CHAPTER IX
INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL PROGRESS
Robert Southey
"Man doth not live by bread alone." The enormous material progress of this country during the last sixty years—imperfectly indicated by the fact that during the last forty years the taxable income of the United Kingdom has been considerably more than doubled—would be but a barren theme of rejoicing, if there were signs among us of intellectual or spiritual degeneracy. The great periods of English history have been always fruitful in great thinkers and great writers, in religious and mental activity. Endeavouring to judge our own period by this standard, and making a swift survey of its achievements in literature, we do not find it apparently inferior to the splendours of "great Elizabeth" or of the Augustan age of Anne. Our fifth Queen-regnant, whose reign, longer than that of any of her four predecessors, is also happier than that of the greatest among them, can reckon among her subjects an even larger number of men eminent in all departments of knowledge, though perhaps we cannot boast one name quite equal to Newton in science, and though assuredly neither this nor any modern nation has yet a second imaginative writer whose throne may be set beside that of Shakespeare.
William Wordsworth
