***** EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND ELEVEN, A POEM. BY ANNA LÆTITIA BARBAULD.
LONDON: PRINTED FOR J. JOHNSON AND CO., ST. PAUL'S CHURCHYARD. 1812. PRINTED BY RICHARD TAYLOR AND CO., SHOE LANE.
STILL the loud death drum, thundering from afar, O'er the vext nations pours the storm of war: To the stern call still Britain bends her ear, Feeds the fierce strife, the alternate hope and fear; Bravely, though vainly, dares to strive with Fate, And seeks by turns to prop each sinking state. Colossal Power with overwhelming force Bears down each fort of Freedom in its course; Prostrate she lies beneath the Despot's sway, While the hushed nations curse him--and obey.
Bounteous in vain, with frantic man at strife, Glad Nature pours the means--the joys of life; In vain with orange blossoms scents the gale, The hills with olives clothes, with corn the vale; Man calls to Famine, nor invokes in vain, Disease and Rapine follow in her train; The tramp of marching hosts disturbs the plough, The sword, not sickle, reaps the harvest now, And where the Soldier gleans the scant supply, The helpless Peasant but retires to die; No laws his hut from licensed outrage shield, And war's least horror is the ensanguined field.
Fruitful in vain, the matron counts with pride The blooming youths that grace her honoured side; No son returns to press her widow'd hand, Her fallen blossoms strew a foreign strand. --Fruitful in vain, she boasts her virgin race, Whom cultured arts adorn and gentlest grace; Defrauded of its homage, Beauty mourns, And the rose withers on its virgin thorns. Frequent, some stream obscure, some uncouth name By deeds of blood is lifted into fame; Oft o'er the daily page some soft-one bends To learn the fate of husband, brothers, friends, Or the spread map with anxious eye explores, Its dotted boundaries and penciled shores, Asks where the spot that wrecked her bliss is found, And learns its name but to detest the sound.
And thinks't thou, Britain, still to sit at ease, An island Queen amidst thy subject seas, While the vext billows, in their distant roar, But soothe thy slumbers, and but kiss thy shore? To sport in wars, while danger keeps aloof, Thy grassy turf unbruised by hostile hoof? So sing thy flatterers; but, Britain, know, Thou who hast shared the guilt must share the woe. Nor distant is the hour; low murmurs spread, And whispered fears, creating what they dread; Ruin, as with an earthquake shock, is here, There, the heart-witherings of unuttered fear, And that sad death, whence most affection bleeds, Which sickness, only of the soul, precedes. Thy baseless wealth dissolves in air away, Like mists that melt before the morning ray: No more on crowded mart or busy street Friends, meeting friends, with cheerful hurry greet; Sad, on the ground thy princely merchants bend Their altered looks, and evil days portend, And fold their arms, and watch with anxious breast The tempest blackening in the distant West.
Yes, thou must droop; thy Midas dream is o'er; The golden tide of Commerce leaves thy shore, Leaves thee to prove the alternate ills that haunt Enfeebling Luxury and ghastly Want; Leaves thee, perhaps, to visit distant lands, And deal the gifts of Heaven with equal hands....
<http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/English/BWRP/Works/BarbAEight.htm> *****
***** ...[T]he storming of the Bastille in 1789 divided the nation: more radical Britons (such as Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Coleridge) looked to the French Revolution hopefully and favored similar republican revolutions at home, while others -- most notably Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) -- were more skeptical. Britain finally and reluctantly declared war on Revolutionary France in 1793, when the Terror had begun and France threatened to invade Holland.
Far from reducing the popular political discontent of the 1780s, though, the wars with France exacerbated it. In the early 1790s, calls for manhood suffrage and annual elections were common in pro-French circles, which had begun to form radical Jacobin societies. Pitt's counter-revolutionary government subjected these corresponding societies to considerable suppression, and by 1795 they ceased to meet. But political discontent was simply forced to go underground.
Things were going badly at home and little better abroad. The Irish Rising of 1798 was a reminder of how precarious Britain's colonial possessions could be. And there was the ever-present threat of a French invasion. Apart from the Battle of the Nile (1798), Britain had scored few important victories against France. The country was forced to assemble a militia, which at one time encompassed perhaps as much as a quarter of the adult male population. A series of coalitions with Russia, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Portugal, Siciliy, Austria, and Prussia produced mixed results but no definitive solution. A short-lived treaty with France (1802) seemed to promise peace, but held for less than a year; by 1803, the two countries were at war again. And the wars were extremely costly: Britain spent over a billion pounds, and in 1797, the Bank of England nearly declared bankruptcy, suspending all cash payments.
The middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century marked a watershed. In 1805, Admiral Nelson defeated the French and Spanish at Trafalgar, significantly reducing the danger of a foreign invasion. And when Spain rejected French rule in 1809, the tide began to turn against France. The Napoleonic Wars came to an end with the Battle of Waterloo (1815), when Napoleon was finally defeated.
In spite of the victory, the Napoleonic Wars left Britain deeply in debt and in a serious economic depression. New wealth was badly needed, and Britain looked to its growing empire, which was becoming the most important source of British income. The India Act of 1784, for example, increased British rule in India, and Captain Cook's explorations in the South Seas led to the colonization of Australia. (Another sign of Britain's management of its one-time colonies is the Act of Union of 1801 joined Great Britain with Ireland to form the United Kingdom.) This tremendous success in acquiring territory, from the Seven Years War through the Napoleonic Wars, produced a population of roughly 200 million people in British-ruled territories in 1820, more than a quarter of the world's population....
<http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/Frank/Places/england.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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