The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 1
by Thomas Babbington Macaulay
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
Return to Part 1 of 2

The magnificence displayed by the first civic magistrate was
almost regal. The gilded coach, indeed, which is now annually
admired by the crowd, was not yet a part of his state. On great
occasions he appeared on horseback, attended by a long cavalcade
inferior in magnificence only to that which, before a coronation,
escorted the sovereign from the Tower to Westminster. The Lord
Mayor was never seen in public without his rich robe, his hood of
black velvet, his gold chain, his jewel, and a great attendance
of harbingers and guards.111 Nor did the world find anything
ludicrous in the pomp which constantly surrounded him. For it was
not more than became the place which, as wielding the strength
and representing the dignity of the City of London, he was
entitled to occupy in the State. That City, being then not only
without equal in the country, but without second, had, during
five and forty years, exercised almost as great an influence on
the politics of England as Paris has, in our own time, exercised
on the politics of France. In intelligence London was greatly in
advance of every other part of the kingdom. A government,
supported and trusted by London, could in a day obtain such
pecuniary means as it would have taken months to collect from the
rest of the island. Nor were the military resources of the
capital to be despised. The power which the Lord Lieutenants
exercised in other parts of the kingdom was in London entrusted
to a Commission of eminent citizens. Under the order of this
Commission were twelve regiments of foot and two regiments of
horse. An army of drapers' apprentices and journeymen tailors,
with common councilmen for captains and aldermen for colonels,
might not indeed have been able to stand its ground against
regular troops; but there were then very few regular troops in
the kingdom. A town, therefore, which could send forth, at an
hour's notice, thousands of men, abounding in natural courage,
provided with tolerable weapons, and not altogether untinctured
with martial discipline, could not but be a valuable ally and a
formidable enemy. It was not forgotten that Hampden and Pym had
been protected from lawless tyranny by the London trainbands;
that, in the great crisis of the civil war, the London trainbands
had marched to raise the siege of Gloucester; or that, in the
movement against the military tyrants which followed the downfall
of Richard Cromwell, the London trainbands had borne a signal
part. In truth, it is no exaggeration to say that, but for the
hostility of the City, Charles the First would never have been
vanquished, and that, without the help of the City, Charles the
Second could scarcely have been restored.

These considerations may serve to explain why, in spite of that
attraction which had, during a long course of years, gradually
drawn the aristocracy westward, a few men of high rank had
continued, till a very recent period, to dwell in the vicinity of
the Exchange and of the Guildhall. Shaftesbury and Buckingham,
while engaged in bitter and unscrupulous opposition to the
government, had thought that they could nowhere carry on their
intrigues so conveniently or so securely as under the protection
of the City magistrates and the City militia. Shaftesbury had
therefore lived in Aldersgate Street, at a house which may still
be easily known by pilasters and wreaths, the graceful work of
Inigo. Buckingham had ordered his mansion near Charing Cross,
once the abode of the Archbishops of York, to be pulled down;
and, while streets and alleys which are still named after him
were rising on that site, chose to reside in Dowgate.112

These, however, were rare exceptions. Almost all the noble
families of England had long migrated beyond the walls. The
district where most of their town houses stood lies between the
city and the regions which are now considered as fashionable. A
few great men still retained their hereditary hotels in the
Strand. The stately dwellings on the south and west of Lincoln's
Inn Fields, the Piazza of Covent Garden, Southampton Square,
which is now called Bloomsbury Square, and King's Square in Soho
Fields, which is now called Soho Square, were among the favourite
spots. Foreign princes were carried to see Bloomsbury Square, as
one of the wonders of England.113 Soho Square, which had just
been built, was to our ancestors a subject of pride with which
their posterity will hardly sympathise. Monmouth Square had been
the name while the fortunes of the Duke of Monmouth flourished;
and on the southern side towered his mansion. The front, though
ungraceful, was lofty and richly adorned. The walls of the
principal apartments were finely sculptured with fruit, foliage,
and armorial bearings, and were hung with embroidered satin.114
Every trace of this magnificence has long disappeared; and no
aristocratical mansion is to be found in that once aristocratical
quarter. A little way north from Holborn, and on the verge of the
pastures and corn-fields, rose two celebrated palaces, each with
an ample garden. One of them, then called Southampton House, and
subsequently Bedford House, was removed about fifty years ago to
make room for a new city, which now covers with its squares,
streets, and churches, a vast area, renowned in the seventeenth
century for peaches and snipes. The other, Montague House,
celebrated for its frescoes and furniture, was, a few months
after the death of Charles the Second, burned to the ground, and
was speedily succeeded by a more magnificent Montague House,
which, having been long the repository of such various and
precious treasures of art, science, and learning as were scarcely
ever before assembled under a single roof, has now given place to
an edifice more magnificent still.115

Nearer to the Court, on a space called St. James's Fields, had
just been built St. James's Square and Jermyn Street. St. James's
Church had recently been opened for the accommodation of the
inhabitants of this new quarter.116 Golden Square, which was in
the next generation inhabited by lords and ministers of state,
had not yet been begun. Indeed the only dwellings to be seen on
the north of Piccadilly were three or four isolated and almost
rural mansions, of which the most celebrated was the costly pile
erected by CIarendon, and nicknamed Dunkirk House. It had been
purchased after its founder's downfall by the Duke of Albemarle.
The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street still preserve the
memory of the site.

He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded
part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and, was
sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock.117 On the
north the Oxford road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred
yards to the south were the garden walls of a few great houses
which were considered as quite out of town. On the west was a
meadow renowned for a spring from which, long afterwards, Conduit
Street was named. On the east was a field not to be passed
without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in a
place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years
before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the
dead carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly
believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and
could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life. No
foundations were laid there till two generations had passed
without any return of the pestilence, and till the ghastly spot
had long been surrounded by buildings.118

We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of the
streets and squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The
great majority of the houses, indeed. have, since that time, been
wholly, or in great part, rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts
of the capital could be placed before us such as they then were,
we should be disgusted by their squalid appearance, and poisoned
by their noisome atmosphere.

In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the
dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought,
cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the
thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of
Durham.119

The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space where the
rabble congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardigan
House and Winchester House, to hear mountebanks harangue, to see
bears dance, and to set dogs at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every
part of the area. Horses were exercised there. The beggars were
as noisy and importunate as in the worst governed cities of the
Continent. A Lincoln's Inn mumper was a proverb. The whole
fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every charitably
disposed grandee in the neighbourhood, and as soon as his
lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in
crowds to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many
accidents, and of some legal proceedings, till, in the reign of
George the Second, Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, was
knocked down and nearly killed in the middle of the Square. Then
at length palisades were set up, and a pleasant garden laid
out.120

Saint James's Square was a receptacle for all the offal and
cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. At
one time a cudgel player kept the ring there. At another time an
impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a shed for
rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons in which the
first magnates of the realm, Norfolk, Ormond, Kent, and Pembroke,
gave banquets and balls. It was not till these nuisances had
lasted through a whole generation, and till much had been written
about them, that the inhabitants applied to Parliament for
permission to put up rails, and to plant trees.121

When such was the state of the region inhabited by the most
luxurious portion of society, we may easily believe that the
great body of the population suffered what would now be
considered as insupportable grievances. The pavement was
detestable: all foreigners cried shame upon it. The drainage was
so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon became torrents.
Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury with which
these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill,
bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable
filth from the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. This flood
was profusely thrown to right and left by coaches and carts. To
keep as far from the carriage road as possible was therefore the
wish of every pedestrian. The mild and timid gave the wall. The
bold and athletic took it. If two roisterers met they cocked
their hats in each other's faces, and pushed each other about
till the weaker was shoved towards the kennel. If he was a mere
bully he sneaked off, mattering that he should find a time. If he
was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind
Montague House.122

The houses were not numbered. There would indeed have been little
advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen,
porters, and errand boys of London, a very small proportion could
read. It was necessary to use marks which the most ignorant could
understand. The shops were therefore distinguished by painted or
sculptured signs, which gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the
streets. The walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through
an endless succession of Saracens' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears,
and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer
required for the direction of the common people.

When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking
about London became serious indeed. The garret windows were
opened, and pails were emptied, with little regard to those who
were passing below. Falls, bruises and broken bones were of
constant occurrence. For, till the last year of the reign of
Charles the Second, most of the streets were left in profound
darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity:
yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceable citizens as another
class of ruffians. It was a favourite amusement of dissolute
young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking
windows, upsetting sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude
caresses to pretty women. Several dynasties of these tyrants had,
since the Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns and
Tityre Tus had given place to the Hectors, and the Hectors had
been recently succeeded by the Scourers. At a later period arose
the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet more dreaded name of
Mohawk.123 The machinery for keeping the peace was utterly
contemptible. There was an Act of Common Council which provided
that more than a thousand watchmen should be constantly on the
alert in the city, from sunset to sunrise, and that every
inhabitant should take his turn of duty. But this Act was
negligently executed. Few of those who were summoned left their
homes; and those few generally found it more agreeable to tipple
in alehouses than to pace the streets.124

It ought to be noticed that, in the last year of the reign of
Charles the Second, began a great change in the police of London,
a change which has perhaps added as much to the happiness of the
body of the people as revolutions of much greater fame. An
ingenious projector, named Edward Heming, obtained letters patent
conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of
lighting up London. He undertook, for a moderate consideration,
to place a light before every tenth door, on moonless nights,
from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and from six to twelve of the clock.
Those who now see the capital all the year round, from dusk to
dawn, blazing with a splendour beside which the illuminations for
La Hogue and Blenheim would have looked pale, may perhaps smile
to think of Heming's lanterns, which glimmered feebly before one
house in ten during a small part of one night in three. But such
was not the feeling of his contemporaries. His scheme was
enthusiastically applauded, and furiously attacked. The friends
of improvement extolled him as the greatest of all the
benefactors of his city. What, they asked, were the boasted
inventions of Archimedes, when compared with the achievement of
the man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day? In
spite of these eloquent eulogies the cause of darkness was not
left undefended. There were fools in that age who opposed the
introduction of what was called the new light as strenuously as
fools in our age have opposed the introduction of vaccination and
railroads, as strenuously as the fools of an age anterior to the
dawn of history doubtless opposed the introduction of the plough
and of alphabetical writing. Many years after the date of
Heming's patent there were extensive districts in which no lamp
was seen.125

We may easily imagine what, in such times, must have been the
state of the quarters of London which were peopled by the
outcasts of society. Among those quarters one had attained a
scandalous preeminence. On the confines of the City and the
Temple had been founded, in the thirteenth century, a House of
Carmelite Friars, distinguished by their white hoods. The
precinct of this house had, before the Reformation, been a
sanctuary for criminals, and still retained the privilege of
protecting debtors from arrest. Insolvents consequently were to
be found in every dwelling, from cellar to garret. Of these a
large proportion were knaves and libertines, and were followed to
their asylum by women more abandoned than themselves. The civil
power was unable to keep order in a district swarming with such
inhabitants; and thus Whitefriars became the favourite resort of
all who wished to be emancipated from the restraints of the law.
Though the immunities legally belonging to the place extended
only to cases of debt, cheats, false witnesses, forgers, and
highwaymen found refuge there. For amidst a rabble so desperate
no peace officer's life was in safety. At the cry of "Rescue,"
bullies with swords and cudgels, and termagant hags with spits
and broomsticks, poured forth by hundreds; and the intruder was
fortunate if he escaped back into Fleet Street, hustled,
stripped, and pumped upon. Even the warrant of the Chief Justice
of England could not be executed without the help of a company of
musketeers. Such relics of the barbarism of the darkest ages were
to be found within a short walk of the chambers where Somers was
studying history and law, of the chapel where Tillotson was
preaching, of the coffee house where Dryden was passing judgment
on poems and plays, and of the hall where the Royal Society was
examining the astronomical system of Isaac Newton.126

Each of the two cities which made up the capital of England had
its own centre of attraction. In the metropolis of commerce the
point of convergence was the Exchange; in the metropolis of
fashion the Palace. But the Palace did not retain influence so
long as the Exchange. The Revolution completely altered the
relations between the Court and the higher classes of society. It
was by degrees discovered that the King, in his individual
capacity, had very little to give; that coronets and garters,
bishoprics and embassies, lordships of the Treasury and
tellerships of the Exchequer, nay, even charges in the royal stud
and bedchamber, were really bestowed, not by him, but by  his
advisers. Every ambitious and covetous man perceived that he
would consult his own interest far better by acquiring the
dominion of a Cornish borough, and by rendering good service to
the ministry during a critical session, than by becoming the
companion, or even the minion, of his prince. It was therefore in
the antechambers, not of George the First and of George the
Second, but of Walpole and of Pelham, that the daily crowd of
courtiers was to be found. It is also to be remarked that the
same Revolution, which made it impossible that our Kings should
use the patronage of the state merely for the purpose of
gratifying their personal predilections, gave us several Kings
unfitted by their education and habits to be gracious and affable
hosts. They had been born and bred on the Continent. They never
felt themselves at home in our island. If they spoke our
language, they spoke it inelegantly and with effort. Our national
character they never fully understood. Our national manners they
hardly attempted to acquire. The most important part of their
duty they performed better than any ruler who preceded them: for
they governed strictly according to law: but they could not be
the first gentlemen of the realm, the heads of polite society. If
ever they unbent, it was in a very small circle where hardly an
English face was to be seen; and they were never so happy as when
they could escape for a summer to their native land. They had
indeed their days of reception for our nobility and gentry; but
the reception was a mere matter of form, and became at last as
solemn a ceremony as a funeral.

Not such was the court of Charles the Second. Whitehall, when he
dwelt there, was the focus of political intrigue and of
fashionable gaiety. Half the jobbing and half the flirting of the
metropolis went on under his roof. Whoever could make himself
agreeable to the prince, or could secure the good offices of the
mistress, might hope to rise in the world without rendering any
service to the government, without being even known by sight to
any minister of state. This courtier got a frigate, and that a
company; a third, the pardon of a rich offender; a fourth, a
lease of crown land on easy terms. If the King notified his
pleasure that a briefless lawyer should be made a judge, or that
a libertine baronet should be made a peer, the gravest
counsellors, after a little murmuring, submitted.127 Interest,
therefore, drew a constant press of suitors to the gates of the
palace; and those gates always stood wide. The King kept open
house every day, and all day long, for the good society of
London, the extreme Whigs only excepted. Hardly any gentleman had
any difficulty in making his way to the royal presence. The levee
was exactly what the word imports. Some men of quality came every
morning to stand round their master, to chat with him while his
wig was combed and his cravat tied, and to accompany him in his
early walk through the Park. All persons who had been properly
introduced might, without any special invitation, go to see him
dine, sup, dance, and play at hazard, and might have the pleasure
of hearing him tell stories, which indeed he told remarkably
well, about his flight from Worcester, and about the misery which
he had endured when he was a state prisoner in the hands of the
canting meddling preachers of Scotland. Bystanders whom His
Majesty recognised often came in for a courteous word. This
proved a far more successful kingcraft than any that his father
or grandfather had practiced. It was not easy for the most
austere republican of the school of Marvel to resist the,
fascination of so much good humour and affability; and many a
veteran Cavalier, in whose heart the remembrance of unrequited
sacrifices and services had been festering during twenty years,
was compensated in one moment for wounds and sequestrations by
his sovereign's kind nod, and "God bless you, my old friend!"

Whitehall naturally became the chief staple of news. Whenever
there was a rumour that anything important had happened or was
about to happen, people hastened thither to obtain intelligence
from the fountain head. The galleries presented the appearance of
a modern club room at an anxious time. They were full of people
enquiring whether the Dutch mail was in, what tidings the express
from France had brought, whether John Sobiesky had beaten the
Turks, whether the Doge of Genoa was really at Paris These were
matters about which it was safe to talk aloud. But there were
subjects concerning which information was asked and given in
whispers. Had Halifax got the better of Rochester? Was there to
be a Parliament? Was the Duke of York really going to Scotland?
Had Monmouth really been summoned from the Hague? Men tried to
read the countenance of every minister as he went through the
throng to and from the royal closet. All sorts of auguries were
drawn from the tone in which His Majesty spoke to the Lord
President, or from the laugh with which His Majesty honoured a
jest of the Lord Privy Seal; and in a few hours the hopes and
fears inspired by such slight indications had spread to all the
coffee houses from Saint James's to the Tower.128

The coffee house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention. It
might indeed at that time have been not improperly called a most
important political institution. No Parliament had sat for years
The municipal council of the City had ceased to speak the sense
of the citizens. Public meetings, harangues, resolutions, and the
rest of the modern machinery of agitation had not yet come into
fashion. Nothing resembling the modern newspaper existed. In such
circumstances the coffee houses were the chief organs through
which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself.

The first of these establishments had been set up by a Turkey
merchant, who had acquired among the Mahometans a taste for their
favourite beverage. The convenience of being able to make
appointments in any part of the town, and of being able to pass
evenings socially at a very small charge, was so great that the
fashion spread fast. Every man of the upper or middle class went
daily to his coffee house to learn the news and to discuss it.
Every coffee house had one or more orators to whose eloquence the
crowd listened with admiration, and who soon became, what the
journalists of our time have been called, a fourth Estate of the
realm. The Court had long seen with uneasiness the growth of this
new power in the state. An attempt had been made, during Danby's
administration, to close the coffee houses. But men of all
parties missed their usual places of resort so much that there
was an universal outcry. The government did not venture, in
opposition to a feeling so strong and general, to enforce a
regulation of which the legality might well be questioned. Since
that time ten years had elapsed, and during those years the
number and influence of the coffee houses had been constantly
increasing. Foreigners remarked that the coffee house was that
which especially distinguished London from all other cities; that
the coffee house was the Londoner's home, and that those who
wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived
in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the
Grecian or the Rainbow. Nobody was excluded from these places who
laid down his penny at the bar. Yet every rank and profession,
and every shade of religious and political opinion, had its own
headquarters. There were houses near Saint James's Park where
fops congregated, their heads and shoulders covered with black or
flaxen wigs, not less ample than those which are now worn by the
Chancellor and by the Speaker of the House of Commons. The wig
came from Paris and so did the rest of the fine gentleman's
ornaments, his embroidered coat, his fringed gloves, and the
tassel which upheld his pantaloons. The conversation was in that
dialect which, long after it had ceased to be spoken in
fashionable circles, continued, in the mouth of Lord Foppington,
to excite the mirth of theatres.129 The atmosphere was like that
of a perfumer's shop. Tobacco in any other form than that of
richly scented snuff was held in abomination. If any clown,
ignorant of the usages of the house, called for a pipe, the
sneers of the whole assembly and the short answers of the waiters
soon convinced him that he had better go somewhere else. Nor,
indeed, would he have had far to go. For, in general the coffee
rooms reeked with tobacco like a guardroom: and strangers
sometimes expressed their surprise that so many people should
leave their own firesides to sit in the midst of eternal fog and
stench. Nowhere was the smoking more constant than at Will's.
That celebrated house, situated between Covent Garden and Bow
Street, was sacred to polite letters. There the talk was about
poetical justice and the unities of place and time. There was a
faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and
the ancients. One group debated whether Paradise Lost ought not
to have been in rhyme. To another an envious poetaster
demonstrated that Venice Preserved ought to have been hooted from
the stage. Under no roof was a greater variety of figures to be
seen. There were Earls in stars and garters, clergymen in
cassocks and bands, pert Templars, sheepish lads from the
Universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats of
frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John
Dryden sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook
by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the
Laureate, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy or of
Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch
from his snuff box was an honour sufficient to turn the head of a
young enthusaist. There were coffee houses where the first
medical men might be consulted. Doctor John Radcliffe, who, in
the year 1685, rose to the largest practice in London, came
daily, at the hour when the Exchange was full, from his house in
Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the capital, to
Garraway's, and was to be found, surrounded by surgeons and
apothecaries, at a particular table. There were Puritan coffee
houses where no oath was heard, and where lankhaired men
discussed election and reprobation through their noses; Jew
coffee houses where darkeyed money changers from Venice and
Amsterdam greeted each other; and Popish coffee houses where, as
good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their cups,
another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the King.130

These gregarious habits had no small share in forming the
character of the Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, a
different being from the rustic Englishman. There was not then
the intercourse which now exists between the two classes. Only
very great men were in the habit of dividing the year between
town and country. Few esquires came to the capital thrice in
their lives. Nor was it yet the practice of all citizens in easy
circumstances to breathe the fresh air of the fields and woods
during some weeks of every summer. A cockney, in a rural village,
was stared at as much as if he had intruded into a Kraal of
Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire or
Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily
distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar.
His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed at
the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters,
and stood under the waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent
subject for the operations of swindlers and barterers. Bullies
jostled him into the kennel. Hackney coachmen splashed him from
head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge
pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the
splendour of the Lord Mayor's show. Moneydroppers, sore from the
cart's tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him
the most honest friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted
women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed
themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he asked
his way to Saint James's, his informants sent him to Mile End. If
he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit
purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of
second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would not
go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee house, he became a
mark for the insolent derision of fops and the grave waggery of
Templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion,
and there, in the homage of his tenants and the conversation of
his boon companions, found consolation for the vexatious and
humiliations which he had undergone. There he was once more a
great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the
assizes he took his seat on the bench near the Judge, or when at
the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.

The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements
of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our
ancestors found in passing from place to place. Of all
inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted,
those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the
civilisation of our species. Every improvement of the means of
locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as
materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the
various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove
national and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all the
branches of the great human family. In the seventeenth century
the inhabitants of London were, for almost every practical
purpose, farther from Reading than they now are from Edinburgh,
and farther from Edinburgh than they now are from Vienna.

The subjects of Charles the Second were not, it is true, quite
unacquainted with that principle which has, in our own time,
produced an unprecedented revolution in human affairs, which has
enabled navies to advance in face of wind and tide, and brigades
of troops, attended by all their baggage and artillery, to
traverse kingdoms at a pace equal to that of the fleetest race
horse. The Marquess of Worcester had recently observed the
expansive power of moisture rarefied by heat. After many
experiments he had succeeded in constructing a rude steam engine,
which he called a fire water work, and which he pronounced to be
an admirable and most forcible instrument of propulsion.131 But
the Marquess was suspected to be a madman, and known to be a
Papist. His inventions, therefore found no favourable reception.
His fire water work might, perhaps, furnish matter for
conversation at a meeting of the Royal Society, but was not
applied to any practical purpose. There were no railways, except
a few made of timber, on which coals were carried from the mouths
of the Northumbrian pits to the banks of the Tyne.132 There was
very little internal communication by water. A few attempts had
been made to deepen and embank the natural streams, but with
slender success. Hardly a single navigable canal had been even
projected. The English of that day were in the habit of talking
with mingled admiration and despair of the immense trench by
which Lewis the Fourteenth had made a junction between the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They little thought that their
country would, in the course of a few generations, be
intersected, at the cost of private adventurers, by artificial
rivers making up more than four times the length of the Thames,
the Severn, and the Trent together.

It was by the highways that both travellers and goods generally
passed from place to place; and those highways appear to have
been far worse than might have been expected from the degree of
wealth and civilisation which the nation had even then attained.
On the best lines of communication the ruts were deep, the
descents precipitous, and the way often such as it was hardly
possible to distinguish, in the dusk, from the unenclosed heath
and fen which lay on both sides. Ralph Thorseby, the antiquary,
was in danger of losing his way on the great North road, between
Barnby Moor and Tuxford, and actually lost his way between
Doncaster and York.133 Pepys and his wife, travelling in their
own coach, lost their way between Newbury and Reading. In the
course of the same tour they lost their way near Salisbury, and
were in danger of having to pass the night on the plain.134 It
was only in fine weather that the whole breadth of the road was
available for wheeled vehicles. Often the mud lay deep on the
right and the left; and only a narrow track of firm ground rose
above the quagmire.135 At such times obstructions and quarrels
were frequent, and the path was sometimes blocked up during a
long time by carriers, neither of whom would break the way. It
happened, almost every day, that coaches stuck fast, until a team
of cattle could be procured from some neighbouring farm, to tug
them out of the slough. But in bad seasons the traveller had to
encounter inconveniences still more serious. Thoresby, who was in
the habit of travelling between Leeds and the capital, has
recorded, in his Diary, such a series of perils and disasters as
might suffice for a journey to the Frozen Ocean or to the Desert
of Sahara. On one occasion he learned that the floods were out
between Ware and London, that passengers had to swim for their
lives, and that a higgler had perished in the attempt to cross.
In consequence of these tidings he turned out of the high road,
and was conducted across some meadows, where it was necessary for
him to ride to the saddle skirts in water.136 In the course of
another journey he narrowly escaped being swept away by an
inundation of the Trent. He was afterwards detained at Stamford
four days, on account of the state of the roads, and then
ventured to proceed only because fourteen members of the House of
Commons, who were going up in a body to Parliament with guides
and numerous attendants, took him into their company.137 On the
roads of Derbyshire, travellers were in constant fear for their
necks, and were frequently compelled to alight and lead their
beasts.138 The great route through Wales to Holyhead was in such
a state that, in 1685, a viceroy, going to Ireland, was five
hours in travelling fourteen miles, from Saint Asaph to Conway.
Between Conway and Beaumaris he was forced to walk a great part
of the way; and his lady was carried in a litter. His coach was,
with much difficulty, and by the help of many hands, brought
after him entire. In general, carriages were taken to pieces at
Conway, and borne, on the shoulders of stout Welsh peasants, to
the Menai Straits.139 In some parts of Kent and Sussex, none but
the strongest horses could, in winter, get through the bog, in
which, at every step, they sank deep. The markets were often
inaccessible during several months. It is said that the fruits of
the earth were sometimes suffered to rot in one place, while in
another place, distant only a few miles, the supply fell far
short of the demand. The wheeled carriages were, in this
district, generally pulled by oxen.140 When Prince George of
Denmark visited the stately mansion of Petworth in wet weather,
he was six hours in going nine miles; and it was necessary that a
body of sturdy hinds should be on each side of his coach, in
order to prop it. Of the carriages which conveyed his retinue
several were upset and injured. A letter from one of the party
has been preserved, in which the unfortunate courtier complains
that, during fourteen hours, he never once alighted, except when
his coach was overturned or stuck fast in the mud.141

One chief cause of the badness of the roads seems to have been
the defective state of the law. Every parish was bound to repair
the highways which passed through it. The peasantry were forced
to give their gratuitous labour six days in the year. If this was
not sufficient, hired labour was employed, and the expense was
met by a parochial rate. That a route connecting two great towns,
which have a large and thriving trade with each other, should be
maintained at the cost of the rural population scattered between
them is obviously unjust; and this injustice was peculiarly
glaring in the case of the great North road, which traversed very
poor and thinly inhabited districts, and joined very rich and
populous districts. Indeed it was not in the power of the
parishes of Huntingdonshire to mend a high-way worn by the
constant traffic between the West Riding of Yorkshire and London.
Soon after the Restoration this grievance attracted the notice of
Parliament; and an act, the first of our many turnpike acts, was
passed imposing a small toll on travellers and goods, for the
purpose of keeping some parts of this important line of
communication in good repair.142 This innovation, however,
excited many murmurs; and the other great avenues to the capital
were long left under the old system. A change was at length
effected, but not without much difficulty. For unjust and absurd
taxation to which men are accustomed is often borne far more
willingly than the most reasonable impost which is new. It was
not till many toll bars had been violently pulled down, till the
troops had in many districts been forced to act against the
people, and till much blood had been shed, that a good system was
introduced.143 By slow degrees reason triumphed over prejudice;
and our island is now crossed in every direction by near thirty
thousand miles of turnpike road.

On the best highways heavy articles were, in the time of Charles
the Second, generally conveyed from place to place by stage
waggons. In the straw of these vehicles nestled a crowd of
passengers, who could not afford to travel by coach or on
horseback, and who were prevented by infirmity, or by the weight
of their luggage, from going on foot. The expense of transmitting
heavy goods in this way was enormous. From London to Birmingham
the charge was seven pounds a ton; from London to Exeter twelve
pounds a ton.144 This was about fifteen pence a ton for every
mile, more by a third than was afterwards charged on turnpike
roads, and fifteen times what is now demanded by railway
companies. The cost of conveyance amounted to a prohibitory tax
on many useful articles. Coal in particular was never seen except
in the districts where it was produced, or in the districts to
which it could be carried by sea, and was indeed always known in
the south of England by the name of sea coal.

On byroads, and generally throughout the country north of York
and west of Exeter, goods were carried by long trains of
packhorses. These strong and patient beasts, the breed of which
is now extinct, were attended by a class of men who seem to have
borne much resemblance to the Spanish muleteers. A traveller of
humble condition often found it convenient to perform a journey
mounted on a packsaddle between two baskets, under the care of
these hardy guides. The expense of this mode of conveyance was
small. But the caravan moved at a foot's pace; and in winter the
cold was often insupportable.145

The rich commonly travelled in their own carriages, with at least
four horses. Cotton, the facetious poet, attempted to go from
London to the Peak with a single pair, but found at Saint Albans
that the journey would be insupportably tedious, and altered his
Plan.146 A coach and six is in our time never seen, except as
part of some pageant. The frequent mention therefore of such
equipages in old books is likely to mislead us. We attribute to
magnificence what was really the effect of a very disagreeable
necessity. People, in the time of Charles the Second, travelled
with six horses, because with a smaller number there was great
danger of sticking fast in the mire. Nor were even six horses
always sufficient. Vanbrugh, in the succeeding generation,
described with great humour the way in which a country gentleman,
newly chosen a member of Parliament, went up to London. On that
occasion all the exertions of six beasts, two of which had been
taken from the plough, could not save the family coach from being
embedded in a quagmire.

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 right 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 right 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 right. 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 he
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 he 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