5

would be told, as Thucydides would have told them, with perspicuous conciseness. They are merely connecting links. But the great characteristics of the age, the loyal enthusiasm of the brave English gentry, the fierce licentiousness of the swearing, dicing, drunken reprobates whose excesses disgraced the royal cause, -the austerity of the Presbyterian Sabbaths in the city, the extravagance of the independent preachers in the camp, the precise garb, the severe countenance, the petty scruples, the affected accent, the absurd_names and phrases 15 which marked the Puritans,— the valor, the policy, the public spirit, which lurked beneath these ungraceful disguises,― the dreams of the raving Fifth-monarchyman, the dreams, scarcely less wild, of the philosophic republican,- all these would enter into the representation, and render it at once more exact and more striking.

The instruction derived from history

the fifteenth century. In the Reformation we should see, not merely a schism which changed the ecclesiastical constitution of England and the mutual relations of the European powers, but a moral war which raged in every family, which set the father against the son, and the son against the father, the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother. Henry would be painted with 10 the skill of Tacitus. We should have the change of his character from his profuse and joyous youth to his savage and imperious old age. We should perceive the gradual progress of selfish and tyrannical passions in a mind not naturally in sensible or ungenerous; and to the last we should detect some remains of that open and noble temper which endeared him to a people whom he oppressed, 20 struggling with the hardness of despotism and the irritability of disease. We should see Elizabeth in all her weakness and in all her strength, surrounded by the handsome favorites whom she never 25 thus written would be of a vivid and trusted, and the wise old statesman whom she never dismissed, uniting in herself the most contradictory qualities of both her parents, the coquetry, the caprice, the petty malice of Anne,- the haughty 30 and resolute spirit of Henry. We have no hesitation in saying that a great artist might produce a portrait of this markable woman at least as striking as that in the novel of Kenilworth, without 35 employing a single trait not authenticated. by ample testimony. In the meantime, we should see arts cultivated, wealth accumulated, the conveniences of life improved. We should see the keeps, where 40 nobles, insecure themselves, spread insecurity around them, gradually giving place to the halls of peaceful opulence, to the oriels of Longleat, and the stately pinnacles of Burleigh. We should see 45 towns extended, deserts cultivated, the hamlets of fisherman turned into wealthy havens, the meal of the peasant improved, and his hut more commodiously furnished. We should see those opinions and feel- 50 ings which produced the great struggle against the House of Stuart slowly growing up in the bosom of private families, before they manifested themselves in parliamentary debates. Then would come the Civil War. Those skirmishes on which Clarendon dwells so minutely

55

cause.

practical character. It would be received
by the imagination as well as by the
reason. It would be not merely traced
on the mind, but branded into it. Many
truths, too, would be learned, which can
be learned in no other manner. As the
history of states is generally written, the
greatest and most momentous revolutions
seem to come upon them like supernatural
inflictions, without warning or
But the fact is, that such revolutions are
almost always the consequences of moral
changes, which have gradually passed on
the mass of the community, and which
ordinarily proceed far, before their
progress is indicated by any public meas-
ure. An intimate knowledge of the do-
mestic history of nations is therefore
absolutely necessary to the prognosis of
political events. A narrative, defective
in this respect, is as useless as a medical
treatise which should pass by all the
symptoms attendant on the early stage of
a disease and mention only what occurs
when the patient is beyond the reach of
remedies.

A historian such as we have been attempting to describe would indeed be an intellectual prodigy. In his mind, powers scarcely compatible with each other must be tempered into an exquisite harmony. We shall sooner see another Shakspere

5

or another Homer. The highest excellence to which any single faculty can be brought would be less surprising than such a happy and delicate combination of qualities. Yet the contemplation of imaginary models is not an unpleasant or useless employment of the mind. It cannot indeed produce perfection; but it produces improvement, and nourishes that generous and liberal fastidiousness which 10 is not inconsistent with the strongest sensibility to merit, and which, while it exalts our conceptions of the art, does not render us unjust to the artist.

(1828)

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

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 a 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 constantly increasing. Foreigners remarked that the coffee-house was that which especially distinguished London 15 from all other cities; that the coffeehouse 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

(FROM VOL. I, CHAP. III, ON THE 20 whether he frequented the Grecian or

STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685)

The coffee-house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention. It might, indeed, at that time have been not im- 25 properly 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, 30 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 35 chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself.

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 theaters. 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.

The first of these establishments had been set up, in the time of the Commonwealth, by a Turkey merchant, who had 40 acquired among the Mahometans a taste for their favorite 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 45 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 50 Nor, indeed, would he have had far to

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 55
with uneasiness the growth of this new
power in the state. An attempt had been

go. For, in general, the coffee-rooms

1 The chief peculiarity of this dialect was that, in a large class of words, the O was pronounced like A. Thus Lord was pronounced Lard. See Vanbrugh's Relapse. Lord Sunderland was a great master of this court tune, as Roger North calls it; and Titus Oates affected it in the hope of passing for a fine gentleman. Examen, 77, 254.

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 English5 man. 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 cap

reeked with tobacco like a guard-room; 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 10 ital thrice in their lives. Nor was it

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

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

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 banterers. 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 splendor of the Lord Mayor's show. Moneydroppers, sore from the cart's tail.

to have been in rime. To another an 15 village was stared at as much as if he 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 gar- 20 ters, 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 25 John Dryden sat. 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 30 Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his. snuff-box was an honor sufficient to turn the head of a young enthusiast. There were coffee-houses where the first med- 35 introduced themselves to him, and apical men might be consulted. Dr. 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 40 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 coffeehouses where no oath was heard, and where lank-haired men discussed election and reprobation through their noses; Jew coffee-houses where dark-eyed money changers from Venice and from Amsterdam greeted each other; and popish cof-50 fee-houses where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their cups, another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the King.1

1 Lettres sur les Anglois; Tom Brown's Tour; Ward's London Spy: The Character of a Coffee House, 1673; Rules and Orders of the Coffee

45

55

peared 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 honor. 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 coffeehouse, he became a mark for the insolent House, 1674: Coffee Houses vindicated, 1675; A Satyr against Coffee; North's Examen, 138. Life of Guildford, 152; Life of Sir Dudley North. 149; Life of Dr. Radcliffe, published by Curl 1715. The liveliest description of Will's is in the City and Country Mouse. There is a remarkable passage about the influence of the coffee house ora tors in Halstead's Succinct Genealogies, printed 1685.

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, 5
found consolation for the vexations 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 10
the bench near the judge, or when at
the muster of the militia he saluted the
Lord Lieutenant.

15

20

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 civilization of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the 25 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 30 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.

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.2 There was very little international 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 Louis the Fourteenth had made a junction between the Atlantic and 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 travelers 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 civilization which the nation had even then attained. On the best lines of communication the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the 35 way often such as it was hardly possible to distinguish, in the dusk, from the uninclosed heath and fen which lay on both sides. Ralph Thoresby, 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. Pepys and his wife, traveling 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. 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.

40

45

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, 50 and which he pronounced to be an admirable and most forcible instrument of propulsion. But the Marquess was suspected to be a madman, and known to be a Paptist. His inventions, therefore, 55 found no favorable reception. His fire 1 Century of Inventions, 1663, No. 68.

2 North's Life of Guildford, 136.

At

3 Thoresby's Diary, Oct. 21, 1680, Aug. 3, 1712. Pepys's Diary, June 12 and 16, 1668.

5 Pepys's Diary, Feb. 28, 1660.

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 inac5 cessible 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

this district, generally pulled by oxen.5 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

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 neighboring farm to tug them out of the slough. But in bad seasons the traveler had to encounter inconveniences still more 10 demand. The wheeled carriages were, in serious. Thoresby, who was in the habit of traveling 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 15 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 at- 20 tempt 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. In the 25 mud. 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 30 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. On the 35 roads of Derbyshire, travelers were in constant fear for their necks, and were frequently compelled to alight and lead their beasts. The great route through Wales to Holyhead was in such a state 40 that, in 1685, a viceroy, going to Ireland, was five hours in traveling fourteen miles, from Saint Asaph to Conway. Between Conway and Beaumaris he was forced to walk great part of the way; 45 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, 50 on the shoulders of stout Welsh peasants, to the Menai Straits. In some parts of 1 Thoresby's Diary, May 17, 1695. Ibid., Dec. 27, 1708.

Tour in Derbyshire, by J. Browne, son of Sir
Thomas Browne, 1662. Cotton's Angler, 1676.
4 Correspondence of Henry, Earl of Clarendon,
Dec. 30, 1685, Jan. 1, 1686.

55

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 labor six days in the year. If this was not sufficient, hired labor 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 highway 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 travelers and goods, for the purpose of keeping some parts of this important line of

5 Postlethwaite's Dict., Roads; History of Hawkhurst, in the Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica. Annals of Queen Anne, 1703, Appendix, No. 3