370 THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 
tences of Milton sound almost foreign to our ears. The new prose 
‘style began with Dryden, was improved by the writers of the age of 
Anne, and perfected by Dr. Johnson. The thorough limpidity of 
which the new style is capable is, I believe, to a large extent due to 
the absence of enthusiams, to the material aims, and to the mainly 
matter-of-fact scientific discussions of the age in which it was formed. 
For it was not an age of brilliant scientific speculations, but rather 
‘one in which the mines discovered by preceding geniuses were worked, 
in which facts were collected, in short an age of considerable though 
not specially brilliant advances upon the past and anticipations of 
the future. 
The character of this period between 1660 and 1760 is the same 
throughout Western Europe as in England. It is the plain be- 
tween two mountain ranges, the pause between two pulsations of 
hnman progress. It was a period of intellectual ebb. There were 
undoubtedly great and active minds in all the cultivated European 
nations ; but the work which they performed consisted mainly in 
extending the application of the laws discovered by the men of the 
previous epoch and in accumulating new facts. But, though it was 
a period comparatively infertile in new ideas, it would be a mistake 
to consider it one of retrogression. It was rather a foundation- 
laying period, rather the period of the slow germination of the con- 
cealed grain. 
About the middle of the eighteenth century a change came over 
the intellectual life of Europe. A new race of writers and thinkers, 
more numerous than, and as active and able as any the world had 
ever seen, began to propound new views in every department of 
human enquiry. To the political thinkers of that age we owe the 
democratic impulse which within about a hundred years produced the 
American Revolution, the French Revolution, the change of the 
Spanish American Colonies into republics. the English Reform Bills, 
the movements of 1848, the freedom of Italy, the unification of 
Germany, the abolition of slavery, the great host of socialist move- 
ments, the establishment of systems of universal education. To the 
same movement operating in the moral and spiritual sphere, we owe 
the overthrow of the Jesuits, the weakening of the alliance between 
church and state everywhere, the emancipation of proscribed religious 
minorities, such as the Catholics in England and the Protestants in 
France, the great tendency to scepticism and atheism which has since 
