the mass of the nation, or raised vague desires of revolution. It kept, rather, what was held to be the best company. It entered the palace during the licentiousness of the two former reigns; and, though the court was now become decorous and devout, the nobility, and those who in that day were called "the great," affected free-thinking, and laughed at the evidence of piety in any one of their order. But the spirit of the people rebelled against materialism; if worship, as conducted in the parish church, had no attractive warmth, they gathered round the preacher in the fields, eager to be assured that they had within themselves a spiritual nature and a warrant for their belief in immortality; yet, under the moderating influence of Wesley, combining a fervid reform in religion with unquestioning deference to authority in the state.

English metaphysical philosophy itself bore a character of moderation analogous to English institutions. In disregard to the traditions of the Catholic church, Locke had denied that thought implies an immaterial substance; and Hartley and Priestley asserted that the soul was but of flesh and blood; but the more genial Berkeley, armed with "every virtue," insisted rather on the certain existence of the intellectual world alone, while, from the bench of English bishops, Butler pressed the analogies of the material creation itself into the service of spiritual life. If Hume embodied the logical consequences of the materialist philosophy in the most skilfully constructed system of idealism which the world had ever known, his own countryman, Reid, in works worthy to teach the youth of a republic, illustrated the active powers of man and the reality of right; Adam Smith found a criterion of duty in the universal sentiment of mankind; and the English dissenter, Price, enforced the eternal, necessary, and unchanging distinctions of morality. So philosophic freedom in Britain rebuked its own excesses, and, self-balanced and self-restrained, never sought to throw down the august fabric which had for so many centuries stood before Europe as the citadel of liberty.

The blended respect for aristocracy and for popular rights was impressed upon the courts of law. They were charged with the protection of every individual without distinction, securing to the accused a trial by sworn men, who were taken

from among his peers and held their office for but one short term of service. And especially the judges watched over the personal liberty of every Englishman, with power on the instant to set free any one illegally imprisoned, even though in custody by the king's express command.

At the same time, the judiciary, with a reputation for impartiality in the main well deserved, was by its nature conservative, and by its constitution the associate and the support of the house of lords. Westminster Hall, which had stood through many revolutions and dynasties, and was become venerable from an unchanged existence of five hundred years, sent the first officer in one of its courts, from however humble an origin he might have sprung, to take precedence of the nobility of the realm, and preside in the chamber of peers. That branch of the legislature derived an increase of its dignity from the great lawyers whom the crown, from time to time, was accustomed to ennoble; and, moreover, it formed of itself a part of the judicial system. The house of commons, whose members, from their frequent elections, best knew the temper of the people, possessed exclusively the right to originate votes of supply; but the final judgment on all questions of law respecting property rested with the house of lords.

The same cast of aristocracy, intermingled with popularity, pervaded the systems of education. From climate, compact population, and sober national character, England was capable beyond any other country in the world of a system of popular education. Nevertheless, the mass of its people was left ignorant how to read or write. But the benevolence of earlier and later ages had benefited science by endowments, which in their conception were charity schools, founded by piety for the education of poor men's sons; and the sons of the aristocracy grouped themselves at Eton, or Westminster, or Harrow, or Winchester, round the scholars on the foundation.

The same time-honored constitution marked the universities. As a consequence, the genius of the past claimed a right to linger in their streets, and something of the ancient theory of loyalty long found an asylum in the colleges of Oxford.

The cities were not barred against the influence of the aris

tocracy. The swelling expenses of the government increased its dependence on the moneyed class, and the leading minister needed the confidence of the city as well as of the country and the court. Besides, it was not uncommon to see a wealthy citizen toiling to amass yet greater wealth, that he might purchase land and found a family; or giving his richly dowered daughter in marriage to a peer. The members of the legisla ture listened readily to the petitions of the merchants, who, in their turn, rebelled against the necessity of intrusting the protection of their interests to members of the aristocratic organization as little as they did at the employment of barristers in the halls of justice.

But, if aristocracy was not excluded from towns, it pervaded the whole rural life of England. The climate was not only softened by the milder atmosphere that belongs to the western side of masses of land, but was further modified by the proximity of every part of it to the sea. It knew neither long-continuing heat nor cold, and was more friendly to daily employment without doors throughout the whole year, than any in Europe. The island was "a little world" of its own, with a "happy breed of men" for its inhabitants, in whom the hardihood of the Norman was intermixed with the gentler qualities of the Celt and the Saxon, just as nails are rubbed into steel to harden the Damascus blade. They loved country life, of which the mildness of the clime increased the charms, since every grass and flower and tree that had its home between the remote North and the neighborhood of the tropics would live abroad, and except those only which need a hot sun to unfold their bloom, or fix their aroma, or ripen their fruit, would thrive in perfection; so that no region could show such a varied wood. The moisture of the sky favored a soil not naturally rich, and clothed the earth in perpetual verdure. Nature had its attractions even in winter. The ancient trees were stripped indeed of their foliage, so that they showed more clearly their fine proportions and the undisturbed nests of the noisy rooks among their boughs; but the air was so mild that flocks and herds still grazed on the freshly springing herbage, and the deer found shelter enough by crouching among the fern; the smoothly shaven, grassy walk was soft and yielding under the foot; nor

was there a month in the year in which the plough was idle. The large landed proprietors dwelt often in houses which had descended to them from the times when England was gemmed all over with delicate and solid structures of Gothic art. Estates were bounded by the same hedges and ditches, counties by the same lanes, as in William the Conqueror's time, and water-wheels revolved to grind corn just where they had been doing so for at least eight hundred years. Hospitality had its traditions, and for untold centuries Christmas had been the most joyous of the seasons.

The aristocratic system was so completely the ruling element in English history and English life, especially in the country, that it seemed the most natural organization of society, and was even endeared to the dependent people. Hence the manners of the aristocracy, without haughtiness or arrogance, implied rather than expressed the consciousness of undisputed rank.

Yet the privileged class carried their watchfulness over their rural pleasures and interests to an extreme. The life of the farmer from generation to generation was but "an equal conflict between industry and want;" and the laboring poor "with all their thrift did not thrive," with all their ingenious parsimony could barely live without extorting alms. The game laws, parcelling out among the large proprietors the exclusive right of hunting, which had been wrested from the king as too grievous a prerogative, were maintained with relentless severity; and to steal or even to hamstring a sheep was as much punished by death as murder or treason. During the reign of George II., sixty-three new capital offences had been added to the criminal laws, and five new ones, on the average, continued to be discovered annually; so that the criminal code of England, formed under the influence of the gentry, was written in blood.

But this cruelty, while it encouraged and hardened offenders, did not revolt the submissiveness of the rural population. The tenantry, holding lands at a moderate rent, for the most part without permanent leases, transmitting the occupation of them from father to son through many generations, clung to the lord of the manor as ivy to massive old walls. They loved

to live in his light, to lean on his support, to gather round him with affectionate deference, and, by faithful attachment, to win his sympathy and care, happy when he was such a one as merited their love. They caught refinement of their superiors, so that their cottages were carefully neat, with roses and honeysuckles clambering to their roofs. They cultivated the soil in sight of the towers of the church round which reposed the ashes of their ancestors for almost a thousand years. The island was mapped out into territorial parishes, as well as into counties; and the affairs of local interest, the assessment of rates, the care of the poor and of the roads, were intrusted to elected vestries or magistrates, with little interference from the central government. The resident magistrates were unpaid, being taken from among the landed gentry; and the local affairs of the county and all criminal prosecutions of no uncommon importance were settled by them in a body at quarterly sessions, where a kind-hearted landlord often presided, to appall the convict by the earnestness of his rebuke and then to show him mercy by a lenient sentence. All judgments were controlled by fixed law; and, at the assizes, no sentence could be pronounced against the accused but by the consent of impartial men taken from the body of the people.

The climate, so inviting to rural life, was benign to industry of all sorts. It might seem that the population engaged in manufactures would have constituted a separate element not included within the aristocratic system, but the great manufacture of the material not produced at home was still in its infancy. The weaver toiled in his own cottage, and the thread which he used was with difficulty supplied to him sufficiently by the spinners at the wheel of his own family and among his neighbors. Men had not as yet learned by machinery to produce, continuously and uniformly, from the down of cotton, the porous cords of parallel filaments; to attenuate them by gently drawing them out; to twist and extend the threads; and to wind them regularly on pins of wood as fast as they are spun. In 1763, the inconsiderable cotton manufactures of Great Britain, transported from place to place on pack-horses, did not form one two-hundredth part of the production of ninety years later, and were politically of no importance. Not yet had art