1759-60 CLIVE AND COOTE. 477 XXVII. brilliant daring of Clive's achievements, and from this time he CHAP. had spared no pains in furnishing reinforcements. The French, on the other hand, were active in increasing their naval force in the Indian seas, and Count d'Aché, having been joined in the Isle of France by three ships of the line, appeared at the end of August, 1759, off the Coromandel coasts with a fleet of eleven ships. Pocock was awaiting him with nine small ships of the line, his force being inferior by 192 guns and 2,365 men. The battle of September 10, off Tranquebar, though bloody, was indecisive, but it was followed by the final retreat of D'Aché, leaving Pocock master of the sea and the French in India hopeless of help. The ill success of Lally served to increase the discords and difficulties of the French army. His native soldiers shewed themselves ready to desert, and their example infected even his regular troops. Taking advantage of this, Eyre Coote on November 30 attacked the important fortress of Wandiwash, which surrendered after a few days' siege. In an attempt to recover it Lally sustained a crushing defeat by Coote on January 22, 1760. Bussy, Lally's principal officer, was taken prisoner. The battle of Wandiwash decided the fate of the Carnatic and thereby of India. cherry was soon the last place of importance left to the French. An iron ring closed round the city; supplies had run out. Nothing remained but surrender. On January 16, 1761, Pondicherry was surrendered to Coote. In the following month the French possessions on the west coast followed, and the French power was expelled from India. Pondi On October 25, 1760, ere the surrender of Pondicherry had sealed the transfer of India to the British, George II. died suddenly at Kensington, of rupture of the ventricle of the heart, at the age of seventy-seven. His end came at a dramatic moment, tidings of victories, successive as the news of Job's misfortunes, casting a parting glory upon his life. On September 22, Admiral Pocock, who had driven the French from the Indian coasts, anchored in the Downs, bringing with him the news of the decisive battle of Wandiwash. Nine days before the king died, the lord mayor and corporation presented him an address of congratulation on the completion of the conquest of Canada. Saunders in the new world, Boscawen in the Mediterranean, and Hawke in the Channel were masters of the sea. Success XXVII. CHAP. so brilliant extinguished such unpopularity in the nation at large as may have been entailed on the king by his Hanoverian leanings. The public recognised, as did those nearest to him, like Lord Waldegrave, that, despite his prejudice in favour of the absolute government to which till past the age of thirty he had been accustomed, he remained in practice steadily faithful to the limitations imposed upon him by the British constitution. He offered, it is true, an obstinate resistance where his personal dislikes were aroused, as to the admission of Pitt to cabinet office; but when Hanover was not in peril, he was free from a disposition, like that of Anne and Louis XV., to intrigue against his own ministers. What he surrendered in initiative he gained in influence, and the relations of the sovereign to the ministry were, at the close of his reign, nearer those obtaining under Queen Victoria than was the case with his grandson and successor. The effectiveness of the influence which, while abstaining from insistence on prerogative, he contrived to exercise, is illustrated by the concessions of Pitt to his Hanoverian policy. When George II. died the secular struggle between the crown and a political party seemed, with the extinction of Jacobitism, to have been laid at rest. CHAPTER XXVIII. LITERATURE AND MANNERS. THE Revolution stirred the national life in all departments. CHAP. It impressed a political stamp upon social and literary activity XXVIII. during the two generations following it, so that the parties of poets and philosophers were as well known as those of their patrons. At the death of William III. freedom of discussion reigned in the coffee-house and the club, and a spirit of reform had begun to test social and literary traditions. The reign of Anne, during which this renascence acquired a marked extension, was a brilliant period of the Augustan age of English literature. It was, indeed, the achievement of Addison to found a school of taste upon classical models; but the developement of his literary form by poets and essayists submissive to his canons continued throughout the reigns so dissociated in popular thought from literary distinction as those of Anne's two successors. While Addison gave literature its form, John Locke, who died in 1704, inspired its spirit. He exercised over the thinkers. of the first half of the eighteenth century much the same influence that Darwin and Herbert Spencer exercised over those of the end of the nineteenth. His "common sense philosophy" was applied to social and literary questions as widely as the doctrine of evolution is now. It was reinforced in the purely literary sphere by classicism, which aimed at realising the doctrine of Boileau, the critic most in vogue, Tout doit tendre au bon sens. The kernel of Locke's philosophy -that all our knowledge is derived from experience-fitted in also with the active investigation of natural phenomena which marked what Whewell calls "the inductive epoch of Newton". John Flamsteed, the first astronomer-royal (d. 1719), Edmund XXVIII. CHAP. Halley (d, 1742), the student of tides, comets, and eclipses, James Bradley (d. 1762), the discoverer of the nutation of the earth's axis, above all, Sir Isaac Newton himself (d. 1727), gave England the leading place in astronomical science. In the region of pure speculation Locke held the field in the sense that subsequent philosophic thought was either in developement of, or antagonism to his system. Bishop Berkeley (d. 1753) inferred from Locke's doctrine of "ideas" the nonexistence of "matter," while David Hume (d. 1776) carried destructive analysis a step further by attacking the substantial existence of mind. David Hartley, in his Observations on Man (1749), first brought into prominence the part played by the law of association in mental processes. In moral philosophy Locke was, to employ a later designation, a utilitarian, while Bishop Butler (d. 1752), the author of The Analogy, opposed Locke's negation of " innate ideas" by assigning “conscience" as the innate principle of authority. In The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits, Bernard Mandeville (d. 1733), in a series of cynical paradoxes, attacked Locke's doctrine that "God has by an inseparable connexion joined Virtue and Public Happiness together". Vehement condemnations followed, alike from critics such as John Dennis, the dramatist (d. 1734), theologians, as William Law, and moralists, as Francis Hutcheson (d. 1747), whose System of Moral Philosophy borrowed its doctrine of the "moral sense" from the school of Shaftesbury. David Hume, whose Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals was published in 1751, introduced "the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects". The theologians, like the philosophers, derived from Locke. "The reasonableness of Christianity," upon which he wrote a treatise, was the key-word of the orthodox preachers of the school of Tillotson. On the other hand, Locke rated Church authority but lightly, and was nebulous or reticent upon dogma. In this he was followed by Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor and afterwards of Winchester," the object," says Gibbon, "of Whig idolatry and Tory abhorrence," but unquestionably the most prominent prelate of his time. The Bangorian Controversy, in which Hoadly minimised ecclesiastical authority, and A Plain Account of the Lord's Supper, in which he rationalised the Christian mysteries, convulsed religious England. His THEOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES. 481 chief opponent was William Law (d. 1761), the author of The CHAP. Serious Call (1728), a non-juror and a mystical high church- XXVIII. man. Another school of thought, that of the Deists, which flourished during the first half of the eighteenth century, was traced by friends and foes alike to Locke's writings. The earliest of the school, John Toland, an Irishman, published in 1696, the year after Locke's treatise on the Reasonableness of Christianity, a book, Christianity not Mysterious, which Bishop Stillingfleet declared to be a legitimate deduction from Locke's premisses. A friend of Locke, Anthony Collins, published in 1712 a Discourse on Freethinking, which provoked a satirical tract from Swift, and argumentative answers from Whiston, Berkeley, and Richard Bentley, the last under the name of "Phileleutherus Lipsiensis". A fresh controversy arose upon his publication in 1724 of A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, in which Thomas Sherlock, afterwards Bishop of London, Zachary Pearce, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and Samuel Clarke, the metaphysician and a friend of Queen Caroline, were Collins's opponents. Another Deist, of a family intimate with Locke, was Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose Characteristicks appeared in 1713. Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, published in 1730, proposed as the constructive substitute offered by Deism for popular Christianity "the religion of nature". This book produced a hundred and fifteen answers, the most notable of which was the Defence of Revealed Religion (1732), by John Conybeare, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, pronounced by Bishop Warburton to be one of the best reasoned books in the world. To the school of Deistical thinkers belonged Bolingbroke (d. 1751), though his Philosophical Works were not published till 1754. "He was," said Dr. Johnson, "a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality, and a coward because he had no resolution to fire it off himself." After the appearance of Tindal's book the controversy declined, but not before it had given birth to three apologetic works, of which one is read and the others remembered to the present day. Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732), by George Berkeley, the metaphysician, afterwards Bishop of Cloyne, was a satirical polemic against Deism in general. The Analogy |