The advance of a nation in numbers and civilization is accompanied by so great a complexity of social conditions that in this volume it is possible only to attempt to seize such salient characteristics of the eighteenth century as may serve to throw light on the course of English fiction. No age presents a more prosaic aspect. If we consider the condition of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the prevalence of abuses and corruption left by the ignorance or vice of preceding years, and reflect at the same time upon the progressive nature of the people, the practical habit of their minds, and the moral earnestness which they never wholly lost, it is not surprising to find that the century is one of reforms. Population and wealth had outgrown the laws and customs which had hitherto served for their control, and though in the earlier part of the period we find corruption in public and private life, indifference in religion, inadequate provision for the education of the young, gross abuses in jurisprudence, and coarseness of action and taste throughout the social system, there is also perceptible a solid foundation of good-sense and an earnest desire for improvement, which gradually, as the century wore on, introduced one reform after another, until many of those benefits were attained or made possible which the present century almost unconsciously enjoys. We should lose one of the most instructive lessons which history can afford, if, with Carlyle, we should allow the eighteenth century to lie "massed up in our minds as a disastrous, wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon,"[90] The England of that century was modern England, but modern England, burdened with a heritage of corruption and ignorance which it is the glory of the time to have in large part discarded. It was a time of social and material progress, and it was also the period of the growth and perfection of English fiction. To thoroughly understand the one, we must be acquainted with the other, and it will be the object of the two following chapters to trace the development of the English novel in connection with that national development of which it will be shown to be in great measure the exponent.