FORE:The effect of the issue upon the state of parties in England was tremendous. The Morning Chronicle, then the organ of the Whig party, said, "The battle of English liberty has really been fought and won at Paris." The Times thundered the great fact with startling reverberation throughout the United Kingdom. Mr. Brougham in the House of Commons spoke of it as that revolution which in his conscience he believed to be "the most glorious" in the annals of mankind, and he expressed his heartfelt admiration, his cordial gratitude, to the patriots of that great nation for the illustrious struggle they were making. This language expresses the feelings which prevailed through all classes of the people of Britain, and it may be easily supposed that the effect was most favourable to the Liberal party and most damaging to the Tories, especially as the exciting events occurred at the time of the general election; and Prince de Polignac being considered the particular friend of the Duke of Wellington, his Ministry was called in France the Wellington Administration. All these things were against the Premier: the hostility of the anti-Catholic party, the alienation of the Whigs, the accession of a liberal monarch, and the odium of the supposed intimate relationship with the vanquished despotism of France.
FORE:It is a curious fact, that whilst Cowper was haunted by the most agonising terrors of a nervous temperament, even to despair, his poetry breathes the most consolatory tone. Whilst his mind was often wandering in insanity, there is no composition so sane and so sound in intellectual substance as his. Though seldom indulging in high flights of imagination, yet his verse frequently rises into a richness and nobility of voice nearly equal to the prophetic. The "Lines on his Mother's Picture" exhibit the deep feeling of Cowper, and the ballad of "John Gilpin" the genuine mirth which often bubbled up in a heart so racked and tried with melancholy.
ONE:NIAGARA FALLS.Mention must be made of the extraordinary calculating machines of Charles Babbage. A few years after leaving college he originated the plan of a machine for calculating tables, by means of successive orders of differences, and having received for it, in 1822 and the following year, the support of the Astronomical and Royal Societies, and a grant of money from Government, he proceeded to its execution. He also in 1834 contrived a machine called the "analytical engine," extending the plan so as to develop algebraic quantities, and to tabulate the numerical value of complicated functions, when one or more of the variables which they contain are made to alter their values; but the difficulties of carrying out this plan became insurmountable. In 1839 Babbage resigned the professorship of mathematics in the University of Cambridge. He died at the end of 1871, having devoted his life to the study and advancement of science.
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THREE:Matthew Prior had a high reputation in his day as a poet, but his poetry has little to recommend it now. He was the more popular as a poet, no doubt, because he was much employed as a diplomatist in Queen Anne's reign by the Tory party. His "City and Country Mouse," written in conjunction with Lord Halifax, in ridicule of Dryden's "Hind and Panther," may be considered as one of his happiest efforts.Amongst the foremost of the promoters of science, and the most eloquent of its expounders, was Sir David Brewster, who died full of years and of honours in 1868. Arrived at manhood at the opening of the present century, having been born in 1781, he continued his brilliant course during fifty years, pursuing his investigations into the laws of polarisation by crystals, and by the reflection, refraction, and absorption of light, in which he made important discoveries. The attention of the British public was forcibly arrested by an able treatise on "Light," contributed by Sir John Herschel, in 1827, to the "Encyclop?dia Metropolitana." Its excellent method and lucid explanations attracted to the theory of Young and Fresnel men of science who had been deterred by the fragmentary and abstruse style of the former. This was followed four years later by a most able and precise mathematical exposition of the theory, and its application to optical problems, by Professor Airy, who became Astronomer-Royal in 1835.
FORE:
In this uneasy state of things Austria very unnecessarily put the match to the political train, and threw the whole of the south of Europe again into war. Don Joseph Molina, the Spanish Ambassador at Rome, being appointed Inquisitor-General at Spain, commenced his journey homewards, furnished with a passport from the Pope, and an assurance of safety from the Imperial Minister. Yet, notwithstanding this, he was perfidiously arrested by the Austrian authorities and secured in the citadel of Milan. The gross insult to Spain, and equally gross breach of faith, so exasperated the King and Queen of Spain that they would listen to nothing but war. The earnest expostulations of Alberoni, delivered in the form of a powerful memorial, were rejected, and he was compelled to abandon the cherished hopes of peaceful improvement and make the most active preparations for war.George and his soldiers, however, lost no atom of heart; they determined to cut a way through the enemy or die on the ground; and luckily at this moment the enemy committed almost as great an error as Stair had done. Noailles quitted his post in front of the king's army, and crossed the Main bridge to give some further orders on that side; and no sooner did he depart than his nephew, De Gramont, eager to seize the glory of defeating the English, and not aware that the whole British army was at that moment about to bear down upon him, ordered his troops to cross the ravine in their front, and assault the English on their own side. The order was executed, and had instantly the unforeseen effect of silencing their own batteries on the other side of the river, for, by this movement, the French came directly between their fire and the English, which it had been till that moment mercilessly mowing down.The literature of this period is more distinguished for learning and cleverness than for genius. There are a few names that rise above the smartness and mere accomplishment of the time into the regions of pure genius; but, with very few exceptions, even they bear the stamp of the period. We have here no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Herbert, no Herrick even, to produce; but De Foe, Addison, Steele, Thomson, and Pope, if they do not lift us to the highest creative plane, give us glimpses and traits of what is found there. For the rest, however full of power, there hangs a tone of "town," of a vicious and sordid era, about them, of an artificial and by no means refined life, a flavour of the grovelling of the politics which distinguished the period, and of the low views and feelings which occupied and surrounded the throne during the greater portion of this term.
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