stereotype works were first issued in the years 1807 and 1809, respectively. In those branches of printing more closely allied to the fine arts, the beautiful art of lith graphy was, towards the close of this period, offering facilities for the production of works of art of a totally new and very useful character, and the introduction of steel plates in lieu of copper for engraving book-illustrations, maps, and other works of art, of which great numbers of impres sions were required, was affording a kind of parallel, equally important in its peculiar branch of art or industry, to the stereotyping process. The time from 1802 to 1820 forms a very important period in the history of Agriculture in this country. Attracted by the high prices of every description of agricultural produce, capital was freely expended in bringing land into cultivation, and in developing the fertility of that already under the plough. At first it was the tenants rather than the landlords who reaped the advantages attending the rise in the price of agricultural produce; but between 1792 and 1812 rents were doubled, or even trebled in amount. Extensive districts which, at the commencement of the period, were cropped • Holland's Manufactures in Metal, ii. 221. + See ante, vol. iii. p. 714. Penny Cyclopædia, art., Stereotype.' only by rabbits, fed flocks of geese, or served as pasture for the half-starved straggling sheep, or other live-stock of the cottager, before the close of the period exhibited the rich exuberance of superior cultivation. The progress of population, as well as the peculiar circumstances of the country during the war, and the casualty of the seasons, accelerated these changes. The increase of population from 1811 to 1821 was 20 per cent. in Cambridgeshire; 19 per cent. in Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire; and 18 per cent. in Norfolk; each of these counties being distinguished for the extension and improvement of its agriculture. There During the present period many of the practices of isolated districts which had become pre-eminent for their superior husbandry were brought into operation over a wider surface. The downs, wolds, and clays were fertilised by chalk; marling' rendered the barren sands fruitful; by the admixture of clay the fens and peats became productive; and lime corrected the acid soil of the moorlands. Experiments were made on the efficacy of new manures and composts. Draining was more extensively practised. The improvement of livestock was zealously pursued. Root crops and artificial grasses were more extensively cultivated, and new varieties of each were introduced. was nothing new in these operations; most of them, indeed, had been practised from time immemorial; but it was only here and there where they were formerly common, while now they promised to become universal. The working farmer, stimulated by the examples around him, betook himself to new processes, which called forth a greater degree of intelligence than the old routine course which he formerly pursued without much thought as to its practical object. The old and clumsy implements of his calling were discarded, as the course of improvement in which he had made a I beginning required others of a better construction, and some were wanted adapted to entirely new purposes. It was this more general departure from the spirit of routine, in every department of rural economy, which more particularly marked the present period. In 1810 the late Šir HumI phry Davy published his Agricultural Chemistry;' but the triumph of scientific agriculture is reserved for a period even beyond the present day. It is unnecessary to enter into a minute detail of the various processes by which the agriculture of the country was brought nearer to perfection in the last eighteen or twenty years of the reign of George III.; but we may briefly indicate their general tendency. Under the old system of EngUnder the old system of English husbandry the clay lands produced the great bulk of the food of the country. According to the old distich "When the sand doth feed the clay, The tendency, then, of the changes which took place in the period from 1802 to 1820, changes still operating in a sphere which is gradually enlarging, was to transfer the capability of supplying the bulk of the food for the population from the clays to the light arable soils. The improvement of these soils, and the secret of their productiveness, are to be attributed to the introduction of root-crops and of artificial grasses as food for cattle, which leads to a more perfect tillage, and a progressive enrichment of the soil. The old grass lands, on which our ancestors depended for a supply of animal food, could only fatten a limited quantity of stock, and, as there was little hay for winter keep, they were under the necessity of making large provision of salt meat for winter consumption. We chiefly owe the luxury of fresh meat all the year round to the introduction of the common turnip; and, if we could not have thus repaired the deficiency of our meadows, a large proportion of the population would have been debarred from animal food, either salt or fresh. The common turnip, however, cannot be preserved later than February; and the next step in the course of improvement was the introduction of the Swedish turnip, which carries the feeder of stock to the end of March; while mangold-wurzel, which is of still later introduction, brings him to the period when, under superior management, early spring vetches complete the circle of artificial food for the whole year. These crops, which are the mainstay of modern agricultural improvement, and enable the farmer both to grow corn and feed stock, are the produce of the light soils; and hence they have gradually been fertilised, while the clay lands have gone backward. On the light soils the harvests are earlier; the operations of husbandry are not nearly so dependant on the weather; and the expenses of cultivation are not so great. The next step in the course of agricultural improvement will be to adapt the clay lands to alternating crops, so as to enable them to feed stock on roots and green crops, as well as to produce grain. They will thus again bear their share in feeding the population; but before this object can be accomplished they must be effectually drained; and even now it is computed that one-third of the cultivated land in England requires draining. It will be for future writers, therefore, to record this grand improvement in the agriculture of the country. CHAPTER V. THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND THE FINE ARTS. T would almost seem as if there were something in the impressiveness of the great chronological event formed by the termination of one century and the commencement of another that had been wont to act with an awakening and fructifying power upon literary genius in this island. Of the three last great sunbursts of our literature, the first, making what has been called the Elizabethan of our dramatic and other poetry, threw its splendour over the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth century; the second, famous as the Augustan age of Anne, brightened the earlier years of the eighteenth; the nineteenth century was ushered in by the third. At the termination of the reign of George III., in the year 1820, there were still among us, not to mention minor names, at least nine or ten poetical writers, cach (whatever discordance of opinion there may be about either their relative or their absolute merits) commanding universal attention from the reading world to whatever he produced:-Crabbe (to take them in the order of their seniority), Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and perhaps we ought to add Keats, though rather for what he promised to do if he had lived than for what he had actually done. Many other voices there were from which divine words were often heard, but these were oracles to whom all listened, whose inspiration all men acknowledged. For the greater part of the present period we had the whole of these lights, with the exception only of the two last named, shining in our sky together; of the rest, indeed, Byron was the only one who had not appeared above the horizon before the century began. It is such crowding and clustering of remarkable writers that has chiefly distinguished the great literary ages in every country: there are eminent writers at other times, but then they come singly or in small numbers, as Lucretius, the noblest of the Latin poets, did before the Augustan age of Roman literature; as our own Milton and Dryden did in the interval between our Elizabethan age and that of Anne; as Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and then Cowper, and Burns, in twos and threes, or one by one, preceded and as it were led in the rush and crush of our last revival. For such single swallows, though they do not make, do yet commonly herald the summer; and accordingly those remarkable writers who have thus appeared between one great age of literature and another have mostly, it may be observed, arisen not in the earlier but in the later portion of the intervalhave been not the lagging successors of the last era, but the precursors of the next. But, however it is to be explained or accounted for, it does indeed look as if nature in this, as in other things, had her times of production and of comparative rest and inactivity-her autumns and her winters age-or, as we may otherwise conceive it, her alternations of light and darkness, of day and night. After a busy and brilliant period of usually some thirty or forty years has always followed in every country a long term during which the literary spirit, as if over-worked and exhausted, has manifested little real energy or power of life, and ever the very demand and taste for the highest kind of literature, for depth, and subtlety, and truth, and originality, and passion, and beauty, has in a great measure ceased with the supply-a sober and slumbrous twilight of imitation and mediocrity, and little more than mechanical dexterity in bookmaking, at least with the generality of the most popular and applauded writers. After all, the re awakening of our English literature, on each of the three occasions we have mentioned, was probab brought about mainly by the general political and social circumstances of the country and of the world at the time. The poetical and dramat: wealth and magnificence of the era of Elizabeth and James came, no doubt, for the most part, ou of the passions that had been stirred and t strength that had been acquired in the might contests and convulsions which filled, here and throughout Europe, the middle of the sixteent century; another breaking up of old institutions and re-edification of the state upon a new found tion and a new principle, the work of the last six years of the seventeenth century, if it did not co tribute much to train the wits and fine writers of the age of Anne, at least both prepared the tr quillity necessary for the restoration of elegant li rature, and disposed the public mind for its enjoy ment; the poetical dayspring, finally, that came with our own century was born with, and probab in some degree of, a third revolution, which shook both established institutions and the minds and opinions of men throughout Europe as much almost as the Reformation itself had done three centuries and a half before. It is also to be observed that on each of these three occasions the excitement appears to have come to us in part from a foreign literature which had undergone a similar reawakening, or put forth a new life and vigour, shortly before our own in the Elizabethan age the contagion or impulse was caught from the literature of Italy; in the age of Anne from that of France; in the present period from that of Germany. This German inspiration operated most directly, and produced the most marked effect, in the poetry of Wordsworth. Wordsworth has preserved in the editions of his collected works some of his verses written so long ago as 1786; and he has also continued to reprint the two earliest of his published poems, entitled 'An Evening Walk, addressed to a Young Lady, from the Lakes of the North of England,' and 'Descriptive Sketches, taken during a pedestrian tour among the Alps,' both of which first appeared in 1793. The recollection of the former of these poems probably suggested to somebody, a few years later, the otherwise not very intelligible designation of the Lake School, which has been applied to this writer and his imitators, or supposed imitators. But the Evening Walk' and the Descriptive Sketches,' which are both written in the usual rhyming ten-syllabled verse, are themselves perfectly orthodox poems, according to the common creed, in spirit, manner, and form. The peculiarities which are conceived to constitute what is called the Lake manner first appeared in the Lyrical Ballads ;' the first volume of which was published in 1798, the second in 1800. In the Preface to the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads' the author himself described his object as being to ascertain how far the purposes of poetry might be fulfilled by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation." In other words he proclaimed his belief to be that poetry was nothing more than the natural language of passion corrected and rendered metrical; and we are not aware that he has ever announced any retractation, or even modification or correction, of this doctrine. It is an account of the matter which is scarcely worth refuting, even if the present were the place for entering into an examination of it; in fact, it refutes itself, for it, as is implied, passion, or 'vivid sensation,' always speaks in poetry, the metrical arrangement and the selection are unnecessary and unwarrantable; if these operations be indispensable, the language of vivid sensation is not always poetry. It might as well be said that the Christian revelation is the language of the inspired writers selected and made metrical, or set to music. But, after all, this has been always much more Wordsworth's theory, or profession of poetical belief, than his practice; and is as much contradicted and confuted by the greater VOL. IV.-GEO. III. | part of his own poetry as it is by that of all languages and all times in which poetry has been written, or by the universal past experience of mankind in every age and country. He is a great poet, and has enriched our literature with much beautiful and noble writing, whatever be the method or principle upon which he constructs, or fancies that he constructs, his compositions. His Laodamia,' without the exception of a single line, his 'Lonely Leech-gatherer,' with the exception of very few lines; his Ruth,' his Affliction of Margaret, his 'Tintern Abbey,' his 'Feast of Brougham,' the Water Lily,' the greater part of the Excursion,' most of the 'Sonnets,' his great 'Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood,' and many of his shorter lyrical pieces, such as the three on the Yarrow, and numbers more, are as unexceptionable in diction as they are deep and true in feeling, judged according to any rules or principles of art that are now patronized by anybody. It is true, indeed, that it will not do to look at anything that Wordsworth has written through the spectacles of that species of criticism which was in vogue among us in the last century; we believe that in several of the pieces we have named even that narrow and superficial doctrine (if it could be recalled from the tomb) would find little or nothing to object to, but we fear it would find as little to admire; it had no feeling or understanding of the poetry of any other era than its own,-neither of that of Homer, nor that of the Greek dramatists, nor that of our own Elizabethan age, and it certainly would not enter far into the spirit either of that of Wordsworth or of any other great writer of his time. It is part, and a great part, of what the literature of Germany has done for us within the last fifty years, that it has given a wider scope and a deeper insight to our perception and mode of judging of the poetical in all its forms and manifestations; and the poetry of Wordsworth has materially aided in establishing this revolution of taste and critical doctrine, by furnishing the English reader with some of the earliest and many of the most successful or most generally appreciated examples and illustrations of the precepts of the new faith. Even the errors of Wordsworth's poetical creed and practice, the excess to which he has sometimes carried his employment of the language of the common people, and his attempts to extract poetical effects out of trivial incidents and humble life, were fitted to be rather serviceable than injurious in the highly artificial state of our poetry when he began to write. He may not have succeeded in every instance in which he has tried to glorify the familiar and elevate the low, but he has nevertheless taught us that the domain of poetry is much wider and more various than it used to be deemed, that there is a great deal of it to be found where it was formerly little the fashion to look for anything of the kind, and that the poet does not absolutely require for the exercise of his art and the display of his powers what are commonly called illustrious or distinguished characters, and an otherwise dignified subject, any more than long and 4 U learned words. Of all his English contemporaries | 1610 COLERIDGE. In all that constitutes artistic character the poetry of Coleridge is a contrast to that of Wordsworth. Coleridge, born in 1772, published the earliest of his poetry that is now remembered in 1796, in a small volume containing also some pieces by Charles Lamb, to which some by Charles Lloyd were added in a second edition the following year. It was not till 1800, after he had produced and printed separately his 'Ode to the Departing Year' (1796), his noble ode entitled 'France' (1797), his Fears in Solitude' (1798), and his translations of both parts of Schiller's' Wallenstein,' that he was first associated as a poet and author with Wordsworth, in the second volume of whose Lyrical Ballads,' published in 1800, appeared, as the contributions of an anonymous friend, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner,' Foster Mother's Tale,' Nightingale,' and 'Love." "I should not have requested this assistance," said Wordsworth, in his preface," had I not believed that the poems of my friend would, in a great measure, have the same tendency as my own, and that, though there would be found a difference, there would be found no discordance in the colours of our style; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do almost entirely coincide." Coleridge's own account, however, is very different. In his 'Biographia Literaria,' he tells us that, besides the Ancient Mariner,' he was preparing for the conjoint publication, among other poems, the Dark Ladie' and the 'Christabal,' in which he should have more nearly realised his ideal than he had done in his first attempt, when the volume was brought out with so much larger a portion of it the produce of Wordsworth's industry than his own, that his few compositions, "instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter;" and then he adds, in reference to the long preface in which Wordsworth had expounded his theory of poetry, "With many parts of this preface in the sense attri buted to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorise, I never concurred; but, on the contrary, objected to them as erroneous in principle and contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves." Coleridge's poetry is remarkable for the perfection of its execution, for the exquisite art with which its divine informing spirit is endowed with formal expression. The subtly woven words, with all their sky colours, seem to grow out of the thought or emotion, as the flower from its stalk, or the flame from its feeding oil. The music of his verse, too, especially of what he has written in rhyme, is as sweet and as characteristic as any thing in the language, placing him for that rare excellence in the same small band with Shakspeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher (in their lyrics), and Milton, and Collins, and Shelley, and Tennyson. It was probably only quantity that was wanting to make Coleridge the greatest poet of his day. Cer tainly, at least, some things that he has written have not been surpassed, if they have been matched, by any of his contemporaries. And (as indeed has been the case with almost all great poets) he continued to write better and better the longer |