Public carriages had recently been much improved. During the years which

immediately followed the Restoration, a diligence ran between London and

Oxford in two days. The passengers slept at Beaconsfield. At length, in

the spring of 1669, a great and daring innovation was attempted. It was

announced that a vehicle, described as the Flying Coach, would perform

the whole journey between sunrise and sunset. This spirited undertaking

was solemnly considered and sanctioned by the Heads of the University,

and appears to have excited the same sort of interest which is excited

in our own time by the opening of a new railway. The Vicechancellor, by

a notice affixed in all public places, prescribed the hour and place

of departure. The success of the experiment was complete. At six in the

morning the carriage began to move from before the ancient front of All

Souls College; and at seven in the evening the adventurous gentlemen

who had run the first risk were safely deposited at their inn in London.

[147] The emulation of the sister University was moved; and soon a

diligence was set up which in one day carried passengers from Cambridge

to the capital. At the close of the reign of Charles the Second flying

carriages ran thrice a week from London to the chief towns. But no stage

coach, indeed no stage waggon, appears to have proceeded further north

than York, or further west than Exeter. The ordinary day's journey of

a flying coach was about fifty miles in the summer; but in winter, when

the ways were bad and the nights long, little more than thirty. The

Chester coach, the York coach, and the Exeter coach generally reached

London in four days during the fine season, but at Christmas not till

the sixth day. The passengers, six in number, were all seated in the

carriage. For accidents were so frequent that it would have been

most perilous to mount the roof. The ordinary fare was about twopence

halfpenny a mile in summer, and somewhat more in winter. [148]

This mode of travelling, which by Englishmen of the present day would be

regarded as insufferably slow, seemed to our ancestors wonderfully and

indeed alarmingly rapid. In a work published a few months before the

death of Charles the Second, the flying coaches are extolled as far

superior to any similar vehicles ever known in the world. Their velocity

is the subject of special commendation, and is triumphantly contrasted

with the sluggish pace of the continental posts. But with boasts like

these was mingled the sound of complaint and invective. The interests of

large classes had been unfavourably affected by the establishment of the

new diligences; and, as usual, many persons were, from mere stupidity

and obstinacy, disposed to clamour against the innovation, simply

because it was an innovation. It was vehemently argued that this mode of

conveyance would be fatal to the breed of horses and to the noble art of

horsemanship; that the Thames, which had long been an important nursery

of seamen, would cease to be the chief thoroughfare from London up to

Windsor and down to Gravesend; that saddlers and spurriers would be

ruined by hundreds; that numerous inns, at which mounted travellers had

been in the habit of stopping, would be deserted, and would no longer

pay any rent; that the new carriages were too hot in summer and too cold

in winter; that the passengers were grievously annoyed by invalids and

crying children; that the coach sometimes reached the inn so late that

it was impossible to get supper, and sometimes started so early that

it was impossible to get breakfast. On these grounds it was gravely

recommended that no public coach should be permitted to have more than

four horses, to start oftener than once a week, or to go more than

thirty miles a day. It was hoped that, if this regulation were adopted,

all except the sick and the lame would return to the old mode of

travelling. Petitions embodying such opinions as these were presented to

the King in council from several companies of the City of London, from

several provincial towns, and from the justices of several counties. We

Smile at these things. It is not impossible that our descendants,

when they read the history of the opposition offered by cupidity and

prejudice to the improvements of the nineteenth century, may smile in

their turn. [149]

In spite of the attractions of the flying coaches, it was still usual

for men who enjoyed health and vigour, and who were not encumbered by

much baggage, to perform long journeys on horseback. If the traveller

wished to move expeditiously he rode post. Fresh saddle horses and

guides were to be procured at convenient distances along all the great

lines of road. The charge was threepence a mile for each horse, and

fourpence a stage for the guide. In this manner, when the ways were

good, it was possible to travel, for a considerable time, as rapidly

as by any conveyance known in England, till vehicles were propelled by

steam. There were as yet no post chaises; nor could those who rode

in their own coaches ordinarily procure a change of horses. The King,

however, and the great officers of state were able to command relays.

Thus Charles commonly went in one day from Whitehall to New-market, a

distance of about fifty-five miles through a level country; and this was

thought by his subjects a proof of great activity. Evelyn performed the

same journey in company with the Lord Treasurer Clifford. The coach was

drawn by six horses, which were changed at Bishop Stortford and again at

Chesterford. The travellers reached Newmarket at night. Such a mode of

conveyance seems to have been considered as a rare luxury confined to

princes and ministers. [150]

Whatever might be the way in which a journey was performed, the

travellers, unless they were numerous and well armed, ran considerable

risk of being stopped and plundered. The mounted highwayman, a marauder

known to our generation only from books, was to be found on every main

road. The waste tracts which lay on the great routes near London were

especially haunted by plunderers of this class. Hounslow Heath, on the

Great Western Road, and Finchley Common, on the Great Northern Road,

were perhaps the most celebrated of these spots. The Cambridge scholars

trembled when they approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight.

Seamen who had just been paid off at Chatham were often compelled

to deliver their purses on Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years

earlier by the greatest of poets as the scene of the depredations of

Falstaff. The public authorities seem to have been often at a loss

how to deal with the plunderers. At one time it was announced in the

Gazette, that several persons, who were strongly suspected of being

highwaymen, but against whom there was not sufficient evidence, would be

paraded at Newgate in riding dresses: their horses would also be shown;

and all gentlemen who had been robbed were invited to inspect this

singular exhibition. On another occasion a pardon was publicly offered

to a robber if he would give up some rough diamonds, of immense value,

which he had taken when he stopped the Harwich mail. A short time after

appeared another proclamation, warning the innkeepers that the eye

of the government was upon them. Their criminal connivance, it was

affirmed, enabled banditti to infest the roads with impunity. That these

suspicions were not without foundation, is proved by the dying speeches

of some penitent robbers of that age, who appear to have received from

the innkeepers services much resembling those which Farquhar's Boniface

rendered to Gibbet. [151]

It was necessary to the success and even to the safety of the highwayman

that he should be a bold and skilful rider, and that his manners and

appearance should be such as suited the master of a fine horse. He

therefore held an aristocratical position in the community of thieves,

appeared at fashionable coffee houses and gaming houses, and betted with

men of quality on the race ground. [152] Sometimes, indeed, he was a man

of good family and education. A romantic interest therefore attached,

and perhaps still attaches, to the names of freebooters of this class.

The vulgar eagerly drank in tales of their ferocity and audacity, of

their occasional acts of generosity and good nature, of their amours,

of their miraculous escapes, of their desperate struggles, and of their

manly bearing at the bar and in the cart. Thus it was related of William

Nevison, the great robber of Yorkshire, that he levied a quarterly

tribute on all the northern drovers, and, in return, not only spared

them himself, but protected them against all other thieves; that he

demanded purses in the most courteous manner; that he gave largely to

the poor what he had taken from the rich; that his life was once spared

by the royal clemency, but that he again tempted his fate, and at length

died, in 1685, on the gallows of York. [153] It was related how Claude

Duval, the French page of the Duke of Richmond, took to the road, became

captain of a formidable gang, and had the honour to be named first in a

royal proclamation against notorious offenders; how at the head of his

troop he stopped a lady's coach, in which there was a booty of four

hundred pounds; how he took only one hundred, and suffered the fair

owner to ransom the rest by dancing a coranto with him on the heath;

how his vivacious gallantry stole away the hearts of all women; how

his dexterity at sword and pistol made him a terror to all men; how, at

length, in the year 1670, he was seized when overcome by wine; how dames

of high rank visited him in prison, and with tears interceded for his

life; how the King would have granted a pardon, but for the interference

of Judge Morton, the terror of highwaymen, who threatened to resign his

office unless the law were carried into full effect; and how, after the

execution, the corpse lay in state with all the pomp of scutcheons, wax

lights, black hangings and mutes, till the same cruel Judge, who

had intercepted the mercy of the crown, sent officers to disturb the

obsequies. [154] In these anecdotes there is doubtless a large mixture

of fable; but they are not on that account unworthy of being recorded;

for it is both an authentic and an important fact that such tales,

whether false or true, were heard by our ancestors with eagerness and

faith.

All the various dangers by which the traveller was beset were greatly

increased by darkness. He was therefore commonly desirous of having

the shelter of a roof during the night; and such shelter it was not

difficult to obtain. From a very early period the inns of England

had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent

accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth

century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the

wide chambers and stables of the Tabard in Southwark. The food was of

the best, and the wines such as drew the company on to drink largely.

Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison

gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great

hostelries. The Continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like

them. There were some in which two or three hundred people, with their

horses, could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the

tapestry, above all, the abundance of clean and fine linen was matter

of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were

signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. In the seventeenth century

England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The traveller

sometimes, in a small village, lighted on a public house such as Walton

has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls

were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelt of lavender, and

where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trouts fresh

from the neighbouring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At

the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk,

choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London.

[155] The innkeepers too, it was said, were not like other innkeepers.

On the Continent the landlord was the tyrant of those who crossed the

threshold. In England he was a servant. Never was an Englishman more

at home than when he took his ease in his inn. Even men of fortune, who

might in their own mansions have enjoyed every luxury, were often in

the habit of passing their evenings in the parlour of some neighbouring

house of public entertainment. They seem to have thought that comfort

and freedom could in no other place be enjoyed with equal perfection.

This feeling continued during many generations to be a national

peculiarity. The liberty and jollity of inns long furnished matter to

our novelists and dramatists. Johnson declared that a tavern chair was

the throne of human felicity; and Shenstone gently complained that no

private roof, however friendly, gave the wanderer so warm a welcome as

that which was to be found at an inn.

Many conveniences, which were unknown at Hampton Court and Whitehall in

the seventeenth century, are in all modern hotels. Yet on the whole it

is certain that the improvement of our houses of public entertainment

has by no means kept pace with the improvement of our roads and of our

conveyances. Nor is this strange; for it is evident that, all other

circumstances being supposed equal, the inns will be best where the

means of locomotion are worst. The quicker the rate of travelling, the

less important is it that there should be numerous agreeable resting

places for the traveller. A hundred and sixty years ago a person who

came up to the capital from a remote county generally required, by the

way, twelve or fifteen meals, and lodging for five or six nights. If he

were a great man, he expected the meals and lodging to be comfortable,

and even luxurious. At present we fly from York or Exeter to London by

the light of a single winter's day. At present, therefore, a traveller

seldom interrupts his journey merely for the sake of rest and

refreshment. The consequence is that hundreds of excellent inns

have fallen into utter decay. In a short time no good houses of that

description will be found, except at places where strangers are likely

to be detained by business or pleasure.

The mode in which correspondence was carried on between distant places

may excite the scorn of the present generation; yet it was such as might

have moved the admiration and envy of the polished nations of antiquity,

or of the contemporaries of Raleigh and Cecil. A rude and imperfect

establishment of posts for the conveyance of letters had been set up by

Charles the First, and had been swept away by the civil war. Under the

Commonwealth the design was resumed. At the Restoration the proceeds of

the Post Office, after all expenses had been paid, were settled on the

Duke of York. On most lines of road the mails went out and came in only

on the alternate days. In Cornwall, in the fens of Lincolnshire, and

among the hills and lakes of Cumberland, letters were received only once

a week. During a royal progress a daily post was despatched from the

capital to the place where the court sojourned. There was also daily

communication between London and the Downs; and the same privilege was

sometimes extended to Tunbridge Wells and Bath at the seasons when those

places were crowded by the great. The bags were carried on horseback day

and night at the rate of about five miles an hour. [156]

The revenue of this establishment was not derived solely from the charge

for the transmission of letters. The Post Office alone was entitled to

furnish post horses; and, from the care with which this monopoly was

guarded, we may infer that it was found profitable. [157] If, indeed, a

traveller had waited half an hour without being supplied he might hire a

horse wherever he could.

To facilitate correspondence between one part of London and another was

not originally one of the objects of the Post Office. But, in the

reign of Charles the Second, an enterprising citizen of London, William

Dockwray, set up, at great expense, a penny post, which delivered

letters and parcels six or eight times a day in the busy and crowded

streets near the Exchange, and four times a day in the outskirts of

the capital. This improvement was, as usual, strenuously resisted. The

porters complained that their interests were attacked, and tore down the

placards in which the scheme was announced to the public. The excitement

caused by Godfrey's death, and by the discovery of Coleman's papers, was

then at the height. A cry was therefore raised that the penny post was a

Popish contrivance. The great Doctor Oates, it was affirmed, had hinted

a suspicion that the Jesuits were at the bottom of the scheme, and that

the bags, if examined, would be found full of treason. [158] The utility

of the enterprise was, however, so great and obvious that all opposition

proved fruitless. As soon as it became clear that the speculation would

be lucrative, the Duke of York complained of it as an infraction of his

monopoly; and the courts of law decided in his favour. [159]

The revenue of the Post Office was from the first constantly increasing.

In the year of the Restoration a committee of the House of Commons,

after strict enquiry, had estimated the net receipt at about twenty

thousand pounds. At the close of the reign of Charles the Second, the

net receipt was little short of fifty thousand pounds; and this was then

thought a stupendous sum. The gross receipt was about seventy thousand

pounds. The charge for conveying a single letter was twopence for eighty

miles, and threepence for a longer distance. The postage increased in

proportion to the weight of the packet. [160] At present a single letter

is carried to the extremity of Scotland or of Ireland for a penny; and

the monopoly of post horses has long ceased to exist. Yet the gross

annual receipts of the department amount to more than eighteen hundred

thousand pounds, and the net receipts to more than seven hundred

thousand pounds. It is, therefore, scarcely possible to doubt that the

number of letters now conveyed by mail is seventy times the number which

was so conveyed at the time of the accession of James the Second. [161]

No part of the load which the old mails carried out was more important

than the newsletters. In 1685 nothing like the London daily paper of

our time existed, or could exist. Neither the necessary capital nor

the necessary skill was to be found. Freedom too was wanting, a want as

fatal as that of either capital or skill. The press was not indeed at

that moment under a general censorship. The licensing act, which had

been passed soon after the Restoration, had expired in 1679. Any person

might therefore print, at his own risk, a history, a sermon, or a poem,

without the previous approbation of any officer; but the Judges were

unanimously of opinion that this liberty did not extend to Gazettes, and

that, by the common law of England, no man, not authorised by the crown,

had a right to publish political news. [162] While the Whig party was

still formidable, the government thought it expedient occasionally to

connive at the violation of this rule. During the great battle of the

Exclusion Bill, many newspapers were suffered to appear, the Protestant

Intelligence, the Current Intelligence, the Domestic Intelligence, the

True News, the London Mercury. [163] None of these was published oftener

than twice a week. None exceeded in size a single small leaf. The

quantity of matter which one of them contained in a year was not more

than is often found in two numbers of the Times. After the defeat of the

Whigs it was no longer necessary for the King to be sparing in the

use of that which all his Judges had pronounced to be his undoubted

prerogative. At the close of his reign no newspaper was suffered to

appear without his allowance: and his allowance was given exclusively

to the London Gazette. The London Gazette came out only on Mondays and

Thursdays. The contents generally were a royal proclamation, two or

three Tory addresses, notices of two or three promotions, an account

of a skirmish between the imperial troops and the Janissaries on the

Danube, a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand

cockfight between two persons of honour, and an advertisement offering a

reward for a strayed dog. The whole made up two pages of moderate size.

Whatever was communicated respecting matters of the highest moment was

communicated in the most meagre and formal style. Sometimes, indeed,

when the government was disposed to gratify the public curiosity

respecting an important transaction, a broadside was put forth giving

fuller details than could be found in the Gazette: but neither the

Gazette nor any supplementary broadside printed by authority ever

contained any intelligence which it did not suit the purposes of the

Court to publish. The most important parliamentary debates, the most

important state trials recorded in our history, were passed over in

profound silence. [164] In the capital the coffee houses supplied in

some measure the place of a journal. Thither the Londoners flocked, as

the Athenians of old flocked to the market place, to hear whether

there was any news. There men might learn how brutally a Whig, had been

treated the day before in Westminster Hall, what horrible accounts the

letters from Edinburgh gave of the torturing of Covenanters, how grossly

the Navy Board had cheated the crown in the Victualling of the fleet,

and what grave charges the Lord Privy Seal had brought against the

Treasury in the matter of the hearth money. But people who lived at a

distance from the great theatre of political contention could be

kept regularly informed of what was passing there only by means of

newsletters. To prepare such letters became a calling in London, as it

now is among the natives of India. The newswriter rambled from coffee

room to coffee room, collecting reports, squeezed himself into the

Sessions House at the Old Bailey if there was an interesting trial, nay

perhaps obtained admission to the gallery of Whitehall, and noticed how

the King and Duke looked. In this way he gathered materials for weekly

epistles destined to enlighten some county town or some bench of rustic

magistrates. Such were the sources from which the inhabitants of the

largest provincial cities, and the great body of the gentry and clergy,

learned almost all that they knew of the history of their own time. We

must suppose that at Cambridge there were as many persons curious

to know what was passing in the world as at almost any place in the

kingdom, out of London. Yet at Cambridge, during a great part of the

reign of Charles the Second, the Doctors of Laws and the Masters of

Arts had no regular supply of news except through the London Gazette.

At length the services of one of the collectors of intelligence in

the capital were employed. That was a memorable day on which the first

newsletter from London was laid on the table of the only coffee room

in Cambridge. [165] At the seat of a man of fortune in the country the

newsletter was impatiently expected. Within a week after it had arrived

it had been thumbed by twenty families. It furnished the neighboring

squires with matter for talk over their October, and the neighboring

rectors with topics for sharp sermons against Whiggery or Popery.

Many of these curious journals might doubtless still be detected by a

diligent search in the archives of old families. Some are to be found

in our public libraries; and one series, which is not the least valuable

part of the literary treasures collected by Sir James Mackintosh, will

be occasionally quoted in the course of this work. [166]

It is scarcely necessary to say that there were then no provincial

newspapers. Indeed, except in the capital and at the two Universities,

there was scarcely a printer in the kingdom. The only press in England

north of Trent appears to have been at York. [167]

It was not only by means of the London Gazette that the government

undertook to furnish political instruction to the people. That journal

contained a scanty supply of news without comment. Another journal,

published under the patronage of the court, consisted of comment without

news. This paper, called the Observator, was edited by an old Tory

pamphleteer named Roger Lestrange. Lestrange was by no means deficient

in readiness and shrewdness; and his diction, though coarse, and

disfigured by a mean and flippant jargon which then passed for wit in

the green room and the tavern, was not without keenness and vigour. But

his nature, at once ferocious and ignoble, showed itself in every line

that he penned. When the first Observators appeared there was some

excuse for his acrimony. The Whigs were then powerful; and he had to

contend against numerous adversaries, whose unscrupulous violence might

seem to justify unsparing retaliation. But in 1685 all the opposition

had been crushed. A generous spirit would have disdained to insult a

party which could not reply, and to aggravate the misery of prisoners,

of exiles, of bereaved families: but; from the malice of Lestrange the

grave was no hiding place, and the house of mourning no sanctuary. In

the last month of the reign of Charles the Second, William Jenkyn, an

aged dissenting pastor of great note, who had been cruelly persecuted

for no crime but that of worshipping God according to the fashion

generally followed throughout protestant Europe, died of hardships and

privations at Newgate. The outbreak of popular sympathy could not be

repressed. The corpse was followed to the grave by a train of a hundred

and fifty coaches. Even courtiers looked sad. Even the unthinking King

showed some signs of concern. Lestrange alone set up a howl of savage

exultation, laughed at the weak compassion of the Trimmers, proclaimed

that the blasphemous old impostor had met with a most righteous

punishment, and vowed to wage war, not only to the death, but after

death, with all the mock saints and martyrs. [168] Such was the spirit

of the paper which was at this time the oracle of the Tory party, and

especially of the parochial clergy.

Literature which could be carried by the post bag then formed the

greater part of the intellectual nutriment ruminated by the country

divines and country justices. The difficulty and expense of conveying

large packets from place to place was so great, that an extensive work

was longer in making its way from Paternoster Row to Devonshire or

Lancashire than it now is in reaching Kentucky. How scantily a rural

parsonage was then furnished, even with books the most necessary to a

theologian, has already been remarked. The houses of the gentry were

not more plentifully supplied. Few knights of the shire had libraries so

good as may now perpetually be found in a servants' hall or in the back

parlour of a small shopkeeper. An esquire passed among his neighbours

for a great scholar, if Hudibras and Baker's Chronicle, Tarlton's Jests

and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay in his hall window among

the fishing rods and fowling pieces. No circulating library, no book

society, then existed even in the capital: but in the capital those

students who could not afford to purchase largely had a resource. The

shops of the great booksellers, near Saint Paul's Churchyard, were

crowded every day and all day long with readers; and a known customer

was often permitted to carry a volume home. In the country there was

no such accommodation; and every man was under the necessity of buying

whatever he wished to read. [169]

As to the lady of the manor and her daughters, their literary stores

generally consisted of a prayer book and receipt book. But in truth

they lost little by living in rural seclusion. For, even in the highest

ranks, and in those situations which afforded the greatest facilities

for mental improvement, the English women of that generation were

decidedly worse educated than they have been at any other time since

the revival of learning. At an early period they had studied the

masterpieces of ancient genius. In the present day they seldom bestow

much attention on the dead languages; but they are familiar with the

tongue of Pascal and Moliere, with the tongue of Dante and Tasso,

with the tongue of Goethe and Schiller; nor is there any purer or more

graceful English than that which accomplished women now speak and write.

But, during the latter part of the seventeenth century, the culture

of the female mind seems to have been almost entirely neglected. If

a damsel had the least smattering of literature she was regarded as a

prodigy. Ladies highly born, highly bred, and naturally quick witted,

were unable to write a line in their mother tongue without solecisms

and faults of spelling such as a charity girl would now be ashamed to

commit. [170]

The explanation may easily be found. Extravagant licentiousness,

the natural effect of extravagant austerity, was now the mode;

and licentiousness had produced its ordinary effect, the moral and

intellectual degradation of women. To their personal beauty, it was the

fashion to pay rude and impudent homage. But the admiration and desire

which they inspired were seldom mingled with respect, with affection,

or with any chivalrous sentiment. The qualities which fit them to

be companions, advisers, confidential friends, rather repelled than

attracted the libertines of Whitehall. In that court a maid of honour,

who dressed in such a manner as to do full justice to a white bosom,

who ogled significantly, who danced voluptuously, who excelled in pert

repartee, who was not ashamed to romp with Lords of the Bedchamber and

Captains of the Guards, to sing sly verses with sly expression, or to

put on a page's dress for a frolic, was more likely to be followed and

admired, more likely to be honoured with royal attentions, more likely

to win a rich and noble husband than Jane Grey or Lucy Hutchinson would

have been. In such circumstances the standard of female attainments was

necessarily low; and it was more dangerous to be above that standard

than to be beneath it. Extreme ignorance and frivolity were thought less

unbecoming in a lady than the slightest tincture of pedantry. Of the

too celebrated women whose faces we still admire on the walls of Hampton

Court, few indeed were in the habit of reading anything more valuable

than acrostics, lampoons, and translations of the Clelia and the Grand

Cyrus.

The literary acquirements, even of the accomplished gentlemen of that

generation, seem to have been somewhat less solid and profound than at

an earlier or a later period. Greek learning, at least, did not flourish

among us in the days of Charles the Second, as it had flourished before

the civil war, or as it again flourished long after the Revolution.

There were undoubtedly scholars to whom the whole Greek literature,

from Homer to Photius, was familiar: but such scholars were to be found

almost exclusively among the clergy resident at the Universities, and

even at the Universities were few, and were not fully appreciated. At

Cambridge it was not thought by any means necessary that a divine should

be able to read the Gospels in the original. [171] Nor was the standard

at Oxford higher. When, in the reign of William the Third, Christ

Church rose up as one man to defend the genuineness of the Epistles

of Phalaris, that great college, then considered as the first seat

of philology in the kingdom, could not muster such a stock of Attic

learning as is now possessed by several youths at every great public

school. It may easily be supposed that a dead language, neglected at the

Universities, was not much studied by men of the world. In a former age

the poetry and eloquence of Greece had been the delight of Raleigh and

Falkland. In a later age the poetry and eloquence of Greece were the

delight of Pitt and Fox, of Windham and Grenville. But during the

latter part of the seventeenth century there was in England scarcely one

eminent statesman who could read with enjoyment a page of Sophocles or

Plato.

Good Latin scholars were numerous. The language of Rome, indeed, had not

altogether lost its imperial prerogatives, and was still, in many parts

of Europe, almost indispensable to a traveller or a negotiator. To speak

it well was therefore a much more common accomplishment shall in our

time; and neither Oxford nor Cambridge wanted poets who, on a great

occasion, could lay at the foot of the throne happy imitations of

the verses in which Virgil and Ovid had celebrated the greatness of

Augustus.

Yet even the Latin was giving way to a younger rival. France united at

that time almost every species of ascendency. Her military glory was

at the height. She had vanquished mighty coalitions. She had dictated

treaties. She had subjugated great cities and provinces. She had forced

the Castilian pride to yield her the precedence. She had summoned

Italian princes to prostrate themselves at her footstool. Her authority

was supreme in all matters of good breeding, from a duel to a minuet.

She determined how a gentleman's coat must be cut, how long his peruke

must be, whether his heels must be high or low, and whether the lace

on his hat must be broad or narrow. In literature she gave law to the

world. The fame of her great writers filled Europe. No other country

could produce a tragic poet equal to Racine, a comic poet equal to

Moliere, a trifler so agreeable as La Fontaine, a rhetorician so skilful

as Bossuet. The literary glory of Italy and of Spain had set; that of

Germany had not yet dawned. The genius, therefore, of the eminent men

who adorned Paris shone forth with a splendour which was set off to full

advantage by contrast. France, indeed, had at that time an empire over

mankind, such as even the Roman Republic never attained. For, when Rome

was politically dominant, she was in arts and letters the humble pupil

of Greece. France had, over the surrounding countries, at once the

ascendency which Rome had over Greece, and the ascendency which Greece

had over Rome. French was fast becoming the universal language, the

language of fashionable society, the language of diplomacy. At several

courts princes and nobles spoke it more accurately and politely than

their mother tongue. In our island there was less of this servility than

on the Continent. Neither our good nor our bad qualities were those of

imitators. Yet even here homage was paid, awkwardly indeed and sullenly,

to the literary supremacy of our neighbours. The melodious Tuscan, so

familiar to the gallants and ladies of the court of Elizabeth, sank into

contempt. A gentleman who quoted Horace or Terence was considered in

good company as a pompous pedant. But to garnish his conversation with

scraps of French was the best proof which he could give of his parts

and attainments. [172] New canons of criticism, new models of style

came into fashion. The quaint ingenuity which had deformed the verses of

Donne, and had been a blemish on those of Cowley, disappeared from our

poetry. Our prose became less majestic, less artfully involved, less

variously musical than that of an earlier age, but more lucid, more

easy, and better fitted for controversy and narrative. In these changes

it is impossible not to recognise the influence of French precept and of

French example. Great masters of our language, in their most dignified

compositions, affected to use French words, when English words, quite as

expressive and sonorous, were at hand: [173] and from France was imported

the tragedy in rhyme, an exotic which, in our soil, drooped, and

speedily died.

It would have been well if our writers had also copied the decorum which

their great French contemporaries, with few exceptions, preserved; for

the profligacy of the English plays, satires, songs, and novels of that

age is a deep blot on our national fame. The evil may easily be traced

to its source. The wits and the Puritans had never been on friendly

terms. There was no sympathy between the two classes. They looked on

the whole system of human life from different points and in different

lights. The earnest of each was the jest of the other. The pleasures

of each were the torments of the other. To the stern precisian even the

innocent sport of the fancy seemed a crime. To light and festive natures

the solemnity of the zealous brethren furnished copious matter of

ridicule. From the Reformation to the civil war, almost every writer,

gifted with a fine sense of the ludicrous, had taken some opportunity of

assailing the straighthaired, snuffling, whining saints, who christened

their children out of the Book of Nehemiah, who groaned in spirit at

the sight of Jack in the Green, and who thought it impious to taste plum

porridge on Christmas day. At length a time came when the laughers began

to look grave in their turn. The rigid, ungainly zealots, after having

furnished much good sport during two generations, rose up in arms,

conquered, ruled, and, grimly smiling, trod down under their feet the

whole crowd of mockers. The wounds inflicted by gay and petulant malice

were retaliated with the gloomy and implacable malice peculiar to bigots

who mistake their own rancour for virtue. The theatres were closed.

The players were flogged. The press was put under the guardianship of

austere licensers. The Muses were banished from their own favourite

haunts, Cambridge and Oxford. Cowly, Crashaw, and Cleveland were ejected

from their fellowships. The young candidate for academical honours was

no longer required to write Ovidian epistles or Virgilian pastorals, but

was strictly interrogated by a synod of lowering Supralapsarians as to

the day and hour when he experienced the new birth. Such a system was

of course fruitful of hypocrites. Under sober clothing and under visages

composed to the expression of austerity lay hid during several years

the intense desire of license and of revenge. At length that desire was

gratified. The Restoration emancipated thousands of minds from a yoke

which had become insupportable. The old fight recommenced, but with an

animosity altogether new. It was now not a sportive combat, but a war to

the death. The Roundhead had no better quarter to expect from those whom

he had persecuted than a cruel slavedriver can expect from insurgent

slaves still bearing the marks of his collars and his scourges.

The war between wit and Puritanism soon became a war between wit and

morality. The hostility excited by a grotesque caricature of virtue did

not spare virtue herself. Whatever the canting Roundhead had regarded

with reverence was insulted. Whatever he had proscribed was favoured.

Because he had been scrupulous about trifles, all scruples were treated

with derision. Because he had covered his failings with the mask of

devotion, men were encouraged to obtrude with Cynic impudence all their

most scandalous vices on the public eye. Because he had punished illicit

love with barbarous severity, virgin purity and conjugal fidelity were

made a jest. To that sanctimonious jargon which was his Shibboleth, was

opposed another jargon not less absurd and much more odious. As he never

opened his mouth except in scriptural phrase, the new breed of wits and

fine gentlemen never opened their mouths without uttering ribaldry of

which a porter would now be ashamed, and without calling on their Maker

to curse them, sink them, confound them, blast them, and damn them.

It is not strange, therefore, that our polite literature, when it

revived with the revival of the old civil and ecclesiastical polity,

should have been profoundly immoral. A few eminent men, who belonged to

an earlier and better age, were exempt from the general contagion. The

verse of Waller still breathed the sentiments which had animated a more

chivalrous generation. Cowley, distinguished as a loyalist and as a man

of letters, raised his voice courageously against the immorality which

disgraced both letters and loyalty. A mightier poet, tried at once by

pain, danger, poverty, obloquy, and blindness, meditates, undisturbed by

the obscene tumult which raged all around him, a song so sublime and so

holy that it would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal

Virtues whom he saw, with that inner eye which no calamity could darken,

flinging down on the jasper pavement their crowns of amaranth and gold.

The vigourous and fertile genius of Butler, if it did not altogether

escape the prevailing infection, took the disease in a mild form. But

these were men whose minds had been trained in a world which had passed

away. They gave place in no long time to a younger generation of

wits; and of that generation, from Dryden down to Durfey, the common

characteristic was hard-hearted, shameless, swaggering licentiousness,

at once inelegant and inhuman. The influence of these writers was

doubtless noxious, yet less noxious than it would have been had they

been less depraved. The poison which they administered was so strong

that it was, in no long time, rejected with nausea. None of them

understood the dangerous art of associating images of unlawful pleasure

with all that is endearing and ennobling. None of them was aware that a

certain decorum is essential even to voluptuousness, that drapery may

be more alluring than exposure, and that the imagination may be far more

powerfully moved by delicate hints which impel it to exert itself, than

by gross descriptions which it takes in passively.

The spirit of the Antipuritan reaction pervades almost the whole polite

literature of the reign of Charles the Second. But the very quintessence

of that spirit will be found in the comic drama. The playhouses, shut

by the meddling fanatic in the day of his power, were again crowded. To

their old attractions new and more powerful attractions had been added.

Scenery, dresses, and decorations, such as would now be thought mean or

absurd, but such as would have been esteemed incredibly magnificent by

those who, early in the seventeenth century, sate on the filthy benches

of the Hope, or under the thatched roof of the Rose, dazzled the eyes

of the multitude. The fascination of sex was called in to aid the

fascination of art: and the young spectator saw, with emotions unknown

to the contemporaries of Shakspeare and Johnson, tender and sprightly

heroines personated by lovely women. From the day on which the theatres

were reopened they became seminaries of vice; and the evil propagated

itself. The profligacy of the representations soon drove away sober

people. The frivolous and dissolute who remained required every year

stronger and stronger stimulants. Thus the artists corrupted the

spectators, and the spectators the artists, till the turpitude of the

drama became such as must astonish all who are not aware that extreme

relaxation is the natural effect of extreme restraint, and that an age

of hypocrisy is, in the regular course of things, followed by all age of

impudence.

Nothing is more characteristic of the times than the care with which

the poets contrived to put all their loosest verses into the mouths of

women. The compositions in which the greatest license was taken were the

epilogues. They were almost always recited by favourite actresses; and

nothing charmed the depraved audience so much as to hear lines grossly

indecent repeated by a beautiful girl, who was supposed to have not yet

lost her innocence [174].

Our theatre was indebted in that age for many plots and characters

to Spain, to France, and to the old English masters: but whatever our

dramatists touched they tainted. In their imitations the houses of

Calderon's stately and highspirited Castilian gentlemen became sties of

vice, Shakspeare's Viola a procuress, Moliere's Misanthrope a ravisher,

Moliere's Agnes an adulteress. Nothing could be so pure or so heroic but

that it became foul and ignoble by transfusion through those foul and

ignoble minds.

Such was the state of the drama; and the drama was the department of

polite literature in which a poet had the best chance of obtaining a

subsistence by his pen. The sale of books was so small that a man of the

greatest name could hardly expect more than a pittance for the copyright

of the best performance. There cannot be a stronger instance than the

fate of Dryden's last production, the Fables. That volume was published

when he was universally admitted to be the chief of living English

poets. It contains about twelve thousand lines. The versification is

admirable, the narratives and descriptions full of life. To this day

Palamon and Arcite, Cymon and Iphigenia, Theodore and Honoria, are

the delight both of critics and of schoolboys. The collection includes

Alexander's Feast, the noblest ode in our language. For the copyright

Dryden received two hundred and fifty pounds, less than in our days has

sometimes been paid for two articles in a review. [175] Nor does the

bargain seem to have been a hard one. For the book went off slowly; and

the second edition was not required till the author had been ten years

in his grave. By writing for the theatre it was possible to earn a much

larger sum with much less trouble. Southern made seven hundred pounds by

one play. [176] Otway was raised from beggary to temporary affluence

by the success of his Don Carlos. [177] Shadwell cleared a hundred and

thirty pounds by a single representation of the Squire of Alsatia. [178]

The consequence was that every man who had to live by his wit wrote

plays, whether he had any internal vocation to write plays or not.

It was thus with Dryden. As a satirist he has rivalled Juvenal. As a

didactic poet he perhaps might, with care and meditation, have rivalled

Lucretius. Of lyric poets he is, if not the most sublime, the most

brilliant and spiritstirring. But nature, profuse to him of many rare

gifts, had withheld from him the dramatic faculty. Nevertheless all the

energies of his best years were wasted on dramatic composition. He

had too much judgment not to be aware that in the power of exhibiting

character by means of dialogue he was deficient. That deficiency he

did his best to conceal, sometimes by surprising and amusing incidents,

sometimes by stately declamation, sometimes by harmonious numbers,

sometimes by ribaldry but too well suited to the taste of a profane and

licentious pit. Yet he never obtained any theatrical success equal to

that which rewarded the exertions of some men far inferior to him in

general powers. He thought himself fortunate if he cleared a hundred

guineas by a play; a scanty remuneration, yet apparently larger than he

could have earned in any other way by the same quantity of labour. [179]

The recompense which the wits of that age could obtain from the public

was so small, that they were under the necessity of eking out

their incomes by levying contributions on the great. Every rich

and goodnatured lord was pestered by authors with a mendicancy

so importunate, and a flattery so abject, as may in our time seem

incredible. The patron to whom a work was inscribed was expected to

reward the writer with a purse of gold. The fee paid for the dedication

of a book was often much larger than the sum which any publisher would

give for the copyright. Books were therefore frequently printed merely

that they might be dedicated. This traffic in praise produced the effect

which might have been expected. Adulation pushed to the verge, sometimes

of nonsense, and sometimes of impiety, was not thought to disgrace a

poet. Independence, veracity, selfrespect, were things not required

by the world from him. In truth, he was in morals something between a

pandar and a beggar.

To the other vices which degraded the literary character was added,

towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second, the most savage

intemperance of party spirit. The wits, as a class, had been impelled

by their old hatred of Puritanism to take the side of the court, and had

been found useful allies. Dryden, in particular, had done good service

to the government. His Absalom and Achitophel, the greatest satire of

modern times had amazed the town, had made its way with unprecedented

rapidity even into rural districts, and had, wherever it appeared

bitterly annoyed the Exclusionists and raised the courage of the Tories.

But we must not, in the admiration which we naturally feel for noble

diction and versification, forget the great distinctions of good and

evil. The spirit by which Dryden and several of his compeers were at

this time animated against the Whigs deserves to be called fiendish. The

servile Judges and Sheriffs of those evil days could not shed blood

as fast as the poets cried out for it. Calls for more victims, hideous

jests on hanging, bitter taunts on those who, having stood by the King

in the hour of danger, now advised him to deal mercifully and generously

by his vanquished enemies, were publicly recited on the stage, and, that

nothing might be wanting to the guilt and the shame, were recited by

women, who, having long been taught to discard all modesty, were now

taught to discard all compassion. [180]

It is a remarkable fact that, while the lighter literature of England

was thus becoming a nuisance and a national disgrace, the English genius

was effecting in science a revolution which will, to the end of time,

be reckoned among the highest achievements of the human intellect. Bacon

had sown the good seed in a sluggish soil and an ungenial season. He

had not expected an early crop, and in his last testament had solemnly

bequeathed his fame to the next age. During a whole generation his

philosophy had, amidst tumults wars, and proscriptions, been slowly

ripening in a few well constituted minds. While factions were struggling

for dominion over each other, a small body of sages had turned away with

benevolent disdain from the conflict, and had devoted themselves to the

nobler work of extending the dominion of man over matter. As soon

as tranquillity was restored, these teachers easily found attentive

audience. For the discipline through which the nation had passed had

brought the public mind to a temper well fitted for the reception of the

Verulamian doctrine. The civil troubles had stimulated the faculties of

the educated classes, and had called forth a restless activity and an

insatiable curiosity, such as had not before been known among us. Yet

the effect of those troubles was that schemes of political and religious

reform were generally regarded with suspicion and contempt. During

twenty years the chief employment of busy and ingenious men had been to

frame constitutions with first magistrates, without first magistrates,

with hereditary senates, with senates appointed by lot, with annual

senates, with perpetual senates. In these plans nothing was omitted. All

the detail, all the nomenclature, all the ceremonial of the imaginary

government was fully set forth, Polemarchs and Phylarchs, Tribes and

Galaxies, the Lord Archon and the Lord Strategus. Which ballot boxes

were to be green and which red, which balls were to be of gold and which

of silver, which magistrates were to wear hats and which black velvet

caps with peaks, how the mace was to be carried and when the heralds

were to uncover, these, and a hundred more such trifles, were gravely

considered and arranged by men of no common capacity and learning.

[181] But the time for these visions had gone by; and, if any steadfast

republican still continued to amuse himself with them, fear of public

derision and of a criminal information generally induced him to keep

his fancies to himself. It was now unpopular and unsafe to mutter a word

against the fundamental laws of the monarchy: but daring and ingenious

men might indemnify themselves by treating with disdain what had lately

been considered as the fundamental laws of nature. The torrent which

had been dammed up in one channel rushed violently into another. The

revolutionary spirit, ceasing to operate in politics, began to exert

itself with unprecedented vigour and hardihood in every department

of physics. The year 1660, the era of the restoration of the old

constitution, is also the era from which dates the ascendency of the new

philosophy. In that year the Royal Society, destined to be a chief agent

in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms, began to exist.

[182] In a few months experimental science became all the mode. The

transfusion of blood, the ponderation of air, the fixation of mercury,

succeeded to that place in the public mind which had been lately

occupied by the controversies of the Rota. Dreams of perfect forms of

government made way for dreams of wings with which men were to fly from

the Tower to the Abbey, and of doublekeeled ships which were never to

founder in the fiercest storm. All classes were hurried along by the

prevailing sentiment. Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and Puritan,

were for once allied. Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles, princes,

swelled the triumph of the Baconian philosophy. Poets sang with emulous

fervour the approach of the golden age. Cowley, in lines weighty

with thought and resplendent with wit, urged the chosen seed to take

possession of the promised land flowing with milk and honey, that land

which their great deliverer and lawgiver had seen, as from the summit

of Pisgah, but had not been permitted to enter. [183] Dryden, with more

zeal than knowledge, joined voice to the general acclamation to enter,

and foretold things which neither he nor anybody else understood. The

Royal Society, he predicted, would soon lead us to the extreme verge of

the globe, and there delight us with a better view of the moon. [184]

Two able and aspiring prelates, Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, and Wilkins,

Bishop of Chester, were conspicuous among the leaders of the movement.

Its history was eloquently written by a younger divine, who was rising

to high distinction in his profession, Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop

of Rochester. Both Chief Justice Hale and Lord Keeper Guildford stole

some hours from the business of their courts to write on hydrostatics.

Indeed it was under the immediate direction of Guildford that the

first barometers ever exposed to sale in London were constructed. [185]

Chemistry divided, for a time, with wine and love, with the stage and

the gaming table, with the intrigues of a courtier and the intrigues

of a demagogue, the attention of the fickle Buckingham. Rupert has the

credit of having invented mezzotinto; from him is named that curious

bubble of glass which has long amused children and puzzled philosophers.

Charles himself had a laboratory at Whitehall, and was far more active

and attentive there than at the council board. It was almost necessary

to the character of a fine gentleman to have something to say about air

pumps and telescopes; and even fine ladies, now and then, thought it

becoming to affect a taste for science, went in coaches and six to

visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke forth into cries of delight at

finding that a magnet really attracted a needle, and that a microscope

really made a fly loom as large as a sparrow. [186]

In this, as in every great stir of the human mind, there was doubtless

something which might well move a smile. It is the universal law that

whatever pursuit, whatever doctrine, becomes fashionable, shall lose a

portion of that dignity which it had possessed while it was confined to

a small but earnest minority, and was loved for its own sake alone. It

is true that the follies of some persons who, without any real

aptitude for science, professed a passion for it, furnished matter of

contemptuous mirth to a few malignant satirists who belonged to the

preceding generation, and were not disposed to unlearn the lore of their

youth. [187] But it is not less true that the great work of interpreting

nature was performed by the English of that age as it had never before

been performed in any age by any nation. The spirit of Francis Bacon was

abroad, a spirit admirably compounded of audacity and sobriety. There

was a strong persuasion that the whole world was full of secrets of high

moment to the happiness of man, and that man had, by his Maker, been

entrusted with the key which, rightly used, would give access to

them. There was at the same time a conviction that in physics it was

impossible to arrive at the knowledge of general laws except by the

careful observation of particular facts. Deeply impressed with these

great truths, the professors of the new philosophy applied themselves

to their task, and, before a quarter of a century had expired, they had

given ample earnest of what has since been achieved. Already a reform

of agriculture had been commenced. New vegetables were cultivated. New

implements of husbandry were employed. New manures were applied to the

soil. [188] Evelyn had, under the formal sanction of the Royal Society,

given instruction to his countrymen in planting. Temple, in his

intervals of leisure, had tried many experiments in horticulture, and

had proved that many delicate fruits, the natives of more favoured

climates, might, with the help of art, be grown on English ground.

Medicine, which in France was still in abject bondage, and afforded an

inexhaustible subject of just ridicule to Moliere, had in England become

an experimental and progressive science, and every day made some

new advance in defiance of Hippocrates and Galen. The attention of

speculative men had been, for the first time, directed to the important

subject of sanitary police. The great plague of 1665 induced them to

consider with care the defective architecture, draining, and ventilation

of the capital. The great fire of 1666 afforded an opportunity for

effecting extensive improvements. The whole matter was diligently

examined by the Royal Society; and to the suggestions of that body must

be partly attributed the changes which, though far short of what the

public welfare required, yet made a wide difference between the new

and the old London, and probably put a final close to the ravages of

pestilence in our country. [189] At the same time one of the founders

of the Society, Sir William Petty, created the science of political

arithmetic, the humble but indispensable handmaid of political

philosophy. No kingdom of nature was left unexplored. To that period

belong the chemical discoveries of Boyle, and the earliest botanical

researches of Sloane. It was then that Ray made a new classification

of birds and fishes, and that the attention of Woodward was first drawn

towards fossils and shells. One after another phantoms which had haunted

the world through ages of darkness fled before the light. Astrology and

alchymy became jests. Soon there was scarcely a county in which some of

the Quorum did not smile contemptuously when an old woman was brought

before them for riding on broomsticks or giving cattle the murrain. But

it was in those noblest and most arduous departments of knowledge

in which induction and mathematical demonstration cooperate for the

discovery of truth, that the English genius won in that age the most

memorable triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of statics on

a new foundation. Edmund Halley investigated the properties of the

atmosphere, the ebb and flow of the sea, the laws of magnetism, and the

course of the comets; nor did he shrink from toil, peril and exile in

the cause of science. While he, on the rock of Saint Helena, mapped the

constellations of the southern hemisphere, our national observatory was

rising at Greenwich: and John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal,

was commencing that long series of observations which is never mentioned

without respect and gratitude in any part of the globe. But the glory

of these men, eminent as they were, is cast into the shade by the

transcendent lustre of one immortal name. In Isaac Newton two kinds of

intellectual power, which have little in common, and which are not often

found together in a very high degree of vigour, but which nevertheless

are equally necessary in the most sublime departments of physics, were

united as they have never been united before or since. There may have

been minds as happily constituted as his for the cultivation of pure

mathematical science: there may have been minds as happily constituted

for the cultivation of science purely experimental; but in no other mind

have the demonstrative faculty and the inductive faculty coexisted in

such supreme excellence and perfect harmony. Perhaps in the days of

Scotists and Thomists even his intellect might have run to waste, as

many intellects ran to waste which were inferior only to his. Happily

the spirit of the age on which his lot was cast, gave the right

direction to his mind; and his mind reacted with tenfold force on the

spirit of the age. In the year 1685 his fame, though splendid, was only

dawning; but his genius was in the meridian. His great work, that work

which effected a revolution in the most important provinces of natural

philosophy, had been completed, but was not yet published, and was just

about to be submitted to the consideration of the Royal Society.

It is not very easy to explain why the nation which was so far before

its neighbours in science should in art have been far behind them. Yet

such was the fact. It is true that in architecture, an art which is half

a science, an art in which none but a geometrician can excel, an art

which has no standard of grace but what is directly or indirectly

dependent on utility, an art of which the creations derive a part, at

least, of their majesty from mere bulk, our country could boast of one

truly great man, Christopher Wren; and the fire which laid London in

ruins had given him an opportunity, unprecedented in modern history, of

displaying his powers. The austere beauty of the Athenian portico,

the gloomy sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was like almost all

his contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of

appreciating; but no man born on our side of the Alps, has imitated with

so much success the magnificence of the palacelike churches of Italy.

Even the superb Lewis has left to posterity no work which can bear a

comparison with Saint Paul's. But at the close of the reign of Charles

the Second there was not a single English painter or statuary whose name

is now remembered. This sterility is somewhat mysterious; for painters

and statuaries were by no means a despised or an ill paid class. Their

social position was at least as high as at present. Their gains, when

compared with the wealth of the nation and with the remuneration of

other descriptions of intellectual labour, were even larger than at

present. Indeed the munificent patronage which was extended to artists

drew them to our shores in multitudes. Lely, who has preserved to us

the rich curls, the full lips, and the languishing eyes of the frail

beauties celebrated by Hamilton, was a Westphalian. He had died in 1680,

having long lived splendidly, having received the honour of knighthood,

and having accumulated a good estate out of the fruits of his skill.

His noble collection of drawings and pictures was, after his decease,

exhibited by the royal permission in the Banqueting House at Whitehall,

and was sold by auction for the almost incredible sum of twenty-six

thousand pounds, a sum which bore a greater proportion to the fortunes

of the rich men of that day than a hundred thousand pounds would bear

to the fortunes of the rich men of our time. [190] Lely was succeeded by

his countryman Godfrey Kneller, who was made first a knight and then a

baronet, and who, after keeping up a sumptuous establishment, and after

losing much money by unlucky speculations, was still able to bequeath

a large fortune to his family. The two Vandeveldes, natives of Holland,

had been tempted by English liberality to settle here, and had produced

for the King and his nobles some of the finest sea pieces in the world.

Another Dutchman, Simon Varelst, painted glorious sunflowers and tulips

for prices such as had never before been known. Verrio, a Neapolitan,

covered ceilings and staircases with Gorgons and Muses, Nymphs and

Satyrs, Virtues and Vices, Gods quaffing nectar, and laurelled princes

riding in triumph. The income which he derived from his performances

enabled him to keep one of the most expensive tables in England. For his

pieces at Windsor alone he received seven thousand pounds, a sum then

sufficient to make a gentleman of moderate wishes perfectly easy for

life, a sum greatly exceeding all that Dryden, during a literary life of

forty years, obtained from the booksellers. [191] Verrio's assistant

and successor, Lewis Laguerre, came from France. The two most celebrated

sculptors of that day were also foreigners. Cibber, whose pathetic

emblems of Fury and Melancholy still adorn Bedlam, was a Dane. Gibbons,

to whose graceful fancy and delicate touch many of our palaces,

colleges, and churches owe their finest decorations, was a Dutchman.

Even the designs for the coin were made by French artists. Indeed, it

was not till the reign of George the Second that our country could glory

in a great painter; and George the Third was on the throne before she

had reason to be proud of any of her sculptors.

It is time that this description of the England which Charles the Second

governed should draw to a close. Yet one subject of the highest moment

still remains untouched. Nothing has yet been said of the great body

of the people, of those who held the ploughs, who tended the oxen, who

toiled at the looms of Norwich, and squared the Portland stone for Saint

Paul's. Nor can very much be said. The most numerous class is precisely

the class respecting which we have the most meagre information. In those

times philanthropists did not yet regard it as a sacred duty, nor had

demagogues yet found it a lucrative trade, to talk and write about the

distress of the labourer. History was too much occupied with courts and

camps to spare a line for the hut of the peasant or the garret of the

mechanic. The press now often sends forth in a day a greater quantity of

discussion and declamation about the condition of the working man than

was published during the twenty-eight years which elapsed between the

Restoration and the Revolution. But it would be a great error to infer

from the increase of complaint that there has been any increase of

misery.

The great criterion of the state of the common people is the amount

of their wages; and as four-fifths of the common people were, in the

seventeenth century, employed in agriculture, it is especially important

to ascertain what were then the wages of agricultural industry. On this

subject we have the means of arriving at conclusions sufficiently exact

for our purpose.

Sir William Petty, whose mere assertion carries great weight, informs us

that a labourer was by no means in the lowest state who received for

a day's work fourpence with food, or eightpence without food. Four

shillings a week therefore were, according to Petty's calculation, fair

agricultural wages. [192]

That this calculation was not remote from the truth we have

abundant proof. About the beginning of the year 1685 the justices of

Warwickshire, in the exercise of a power entrusted to them by an Act of

Elizabeth, fixed, at their quarter sessions, a scale of wages for

the county, and notified that every employer who gave more than the

authorised sum, and every working man who received more, would be liable

to punishment. The wages of the common agricultural labourer, from

March to September, were fixed at the precise amount mentioned by Petty,

namely four shillings a week without food. From September to March the

wages were to be only three and sixpence a week. [193]

But in that age, as in ours, the earnings of the peasant were very

different in different parts of the kingdom. The wages of Warwickshire

were probably about the average, and those of the counties near the

Scottish border below it: but there were more favoured districts. In

the same year, 1685, a gentleman of Devonshire, named Richard Dunning,

published a small tract, in which he described the condition of the poor

of that county. That he understood his subject well it is impossible to

doubt; for a few months later his work was reprinted, and was, by

the magistrates assembled in quarter sessions at Exeter, strongly

recommended to the attention of all parochial officers. According to

him, the wages of the Devonshire peasant were, without food, about five

shillings a week. [194]

Still better was the condition of the labourer in the neighbourhood of

Bury Saint Edmund's. The magistrates of Suffolk met there in the spring

of 1682 to fix a rate of wages, and resolved that, where the labourer

was not boarded, he should have five shillings a week in winter, and six

in summer. [195]

In 1661 the justices at Chelmsford had fixed the wages of the Essex

labourer, who was not boarded, at six shillings in winter and seven in

summer. This seems to have been the highest remuneration given in

the kingdom for agricultural labour between the Restoration and the

Revolution; and it is to be observed that, in the year in which this

order was made, the necessaries of life were immoderately dear. Wheat

was at seventy shillings the quarter, which would even now be considered

as almost a famine price. [196]

These facts are in perfect accordance with another fact which seems to

deserve consideration. It is evident that, in a country where no man can

be compelled to become a soldier, the ranks of an army cannot be filled

if the government offers much less than the wages of common rustic

labour. At present the pay and beer money of a private in a regiment of

the line amount to seven shillings and sevenpence a week. This stipend,

coupled with the hope of a pension, does not attract the English

youth in sufficient numbers; and it is found necessary to supply the

deficiency by enlisting largely from among the poorer population of

Munster and Connaught. The pay of the private foot soldier in 1685 was

only four shillings and eightpence a week; yet it is certain that the

government in that year found no difficulty in obtaining many thousands

of English recruits at very short notice. The pay of the private foot

soldier in the army of the Commonwealth had been seven shillings a

week, that is to say, as much as a corporal received under Charles the

Second; [197] and seven shillings a week had been found sufficient to fill

the ranks with men decidedly superior to the generality of the people.

On the whole, therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that, in the

reign of Charles the Second, the ordinary wages of the peasant did not

exceed four shillings a week; but that, in some parts of the kingdom,

five shillings, six shillings, and, during the summer months, even seven

shillings were paid. At present a district where a labouring man earns

only seven shillings a week is thought to be in a state shocking to

humanity. The average is very much higher; and in prosperous counties,

the weekly wages of husbandmen amount to twelve, fourteen, and even

sixteen shillings. The remuneration of workmen employed in manufactures

has always been higher than that of the tillers of the soil. In the year

1680, a member of the House of Commons remarked that the high wages

paid in this country made it impossible for our textures to maintain a

competition with the produce of the Indian looms. An English mechanic,

he said, instead of slaving like a native of Bengal for a piece of

copper, exacted a shilling a day. [198] Other evidence is extant,

which proves that a shilling a day was the pay to which the English

manufacturer then thought himself entitled, but that he was often forced

to work for less. The common people of that age were not in the habit

of meeting for public discussion, of haranguing, or of petitioning

Parliament. No newspaper pleaded their cause. It was in rude rhyme

that their love and hatred, their exultation and their distress, found

utterance. A great part of their history is to be learned only from

their ballads. One of the most remarkable of the popular lays chaunted

about the streets of Norwich and Leeds in the time of Charles the Second

may still be read on the original broadside. It is the vehement and

bitter cry of labour against capital. It describes the good old times

when every artisan employed in the woollen manufacture lived as well

as a farmer. But those times were past. Sixpence a day was now all that

could be earned by hard labour at the loom. If the poor complained that

they could not live on such a pittance, they were told that they were

free to take it or leave it. For so miserable a recompense were the

producers of wealth compelled to toil rising early and lying down late,

while the master clothier, eating, sleeping, and idling, became rich by

their exertions. A shilling a day, the poet declares, is what the weaver

would have if justice were done. [199] We may therefore conclude that,

in the generation which preceded the Revolution, a workman employed in

the great staple manufacture of England thought himself fairly paid if

he gained six shillings a week.

It may here be noticed that the practice of setting children prematurely

to work, a practice which the state, the legitimate protector of those

who cannot protect themselves, has, in our time, wisely and humanely

interdicted, prevailed in the seventeenth century to an extent which,

when compared with the extent of the manufacturing system, seems almost

incredible. At Norwich, the chief seat of the clothing trade, a little

creature of six years old was thought fit for labour. Several writers

of that time, and among them some who were considered as eminently

benevolent, mention, with exultation, the fact that, in that single

city, boys and girls of very tender age created wealth exceeding what

was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve thousand pounds a

year. [200] The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the

more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age

has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are,

with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence

which discerns and the humanity which remedies them.

When we pass from the weavers of cloth to a different class of artisans,

our enquiries will still lead us to nearly the same conclusions. During

several generations, the Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital have kept a

register of the wages paid to different classes of workmen who have been

employed in the repairs of the building. From this valuable record it

appears that, in the course of a hundred and twenty years, the daily

earnings of the bricklayer have risen from half a crown to four and

tenpence, those of the mason from half a crown to five and threepence,

those of the carpenter from half a crown to five and fivepence, and

those of the plumber from three shillings to five and sixpence.

It seems clear, therefore, that the wages of labour, estimated in money,

were, in 1685, not more than half of what they now are; and there were

few articles important to the working man of which the price was not,

in 1685, more than half of what it now is. Beer was undoubtedly much

cheaper in that age than at present. Meat was also cheaper, but was

still so dear that hundreds of thousands of families scarcely knew

the taste of it. [201] In the cost of wheat there has been very little

change. The average price of the quarter, during the last twelve years

of Charles the Second, was fifty shillings. Bread, therefore, such as is

now given to the inmates of a workhouse, was then seldom seen, even on

the trencher of a yeoman or of a shopkeeper. The great majority of the

nation lived almost entirely on rye, barley, and oats.

The produce of tropical countries, the produce of the mines, the

produce of machinery, was positively dearer than at present. Among the

commodities for which the labourer would have had to pay higher in

1685 than his posterity now pay were sugar, salt, coals, candles,

soap, shoes, stockings, and generally all articles of clothing and all

articles of bedding. It may be added, that the old coats and blankets

would have been, not only more costly, but less serviceable than the

modern fabrics.

It must be remembered that those labourers who were able to maintain

themselves and their families by means of wages were not the most

necessitous members of the community. Beneath them lay a large class

which could not subsist without some aid from the parish. There can

hardly be a more important test of the condition of the common people

than the ratio which this class bears to the whole society. At present,

the men, women, and children who receive relief appear from the official

returns to be, in bad years, one tenth of the inhabitants of England,

and, in good years, one thirteenth. Gregory King estimated them in his

time at about a fourth; and this estimate, which all our respect for

his authority will scarcely prevent us from calling extravagant, was

pronounced by Davenant eminently judicious.

We are not quite without the means of forming an estimate for ourselves.

The poor rate was undoubtedly the heaviest tax borne by our ancestors in

those days. It was computed, in the reign of Charles the Second, at near

seven hundred thousand pounds a year, much more than the produce either

of the excise or of the customs, and little less than half the entire

revenue of the crown. The poor rate went on increasing rapidly, and

appears to have risen in a short time to between eight and nine hundred

thousand a year, that is to say, to one sixth of what it now is. The

population was then less than a third of what it now is. The minimum

of wages, estimated in money, was half of what it now is; and we can

therefore hardly suppose that the average allowance made to a pauper can

have been more than half of what it now is. It seems to follow that the

proportion of the English people which received parochial relief then

must have been larger than the proportion which receives relief now. It

is good to speak on such questions with diffidence: but it has certainly

never yet been proved that pauperism was a less heavy burden or a less

serious social evil during the last quarter of the seventeenth century

than it is in our own time. [202]

In one respect it must be admitted that the progress of civilization has

diminished the physical comforts of a portion of the poorest class. It

has already been mentioned that, before the Revolution, many thousands

of square miles, now enclosed and cultivated, were marsh, forest, and

heath. Of this wild land much was, by law, common, and much of what was

not common by law was worth so little that the proprietors suffered it

to be common in fact. In such a tract, squatters and trespassers were

tolerated to an extent now unknown. The peasant who dwelt there could,

at little or no charge, procure occasionally some palatable addition to

his hard fare, and provide himself with fuel for the winter. He kept a

flock of geese on what is now an orchard rich with apple blossoms.

He snared wild fowl on the fell which has long since been drained and

divided into corn-fields and turnip fields. He cut turf among the furze

bushes on the moor which is now a meadow bright with clover and renowned

for butter and cheese. The progress of agriculture and the increase of

population necessarily deprived him of these privileges. But against

this disadvantage a long list of advantages is to be set off. Of the

blessings which civilisation and philosophy bring with them a large

proportion is common to all ranks, and would, if withdrawn, be missed

as painfully by the labourer as by the peer. The market-place which the

rustic can now reach with his cart in an hour was, a hundred and sixty

years ago, a day's journey from him. The street which now affords to

the artisan, during the whole night, a secure, a convenient, and a

brilliantly lighted walk was, a hundred and sixty years ago, so dark

after sunset that he would not have been able to see his hand, so ill

paved that he would have run constant risk of breaking his neck, and so

ill watched that he would have been in imminent danger of being knocked

down and plundered of his small earnings. Every bricklayer who falls

from a scaffold, every sweeper of a crossing who is run over by a

carriage, may now have his wounds dressed and his limbs set with a skill

such as, a hundred and sixty years ago, all the wealth of a great

lord like Ormond, or of a merchant prince like Clayton, could not have

purchased. Some frightful diseases have been extirpated by science;

and some have been banished by police. The term of human life has been

lengthened over the whole kingdom, and especially in the towns. The year

1685 was not accounted sickly; yet in the year 1685 more than one in

twenty-three of the inhabitants of the capital died. [203] At present

only one inhabitant of the capital in forty dies annually. The

difference in salubrity between the London of the nineteenth century

and the London of the seventeenth century is very far greater than the

difference between London in an ordinary year and London in a year of

cholera.

Still more important is the benefit which all orders of society, and

especially the lower orders, have derived from the mollifying influence

of civilisation on the national character. The groundwork of that

character has indeed been the same through many generations, in the

sense in which the groundwork of the character of an individual may be

said to be the same when he is a rude and thoughtless schoolboy and when

he is a refined and accomplished man. It is pleasing to reflect that the

public mind of England has softened while it has ripened, and that we

have, in the course of ages, become, not only a wiser, but also a kinder

people. There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature

of the seventeenth century which does not contain some proof that our

ancestors were less humane than their posterity. The discipline of

workshops, of schools, of private families, though not more efficient

than at present, was infinitely harsher. Masters, well born and bred,

were in the habit of beating their servants. Pedagogues knew no way of

imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils. Husbands, of decent

station, were not ashamed to beat their wives. The implacability of

hostile factions was such as we can scarcely conceive. Whigs were

disposed to murmur because Stafford was suffered to die without seeing

his bowels burned before his face. Tories reviled and insulted Russell

as his coach passed from the Tower to the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn

Fields. [204] As little mercy was shown by the populace to sufferers of

a humbler rank. If an offender was put into the pillory, it was well

if he escaped with life from the shower of brickbats and paving stones.

[205] If he was tied to the cart's tail, the crowd pressed round him,

imploring the hangman to give it the fellow well, and make him howl.

[206] Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure to Bridewell on court

days for the purpose of seeing the wretched women who beat hemp there

whipped. [207] A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman

burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt for a galled

horse or an overdriven ox. Fights compared with which a boxing match is

a refined and humane spectacle were among the favourite diversions of a

large part of the town. Multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack each

other to pieces with deadly weapons, and shouted with delight when one

of the combatants lost a finger or an eye. The prisons were hells on

earth, seminaries of every crime and of every disease. At the assizes

the lean and yellow culprits brought with them from their cells to the

dock an atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged them

signally on bench, bar, and jury. But on all this misery society looked

with profound indifference. Nowhere could be found that sensitive

and restless compassion which has, in our time, extended a powerful

protection to the factory child, to the Hindoo widow, to the negro

slave, which pries into the stores and watercasks of every emigrant

ship, which winces at every lash laid on the back of a drunken

soldier, which will not suffer the thief in the hulks to be ill fed or

overworked, and which has repeatedly endeavoured to save the life

even of the murderer. It is true that compassion ought, like all other

feelings, to be under the government of reason, and has, for want of

such government, produced some ridiculous and some deplorable effects.

But the more we study the annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice

that we live in a merciful age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred,

and in which pain, even when deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from

a sense of duty. Every class doubtless has gained largely by this great

moral change: but the class which has gained most is the poorest, the

most dependent, and the most defenceless.

The general effect of the evidence which has been submitted to the

reader seems hardly to admit of doubt. Yet, in spite of evidence, many

will still image to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more

pleasant country than the England in which we live. It may at first

sight seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward with

eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret.

But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily

be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of

the state in which we actually are. That impatience, while it stimulates

us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their

happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful in us to be

constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving.

But, in truth, there is constant improvement precisely because there is

constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present,

we should cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the

future. And it is natural that, being dissatisfied with the present, we

should form a too favourable estimate of the past.

In truth we are under a deception similar to that which misleads the

traveller in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and

bare: but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of

refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward and find nothing but sand

where an hour before they had seen a lake. They turn their eyes and see

a lake where, an hour before, they were toiling through sand. A similar

illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress

from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and

civilisation. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall

find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It

is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times

when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would

be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers

breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a

modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege

reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the

purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of

our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than

they now die on the coast of Guiana. We too shall, in our turn, be

outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth

century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably

paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may

receive ten shillings a day; that labouring men may be as little used to

dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that sanitary police

and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average

length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now

unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent

and thrifty working man. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that

the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited

the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen

Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all

classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did

not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the

splendour of the rich.