But literature was now becoming
independent and self-sustaining: it needed to look no longer wistfully for
a monarch's smile: it cared comparatively little for the court: it issued
its periods and numbers directly to the English people: it wrote for them
and of them; and when, in 1830, the last of the Georges died, after an
ill-spent life, in which his personal pleasures had concerned him far more
than the welfare of his people, former prescriptions and prejudices
rapidly passed away; and the new epoch in general improvement and literary
culture, which had already begun its course, received a marvellous
impulsion.
The great movement, in part unconscious, from the artificial rhetoric of
the former age towards the simplicity of nature, was now to receive its
strongest propulsion: it was to be preached like a crusade; to be reduced
to a system, and set forth for the acceptance of the poetical world: it
was to meet with criticism, and even opprobrium, because it had the
arrogance to declare that old things had entirely passed away, and that
all things must conform themselves to the new doctrine.
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