The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham.

The torpor slowly passes.
The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly.

If the French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would have been a supreme achievement.
II The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757.

John Brown's _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_ is largely forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was at once translated into French.

Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of comment upon the _Characteristics_ of Shaftesbury.