CHAPTER IX

of the country, its sole reality a mere personal sentiment, not at all burdensome to the 121 practical business of life; the embers of the absolutist re-action on the point of extinction, and swept off easily and even lazily when they make a show of being dangerous; the nobility a mere titled upper order of the bourgeoisie; the country prosperous, gaining on French and on Dutch in America and India, and beginning to found its colonial and foreign markets, and its navy fast becoming paramount on all seas; the working classes better off than at any time since the fifteenth century, but hopeless, dull, neither adventurous nor intellectual; Art, if not actually dead, represented by a Court painter or so of ugly ladies and stupid gentlemen (Sir Joshua the king of the said painters); a literature produced by a few word-spinning essayists and prosaic versifiers, like Addison and Pope, priding themselves on a well-bred contempt for whatever was manly or passionate or elevating in the past of their own language; while their devotion to the classical times, derived from the genuine and powerful enthusiasm of the Renaissance, had sunk to nothing but a genteel habit of expression.