It is impossible in the short space that is left to us to do justice to that extraordinary interlude in England’s literary and social history—the eighteenth century. The age of powder and platitudes, of _charmers_ with automatically heaving bosoms, ogling and simpering at their corseted _swains_; the age of ugly shaven heads secretly perspiring under fashionable periwigs; the age when country gentlemen erected artificial “ruins” at the bottom of their gardens, and serious poets could hardly mention the sea without adding a reference to the _finny drove_—this age seems to us now to have faded away as suddenly and inexplicably as it arose, leaving only the faintest traces upon our language. Those half-hidden vestiges, however—the just slightly different shades of meaning with which sundry familiar words were used a hundred and fifty years ago—sometimes seem to fascinate us by the very paradox of their proximity and elusiveness. We feel that, if we could only bring them out in some way, we might take from them the very form and pressure of the age. And so, when we come across some particularly popular word like _reason_ in eighteenth-century literature, we are sometimes tempted to lay down the book, while imagination goes groping vainly round the impenetrable fringe of that mysterious no-man’s-land which lies between words and their meanings. If we would seek for the genesis of the curious clockwork cosmos through which the minds and imaginations of the period seem to have moved with a measure of contentment, we should find it, perhaps, not so very far back in the past. Emotionally, the age was still dominated by a pronounced reaction against religious fanaticism—an attitude we see reflected in the changeable meaning of _enthusiasm_, which in Plato’s Greek meant ‘possessed by a god’. Spenser uses it in its Greek form in a good sense, but by the end of the seventeenth century we find Henry More writing: “If ever Christianity be exterminated, it will be by enthusiasm”; and even as late as 1830 a certain zealous, if dogmatic, Churchman thought it worth while to write and publish a _Natural History of Enthusiasm_, in which that dreadful vice, especially in its theological aspect, is castigated with much vigour. _Fanatic_, which had also meant ‘possessed by a god or demon,’ underwent the same change of meaning and gave birth to _fanaticism_ about the middle of the seventeenth century. _Extravagant_, which had formerly meant ‘non-codified’, got its new meaning and produced _extravagance_. And the way in which the word _Gothic_ was used to describe anything barbarous and uncouth reminds us of how the eighteenth century perceived barbarity and uncouthness in many places where we no longer see it—such as medieval architecture, much of which was pulled down at this time and replaced by buildings which were felt to be more “correct” and classical.