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sunction of the Royal Society, given instruction to his country. men in planting. Temple, in his intervals of leisure, had tried many experiments in horticulture, and had proved that many delicate fruits, the natives of more favored climates, might, with the help of art, be grown on English ground. Medicine which, in France, was still in abject bondage, and affonded an inexhaustible subject of just ridicule to Moliere, had in England become an experimental and progressive science, and every day made some new advance, in defiance of Hippocrates and Galen. The attention of speculative men had been, for the first time, directed to the important subject of sanitary police. The great plague of 1665 induced them to consider with care the defective architecture, draining, and ventilation of the capital. The great fire of 1666 afforded an opportunity for effecting extensive improvements. The whole matter was diligently examined by the Royal Society; and to the suggestions of that body must be partly attributed the changes which, though far short of what the public welfare required, yet made a wide difference between the new and the old London, and probably put a final close to the ravages of pestilence in our country.* At the same time one of the founders of the society, Sir William Petty, created the science of political arithmetic, the humble but indispensable handmaid of political philosophy. To that period belong the chemical discoveries of Boyle, and the first botanical researches of Sloane. One after another, phantoms which had haunted the world through ages of darkness fled before the light. Astrology and alchymy became jests. Soon there was scarcely a county in which some of the quorum did not smile contemptuously when an old woman was brought before them for riding on broomsticks or giving cattle the murrain. But it was in those noblest and most arduous departments of knowledge in which induction and mathematical demonstration coöperate for the discovery of truth, that the English genius won in that age the most memorable triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of statics on a new foundation. Edmund Halley inves tigated the properties of the atmosphere, the ebb and flow of the sea, the laws of magnetism, and the course of the

experiments and introduced improvements, is well described by Aubrey, Natural History of Wiltshire, 1685.

• Sprat's History of the Royal Society.

comets; or did he shrink from toil, peril, and exile in the cause of science. While he, on the rock of St. Helena, mapped the constellations of the southern hemisphere, our national observatory was rising at Greenwich; and John Flamsteed, the first astronomer royal, was commencing that long series of observations which is never mentioned without respect and gratitude in any part of the globe. But the glory of these men, eminent as they were, is cast into the shade by the transcendent lustre of one immortal name. In Isaac Newton two kinds of intellectual power, which have little in common, and which are not often found together in a very high degree of vigor, but which nevertheless are equally necessary in the most sublime departments of natural philosophy, were united as they have never been united before or since. There may have been minds as happily constituted as his for the cultivation of pure mathematical science; there may have been minds as happily constituted for the cultivation of science purely experimental; but in no other mind have the demonstrative faculty and the inductive faculty coëxisted in such supreme excellence and perfect harmony. Perhaps in an age of Scotists and Thomists even his intellect might have run to waste, as many intellects ran to waste which were inferior only to his. Happily the spirit of the age on which his lot was cast gave the right direction to his mind; and his mind reacted with tenfold force on the spirit of the age. In the year 1685 his fame, though splendid, was only dawning; but his genius was in the meridian. His great work, that work which effected a revolution in the most important provinces of natural philosophy, had been completed, but was not yet published, and was just about to be submitted to the consideration of the Royal Society.

It is not very easy to explain why the nation which was so far before its neighbors in science should in art have been fa behind them all. Yet such was the fact. It is true that in architecture, an art which is half a science, an art in which none but a geometrician can excel, an art which has no standard of grace but what is directly or indirectly dependent on utility, an art of which the creations derive a part, at least, of their majesty from mere bulk, our country could boast of one truly great man, Christopher Wren; and the fire which laid London in ruins had given him an opportunity, unprecedented in modern history, of displaying his powers. The austere beauty of the Athenian portico, the gloomy

sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was, like almost all nis contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps inca pable of appreciating; but no man, born on our side of the Alps, has imitated with so much success the magnificence of the palace-like churches of Italy. Even the superb Levis has left to posterity no work which can bear a comparisor. with Saint Paul's. But at the close of the reign of Charles the Second there was not a single English painter or statuary whose name is now remembered. This sterility is somewhat mysterious; for painters and statuaries were by no means a despised or an ill-paid class. Their social position was at least as high as at present. Their gains, when compared with the wealth of the nation and with the remuneration of other descriptions of intellectual labor, were even large than at present. Indeed the munificent patronage which was extended to artists drew them to our shores in multitudes. Lely, who has preserved to us the rich curls, the full lips, and the languishing eyes of the frail beauties celebrated by Hamilton, was a Westphalian. He had died in 1680, having long lived splendidly, having received the honor of knighthood, and having accumulated a good estate out of the fruits of his skill. His noble collection of drawings and pictures was after his decease, exhibited by the royal permission in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and sold by auction for the almost incredible sum of twenty-six thousand pounds, a sum which bore a greater proportion to the fortunes of the rich men of that day than a hundred thousand pounds would bear to the fortunes of the rich men of our time.* Lely was succeeded by his countryman Godfrey Kneller, who was made first a knight and then a baronet, and who, after keeping up a sumptuous establishment, and after losing much money by unlucky speculations, was still able to bequeath a large fortune to his family. The two Vandeveldes, natives of Holland, had been induced by English liberality to settle here, and had produced for the king and his nobles some of the finest sea pieces in the world. Another Dutchman, Simon Varelst painted glorious sunflowers and tulips for prices such as had never before been known. Verrio, a Neapolitan, covercd ceilings and staircases with Gorgons and Muses, Nymphs and

1683.

Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting. London Gazette, May 31
North's Life of Guildford.

Satyrs, Virtues and Vices, Gods quaffing nectar, and laurelled princes riding in triumph. The income which he derived from his performances enabled him to keep one of the most expensive tables in England. For his pieces at Windsor alone he received seven thousand pounds, a sum then sufficient to make a gentleman of moderate wishes perfectly easy for life, a sum greatly exceeding all that Dryden, during a literary life of forty years, obtained from the booksellers. Verrio's chief assistant and successor, Lewis Laguerre, came from France. The two most celebrated sculptors of that day were also foreigners. Cibber, whose pathetic emblems of Fury and Melancholy still adorn Bedlam, was a Dane. Gibbons, to whose graceful fancy and delicate touch many of our palaces, colleges, and churches owe their finest decorations, was a Dutchman. Even the designs for the coin were made by French medallists. Indeed, it was not till the reign of George the Second that our country could glory in a great painter; and George the Third was on the throne before she had reason to be proud of any of her sculptors.

It is time that this description of the England which Charles the Second governed should draw to a close. Yet one subject of the highest moment still remains untouched. Nothing has as yet been said of the great body of the people, of those who held the ploughs, who tended the oxen, who toiled at the looms of Norwich, and squared the Portland stone for Saint Paul's. Nor can very much be said. The most numerous class is precisely the class respecting which we have the most meagre information. In those times philanthropists did not yet regard it as a sacred duty, nor had demagogues yet found it a lucrative trade, to expatiate on the distress of the laborer. History was too much occupied with courts and camps to spare a line for the hut of the peasant or for the garret of the mechanic. The press now often sends forth in a day a greater quantity of discussion and declamation about the condition of the working man than was published during the twenty-eight years which elapsed between the Restoration and the Revolution. But it would be a great error to infer from the increase of complaint that there has been any increase of misery.

The great criterion of the state of the common people is

The great prices paid to Varelst and Verrio are mer tioned in Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting.

the amount of their wages; and, as four fifths of the common people were, in the seventeenth century, employed in agricu1. ture, it is especially important to ascertain what were then the wages of agricultural industry. On this subject we have the means of arriving at conclusions sufficiently exact for our purpose.

Sir William Petty, whose mere assertion carries great weight, informs us that a laborer was by no means in the lowest state who received for a day's work fourpence with food, or eightpence without food. Four shillings a week, therefore, were, according to Petty's calculation, fair agricul tural wages.*

That this calculation was not remote from the truth, we have abundant proof. About the beginning of the year 1685, the justices of Warwickshire, in the exercise of a power intrusted to them by an act of Elizabeth, fixed, at their quarter sessions, a scale of wages for their county, and notified that every employer who gave more than the authorized sum, and every working man who received more, would be liable to punishment. The wages of the common agricultural laborer, from March to September, they fixed at the precise sum mentioned by Petty, namely, four shillings a week without food. From September to March the wages were to be only three and sixpence a week.†

But in that age, as in ours, the earnings of the peasant were very different in different parts of the kingdom. The wages of Warwickshire were probably about the average, and those of the counties near the Scottish border below it. But there were more favored districts. In the same year, 1685, a gentleman of Devonshire, named. Richard Dunning, published a small tract, in which he described the condition of the poor of that county. That he understood his subject well it is impossible to doubt; for a few months later his work was reprinted, and was, by the magistrates assembled in quarter sessions at Exeter, strongly recommended to the attention of all parochial officers. According to him, the wages of the Dev. onshire peasant were, without food, about five shillings a week.‡

*Petty's Political Arithmetic.

+ Stat. 5 Eliz. c 4 Archæologia, vol. xi.

Plain and Easy Method showing how the Office cf Overseer of the Poor may be managed, by Richard Dunning. 1st edition, 1685 2d edition, 1686.

VOL. I.

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