These reviews and
magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, became the _nuclei_
about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered. Political
controversy under the Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus
carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no longer so largely
by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like Swift's _Public Spirit
of the Allies_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_, and Burke's
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics by any means
usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science, the whole
circle of human effort and achievement passed under review.
_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies published stories,
poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which
enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.
Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the
English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one
communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter
half of the 18th century, and in particular with the writings of Goethe,
Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French
Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th
century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian
in the 16th and of the French in the 18th.
Pages:
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243