The Victorian Age began in rancour and turmoil. This is an element which we must not overlook, although it was in a measure superficial. A series of storms, rattling and recurrent tempests of thunder and lightning, swept over public opinion, which had been so calm under George IV. and so dull under William IV. Nothing could exceed the discord of vituperation, the Hebraism of Carlyle denouncing the Vaticanism of Wiseman, "Free Kirk and other rubbish" pitted against "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic spectralities." This theological tension marks the first twenty years and then slowly dies down, after the passion expended over _Essays and Reviews_. It was in 1840 that we find Macaulay, anxious to start a scheme of Whig reform and to cut a respectable figure as Secretary of State for War, unable to get to business because of the stumbling-block of religious controversy. Everything in heaven and earth was turned into "a theological treatise," and all that people cared about was "the nature of the sacraments, the operation of holy orders, the visibility of the Church and baptismal regeneration." The sitting member goes down to Edinburgh to talk to his constituents about Corn Laws and Sugar Duties and the Eastern Question; he is met by "a din" of such objections as "Yes, Mr. Macaulay, that is all very well for a statesman, but what becomes of the headship of our Lord Jesus Christ?" If the Victorian Age opened in a tempest of theology, it was only natural that it should cultivate a withering disdain for those who had attempted to reform society on a non-theological basis. In sharp contradistinction to the indulgence of the Georgian period for philosophic speculation, England's interest in which not even her long continental wars had been able to quench, we find with the accession of Victoria the credit of the French thinkers almost abruptly falling. Voltaire, never very popular in England, becomes "as mischievous a monkey as any of them"; the enthusiasm for Rousseau, which had reached extravagant proportions, completely disappears, and he is merely the slanderous sceptic, who, after soaking other people's waistcoats with his tears, sent his own babies to the Foundling Hospital. The influence of the French eighteenth-century literature on the mind of England was first combated and then baldly denied. The premier journalist of the age declared, with the satisfaction of a turkey-cock strutting round his yard, that no trace of the lowest level of what could be called popularity remained in England to the writers of France, and he felt himself "entitled to treat as an imbecile conceit the pretence" that a French school of thought survived in Great Britain. Such was the Podsnappery of the hour in its vigilance against moral and religious taint.