When peace came to Europe in 1815, the English discovered
the Continent once more. For twenty years, with scarcely a
break, they had been shut up in their island, cut off from the
refreshment of Continental experience and ideas. When peace
came, they flocked abroad to see what they had been missing.
'Everything was new and fresh', writes Haydon, who was
among the first to visit Paris. 'We had thought of France from
youth as forbidden ground, as the abode of the enemies of our
country. It was extraordinary. They absolutely had houses,
churches, streets, fields and children!' We had suffered some-
what from intellectual inbreeding and were surfeited by in-
sularity. Fortunately, and perhaps as the obverse of our
isolation, we possessed an extremely vigorous tradition of native
intelligence. The two great seminal minds of the age (the
phrase was coined by John Stuart Mill in 1838) were both
deeply impregnated by European ideas: Jeremy Bentham by
Gallic empiricism, S. T. Coleridge by German idealism: yet
both carried on vigorous native traditions at the same time --
Bentham and his disciples that of Locke, and Coleridge that of the
seventeenth-century English Platonists.

In literature, as in philosophy, and especially in poetry,
England led the world from her own sources of both inspiration
and achievement. She had created and sustained the novel
almost single-handed, and it was within the short span of the
Regency that two of its greatest exponents, Walter Scott and

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