choose twenty-eight of their number to sit in the new House of Lords, and one hundred representatives of the Irish boroughs and counties were to sit in the new House of Commons. The cross of St. Patrick was added to that of St. Andrew and St. George on the royal flag, and the country was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Unable to secure further reforms which Pitt had promised them, the Irish again rebelled in 1803, under the leadership of Robert Emmet. Mobs in Dublin and Ulster were dispersed with difficulty; but Emmet's uprising was imperfectly organized, and the Irish failed to act promptly and unitedly. Emmet was executed, and the rebellion was stamped out so effectually that Ireland remained quiet, though discontented, for many years. 555. Ex India In 1798 the government of India was intrusted to Richard Wellesley (later Marquis). Finding that French officers were intriguing with native princes and drilling their armies, Wellesley adopted the vigorous policy of deposing pansion in princes who seemed to be friendly to France, and substituting others who favored England. Over other states he established "protectorates "; in other words he assumed the right to control their relations with other powers, but left the native rulers in control of the local government. The most notable event of Wellesley's Indian career was his conquest of the Mahratta states in the region between the Dekkan and Delhi. Holkar and Scindia were the leading Mahratta chiefs, and in 1803 an expedition was dispatched against them from the south. In this expedition, resulting in victories at Assaye and elsewhere, Colonel Arthur Wellesley (brother of the Governor of India, and later Duke of Wellington) first proved the high quality of his soldiership. Two years later another army was sent toward Delhi from the north, along the Ganges valley. The two expeditions resulted in bringing the Grand Mogul under British influence, and in establishing a protectorate over much of the conquered territory. As a result of Wellesley's triumphs, "the Company were forced by irresistible facts to accept their position as rulers of half India, and suzerains of the rest." Tout, History of England, 1689-1890 The agitation of the times is reflected in the literature of the period. Robert Burns (1759-1796), the national poet of 556. Liter- Scotland, voiced it in his revolt against pride of birth (A man's a man for a' that !), his burning patriotism (Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled), and his sympathy ature: Burns, with the poor and downtrodden (The Cottar's Saturday Night). A similar spirit animated Samuel Coleridge (17721834), Robert Southey (1774-1843), and William Wordsworth (1770-1850) — called the "Lake Poets" because they lived in the lake region of Westmoreland. It was the revolutionary impulse that led Coleridge in early youth to suggest a communistic state (the Pantisocracy) to be founded "somewhere on the Susquehanna"; but his genius turned to the imaginative, and his finest works (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel) are purely romantic. Southey was associated with Coleridge in the Pantisocracy scheme, and his earlier poems (Wat Tyler, Joan of Arc) were revolutionary in tone; but he soon became an ardent Tory, and a hater of Napoleon, whose downfall he ridiculed in the spirited March to Moscow. Wordsworth was Southey's successor as poet-laureate. During a tour in France in 1791, he became fired with a passion for "liberty, equality, and fraternity"; but the fate of the French under Napoleon taught him that man's true happiness depends not on political liberty but on the freedom of his spirit from bigotry, luxury, and folly. His great poems are therefore those which set forth in simple but wonderfully beautiful language the value of "plain living and high thinking." His Ode on the Intimations of Immortality and his numerous sonnets depicting the beauties of nature are unsurpassed in English literature. 557. Wordsworth Less sane and less profound, but perhaps more brilliantly endowed, were the poets of twin genius, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821). While Keats 558. Shelley stopped his ears to the din of the present, and pondered and Keats only on the classic and romantic past (Endymion, St. Agnes' Eve, Ode to a Greek Urn), Shelley's unbalanced nature led him to revolt against religion and the social order in his Queen Mab, LORD BYRON. From the painting by P. Krämer. and in his own life as George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), showed his revolu- 559. Byron and Scott tionary temper by earned a place beside Scott as the creator of the modern romantic school of literature. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) has little in common with the revolutionary poets except a certain pervading note of the heroic; for his subjects are all drawn from the historic past. Beginning with a series of versified romances (Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, Lady of the Lake), he abandoned this vein as soon as Byron began to work it; and in 1814 published WALKER'S ENG. HIST.-29 Waverley, the first of a series of twenty-seven splendid novels. Around characters drawn from English, Scottish, and French history, he weaves a fascinating web of romance; and in the mary ABBOTTSFORD, THE HOME OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. lifelike portraiture of character, the blending of imagination with fact, and the power to re-create the past, he far excels all his imitators in the field of the historical novel. Every stratum of English social life felt the liberal impulse that caused the French Revolution, and suffered from the 560. Sum- imperial turn given to that impulse under Napoleon. In the minds of conservative men these events led to a distrust of change; in more sanguine spirits they caused an imperative demand for the abolition of long-standing abuses; among the lower classes they aroused discontent and lawlessNevertheless, conservatism through organized government proved strong enough to crush out all rebellion, to prevent ness. |