458 REVIEWS OF BOOKS July Harwich on the government packet-boats which put into their port, and the fact that 50 per cent, of its corporation were either post-office or customs officials, had made it time out of mind, as Horace Walpole fre- quently but fruitlessly explained to him, a government borough. This, however, did not deter Lord Egmont from attempting to convert it into a family appendage nor from applying to the prime minister to assist him in this design until Walpole, after enduring solicitations which fill a considerable portion of this volume, ' curst Harwich, and said it gave him more trouble than any other town in England. And here ', adds Lord Egmont, ' Sir Robert Walpole gave me up ', and another Whig family was added to the ranks of the opposition. R. R. Sedgwick. England in Transition (1789-1832), a Study of Movements. By William Law Mathieson, LL.D. (London : Longmans, 1920.) The changes effected in English political and social life between the out- break of the French Revolution and the parliamentary reform of 1832 derive a peculiar interest from their bearing on our own time, for much that is familiar to us in thought, feeling, and existing conditions either had its origin in those years or was in its earliest stages of development. These changes are related and discussed by Dr. Mathieson, and his treat- ment of them, though not presenting us with any newly discovered facts, nor perhaps containing any new theory, is thoughtful as well as readable, and deserves especial commendation for its invariably temperate tone. It is to be regretted that, with the exception of a notice of the anti-revolu- tionary tendency of romanticism, no attempt is made to exhibit the various relations between the movements it describes and contemporary poetry, but that is a subject which can scarcely be treated at once adequately and concisely, and Dr. Mathieson was doubtless anxious that his volume should not exceed its present moderate size. He arranges his matter on a chronological basis, dividing his period into successive sections, each with a character of its own, and treating separately the progress made during each of them. As with most essays on a period of history, the dates chosen as the limits of his work are open to criticism, for as he is chiefly concerned with changes affecting the mass of the people it may be objected that 1832 did not close a period in their history, and recognizing that he could not expound satisfactorily how England ' emerged from a survival of medieval conditions into the latest phase of modern life ' if he began at 1789, he exhibits in an introductory chapter, along with the causes of this transition, the extent to which it had advanced at the date of his allotted starting-point. After a summary of the principles underlying the demand for parliamentary reform in the first half of the reign of George III, he notes the various philanthropic efforts made by private persons from the beginning of the century to educate the children of the poor, and later to reform the prisons and put an end to the slave- trade. These efforts he attributes mainly to religious influence, High Church, Methodist, and Evangelical. So far he is doubtless right, but he should have said something about other influences, such as the high place assigned by public opinion to benevolence apart from any religious motive,
