NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 447 



The aesthetic reaction, represented on the Continent by Chateau- 

 briand, Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England by Walter 

 Scott, Pugin, Rnskin, and, above all, by Wordsworth, came in to 

 give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who 

 led in this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which, in the pre- 

 vious century had been regarded by men of culture as mere bar- 

 baric masses of stone and mortar, to be masked without by classic 

 colonnades and within by rococo work in stucco and papier maclie, 

 became even more beloved than in the thirteenth century. Even 

 men who were repelled by theological disputations were fascinated 

 and made devoted reactionists by the newly revealed beauties of 

 mediaeval architecture and ritual.* 



The center and fortress of this vast system, and of the reaction 

 against the philosophy of the eighteenth century, was the Uni- 

 versity of Oxford. Orthodoxy was its vaunt, and a special expo- 

 nent of its spirit and object of its admiration was its member of 

 Parliament, Mr. William Ewart Gladstone, who, having begun 

 his political career by a labored plea for tbe union of church and 

 state, ended it by giving that union what is likely to be a death- 

 blow. The mob at the circus of Constantinople in the days of 

 the Byzantine emperors was not more wildly orthodox than the 

 mob of students at this foremost seat of learning of the Anglo- 

 Saxon race during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 

 A curious proof of this had been displayed just before the end of 

 that period. The minister of the United States at the Court of 

 St. James was then Edward Everett. He was undoubtedly the 

 most accomplished scholar and one of the foremost statesmen that 

 America had produced ; his eloquence in early life had made him 

 perhaps the most admired of American preachers ; his classical 

 learning had at a later period made him Professor of Greek &i 

 Harvard ; he had successfully edited the leading American review, 

 and had taken a high place in American literature ; he had been 

 ten years a member of Congress ; he had been again and again 

 elected Governor of Massachusetts ; and in all these posts he had 



* A very curious example of this insensibility of persons of really high culture is to be 

 found in American literature toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Adams, wife 

 of John Adams, afterward President of the United States, but at that time Minister to 

 England, one of the most gifted women of her time, speaking, in her very interesting 

 letters from England, of her journey to the seashore, refers to Canterbury Cathedral, seen 

 from her carriage windows, and which she evidently did not take the trouble to enter, as 

 " looking like a vast prison." So, too, about the same time, Thomas Jefferson, the Amer- 

 ican plenipotentiary in France, a devoted lover of classical and Renaissance architecture, 

 giving an account of his journey from Strasburg to Paris, never refers to any of the beautiful 

 cathedrals or churches upon his route. 



For the alloy of interested motives among English church dignitaries, see the pungent 

 criticism of Bishop Hampden by Canon Liddon, in his Life of Pusey, vol. i, p. 363. 



