2 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CHAP. 



the third George was conducted on constitutional lines 

 to a successful issue ; and the British nation, chastened 

 by the loss of her greatest colonies, and by long European 

 war, emerged from its conflicts unhurt, ready for all that 

 was to open before the world in the next age. 



Art and literature were subject in the eighteenth 

 century to a classical renaissance, and the love of beauty 

 found expression in set forms. Wit of an artificial kind 

 sparkled in conversation and in letters. But freedom 

 of thought and the light of science must lead sooner or 

 later to naturalism in the whole range of knowledge, 

 and ere the century closed this had begun to show itself 

 in art and even in literature. Nor must the strong and 

 stately English prose, of which Johnson was only the 

 chief amongst many masters, be forgotten. Religion 

 was traditional, theological, systematic, and, it must 

 be added, too often gloomy : the true Church slept 

 under forms and shows and a low standard of morals. 

 Men of independent thought were apt to cast off faith 

 entirely, or to take refuge in a vague Deism. But there 

 was always a leaven of faithful men and women better 

 than their churches : the nonconformists grew in 

 number ; and the great Wesleyan revival came as a 

 sorely needed stimulus to the dulled conscience of the 

 time. Influenced by a truer moral sense, many men 

 entered on social and philanthropic work towards the 

 end of the century, the era of Howard and of Wilberforce. 



The science and art of medicine shared to the full in 

 the changes which were going on in the eighteenth century. 

 The increase of knowledge, the emancipation of thought, 

 the rise of naturalism these helped to set medicine free 

 from the traditions of the past, and enabled her to build, 

 upon the sure foundation of anatomy and what we now 

 call physiology, a new science of medicine. Observation 

 and induction were the means by which she built, and 

 the dicta of the ancients came to take a lesser and lesser 

 place as the science grew. Authority and tradition, 

 revered through many ages, were slow to lose their hold, 

 but all through this epoch of time the work begun by 



