Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/14

 2 THE ANCESTOR the power of unbridled criticism in affairs political, which were not theirs. In all countries great political movements must of necessity alter the conditions of social life, and it may safely be said that the French Revolution and its immediate results influenced social life in England far more than is generally supposed. The close of the eighteenth century saw England involved in an almost deadly struggle for existence — ifor out of the ashes of France's fallen monarchy there had arisen a foe in the person of Napoleon Buonaparte — than whom England has never had one more determined for her overthrow. War, it is said, is good for the internal life of a nation, and it must be admitted that the wars which we waged with Napoleon brought about very real and lasting changes in our system of political thought, in our society, and roused us as a people from our national lethargy. The reader may ask what has this diversion to do with the stated object of this paper : to which the answer is — that the last part of the eighteenth century must be considered to have been the close of one of the most interesting epochs in the domestic, social and literary history of our country, and as such deserves our special attention. Just as the great Con- stitutional Revolution of 1688 marks the time when the life of the Court ceased to be the life of the nation — so the opening of the nineteenth century announced that the rule of a proud aristocracy and of corrupt municipalities was at an end — hence- forth the people must not be forgotten. Whether it was for the better or the worse it is not the object of this paper to try and demonstrate. The lives and letters of the members of the Harris family illustrate very fairly well for us the state of things alluded to in the foregoing paragraphs ; they give us a perfectly natural and unfringed account of events social, literary and political, which fill the pages of subsequently-written histories, bio- graphies and other works of a retrospective character, and which are only too often marred by the personal bias of the author. The more important members of the Harris family who flourished during the latter half of the eighteenth century, their immediate relations and friends, were all either Members of Parliament, public servants or men of the world ; they were likewise imbued with strong social, literary and musical tastes,