370 the president's 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 pi-ogress. 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 



