The leaders of the neo-Catholic movement very properly shuddered at a century which whitewashed its churches and thought even monthly communions affected. The ardent Liberal could not but despise a century which did without the franchise, and, despite the most splendid materials, had no Financial Reform Almanack. The sentimental Tory found little to please him in the House of Hanover and Whig domination. The lovers of poetry, with Shelley in their ears and Wordsworth at their hearts, made merry with the trim muses of Queen Anne, with their sham pastorals, their dilapidated classicism, and still more with their town- bred descriptions of the country, with its purling brooks and nodding groves, and, hanging over all, the moon--not Shelley's 'orbed maiden,' but 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, on all hands, the poor century was weighed in a hundred different balances and found wanting. It lacked inspiration, unction, and generally all those things for which it was thought certain the twentieth century would commend us. But we do not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom, are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal _Defence of the Eighteenth Century_, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr. Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson and Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles on the very verge of completion a splendid and long-laboured edition of the poems and letters of the great poet of the eighteenth century, the abstract and brief chronicle of his time, a man who had some of its virtues and most of its vices, one whom it is easy to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander Pope.