It was difficult for men to grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to victory.

Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride.

In the House of Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a new age has come.

It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.
So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single source, the French influence is the effective cause of change.

Voltaire and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw.
Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution, and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience.