5. The Eighteenth Centry: From 1700

5. The Eighteenth Centry: From 1700 to 1800 it was age of confidence, namely, human beings believed in their exalted enthusiasm, the capacity of understanding and expressing the cause and effect and also of creating arts, tradition and articles. To the political background, The glorious Revolution replaced the despotism of the Stuarts by a measure of the Rule of Law. The most injurious feature of reign of William and Mary was the struggle with France and got the leagacy of European wars that it bequeathed to Queen Anne, leading to the war of Spanish succession [ 1702-1714] Wiliam entered into a European alliance to counter the inordinate territorial ambitions of Louis XIV. Im 1710 the Whig fell. A general election in the same year gave the Tories a large majority. To the religious background, it was a triangular contest among the Papists, the puritans and the Anglicans. A churchman in the eyes of a Methodist or freethinker was a Laodicean or wrong doer while a Methodist in the eyes of a churchmah or free-thinker was fantic and a free-thinker in the eyes of a Methodist was a coxcomb; so Swift commented ''We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.''To the social background, this period was marked by a great increase in trade and commerce and the rise of the prosperous middle class. Coffee-houses had become the centres of social life during the reign of Charles ll but during that of Queen Anne were nearly five hundred and places for conducting business. neo-classicism-restraint, rationality, rationality, the emphasis on aform, and a distrust of emotion and exuberance. In this period poetry came very near prose, since it pursued an aim very much similar. Both in poetry and prose it was an age peculiarity suited to the flourishing of satire. One of the factors responsible for it was the close connection between politics and literature. In this period important poets were Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, whose works were novels in a description of the middle class and low class'slives.