XVIII
A HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 1837-1880.[1] By the Rev. J. Franck Bright, D.D., Master of University College, Oxford.
General Garfield wrote in his diary : "No country has made nobler progress against greater obstacles than this heroic England in the last hundred years." At the same time, Gratry described the admirable spectacle of a nation turning from its sordid carnal ways to make reparation for centuries of profitable wrong. Just then, too, Prevost Paradol, with the same scene before him, said that we all know at what stage of existence people begin to feel remorse, settle their affairs, and try to atone for their misdeeds. Dr. Bright has seen these things, and has found in them the keynote of the reign of the queen. He crowns the history of England with the age of conversion and compassion, of increased susceptibility in the national conscience, of a deepened sense of right and wrong, of much that, in the eye of rivalry, is sentiment, emotion, idealism, and imbecility. He has shown how the nation, the constitution, the empire were formed ; but his heart is not in the striving, stumbling past, in the siege of Ascalon and the coronation at Paris, with Drake and Clive, but with those who administer the inheritance of power and responsibility, the treasured experience, and the imperial arts, to the needs and claims of three hundred millions of men. He is the historian of living forces and present cares. His intense consciousness of duty and
- ↑ English Historical Review, vol. iii. 1888.
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