perfectly understood. It was known, | At a much later period the ancestors indeed, that some vegetables lately in- of the gigantic quadrupeds, which all troduced into our island, particularly foreigners now class among the chief the turnip, afforded excellent nutriment wonders of London, were brought from in winter to sheep and oxen: but it the marshes of Walcheren; the anceswas not yet the practice to feed cattle tors of Childers and Eclipse from the in this manner. It was therefore by sands of Arabia. Already, however, no means easy to keep them alive during there was among our nobility and gentry the season when the grass is scanty. a passion for the amusements of the They were killed and salted in great turf. The importance of improving our numbers at the beginning of the cold studs by an infusion of new blood was weather; and, during several months, strongly felt; and with this view a coneven the gentry tasted scarcely any siderable number of barbs had lately fresh animal food, except game and been brought into the country. Two river fish, which were consequently men whose authority on such subjects much more important articles in house- was held in great esteem, the Duke of keeping than at present. It appears Newcastle and Sir John Fenwick, profrom the Northumberland Household nounced that the meanest hack ever Book that, in the reign of Henry the imported from Tangier would produce Seventh, fresh meat was never eaten a finer progeny than could be expected even by the gentlemen attendant on a from the best sire of our native breed. great Earl, except during the short in- They would not readily have believed terval between Midsummer and Mi- that a time would come when the princes chaelmas. But in the course of two and nobles of neighbouring lands would centuries an improvement had taken be as eager to obtain horses from Engplace; and under Charles the Second land as ever the English had been to it was not till the beginning of Novem- obtain horses from Barbary.* ber that families laid in their stock of salt provisions, then called Martinmas beef.* of the The increase of vegetable and animal produce, though great, seems Mineral small when compared with the wealth increase of our mineral wealth. country. In 1685 the tin of Cornwall, which had, more than two thousand years before, attracted the Tyrian sails beyond the pillars of Hercules, was still one of the most valuable subterranean productions of the island. The quantity annually extracted from the earth was found to be, some years later, sixteen hundred tons, probably about a third of what it now is.† But the veins of copper which lie in the same region were, in the time of Charles the Second, altogether neglected, nor did any landowner take them into the account in estimating the * King and Davenant as before; The Duke of Newcastle on Horsemanship; Gentleman's mares" were marks of greatness in the time Recreation, 1686. The "dappled Flanders of Pope, and even later. The vulgar proverb, that the grey mare is the better horse, originated, I suspect, in the preference generally given to the grey mares of Flanders over the finest coach horses of England. † See a curious note by Tonkin, in Lord De Dunstanville's edition of Carew's Survey of Cornwall. value of his property. Cornwall and of the reign of Charles the Second, Wales at present yield annually near great part of the iron which was used fifteen thousand tons of copper, worth in this country was imported from near a million and a half sterling; abroad; and the whole quantity cast that is to say, worth about twice as here annually seems not to have exmuch as the annual produce of all ceeded ten thousand tons. At present English mines of all descriptions in the trade is thought to be in a depressed the seventeenth century.* The first state if less than a million of tons are bed of rock salt had been discovered in produced in a year.* Cheshire not long after the Restoration, One mineral, perhaps more important but does not appear to have been than iron itself, remains to be menworked till much later. The salt which tioned. Coal, though very little used was obtained by a rude process from in any species of manufacture, was brine pits was held in no high estima- already the ordinary fuel in some distion. The pans in which the manufac-tricts which were fortunate enough to ture was carried on exhaled a sulphur- possess large beds, and in the capital, ous stench; and, when the evaporation was complete, the substance which was left was scarcely fit to be used with food. Physicians attributed the scorbutic and pulmonary complaints which were common among the English to this unwholesome condiment. It was therefore seldom used by the upper and middle classes; and there was a regular and considerable importation from France. At present our springs and mines not only supply our own immense demand, but send annually more than seven hundred millions of pounds of excellent salt to foreign countries.† Far more important has been the improvement of our iron works. Such works had long existed in our island, but had not prospered, and had been regarded with no favourable eye by the government and by the public. It was not then the practice to employ coal for While these great changes have been smelting the ore; and the rapid con- in progress, the rent of land Increase of sumption of wood excited the alarm of has, as might be expected, been rent. politicians. As early as the reign of almost constantly rising. In some disElizabeth there had been loud com-tricts it has multiplied more than tenplaints that whole forests were cut fold. In some it has not more than down for the purpose of feeding the furnaces: and the parliament had interfered to prohibit the manufacturers from burning timber. The manufacture consequently languished. At the close *Borlase's Natural History of Cornwall, 1758. The quantity of copper now produced, I have taken from parliamentary returns. Davenant, in 1700, estimated the annual produce of all the mines of England at between seven and eight hundred thousand pounds. + Philosophical Transactions, No. 53. Nov. 1669, No. 66. Dec. 1670, No. 103. May 1674, No. 156. Feb. 1683. which could easily be supplied by water *Yarranton, England's Improvement by Sea and Land, 1677; Porter's Progress of the Nation. See also a remarkably perspicuous history, in small compass, of the English iron works, in Mr. M'Culloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire. † See Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684, 1687; Angliæ Metropolis, 1691; M'Culloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire, Part III. chap. ii. (edition of 1847). In 1845 the quantity of coal brought into London appeared, by the parliamentary returns, to be 3,460,000 tons. (1848.) In 1854 the quantity of coal brought into London amounted to 4,378,000 tons. (1857.) doubled. It has probably, on the ave- | Lieutenancy not one in twenty went to rage, quadrupled. Of the rent, a large proportion was divided among the country gentlemen, a class of persons whose position and character it is most important that we should clearly understand; for by their influence and by their passions the fate of the nation was, at several important conjunctures, determined. The coun town once in five years, or had ever in his life wandered so far as Paris. Many lords of manors had received an education differing little from that of their menial servants. The heir of an estate often passed his boyhood and youth at the seat of his family with no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers, and scarce attained learning enough to We should be much mistaken if sign his name to a Mittimus. If he we pictured to ourselves the went to school and to college, he genetry gen- squires of the seventeenth cen- rally returned before he was twenty to tlemen. tury as men bearing a close the seclusion of the old hall, and there, resemblance to their descendants, the unless his mind were very happily concounty members and chairmen of stituted by nature, soon forgot his acaquarter sessions with whom we are demical pursuits in rural business and familiar. The modern country gentle-pleasures. His chief serious employman generally receives a liberal educa- ment was the care of his property. He tion, passes from a distinguished school examined samples of grain, handled to a distinguished college, and has pigs, and, on market days, made barample opportunity to become an ex-gains over a tankard with drovers and cellent scholar. He has generally seen hop merchants. His chief pleasures something of foreign countries. A con- were commonly derived from field siderable part of his life has generally sports and from an unrefined sensuality. been passed in the capital; and the re- His language and pronunciation were finements of the capital follow him into such as we should now expect to hear the country. There is perhaps no class only from the most ignorant clowns. of dwellings so pleasing as the rural His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous seats of the English gentry. In the terms of abuse, were uttered with the parks and pleasure grounds, nature, broadest accent of his province. It was dressed yet not disguised by art, wears easy to discern, from the first words her most alluring form. In the build- which he spoke, whether he came ings, good sense and good taste com- from Somersetshire or Yorkshire. He bine to produce a happy union of the troubled himself little about decorating comfortable and the graceful. The his abode, and, if he attempted decorapictures, the musical instruments, the tion, seldom produced anything but library, would in any other country be deformity. The litter of a farmyard considered as proving the owner to be gathered under the windows of his an eminently polished and accom- bedchamber, and the cabbages and plished man. A country gentleman gooseberry bushes grew close to his who witnessed the revolution was pro- hall door. His table was loaded with bably in receipt of about a fourth part coarse plenty; and guests were corof the rent which his acres now yield dially welcomed to it. But, as the to his posterity. He was, therefore, as habit of drinking to excess was general compared with his posterity, a poor in the class to which he belonged, and man, and was generally under the ne- as his fortune did not enable him to cessity of residing, with little inter- intoxicate large assemblies daily with ruption, on his estate. To travel on the claret or canary, strong beer was the Continent, to maintain an establish- ordinary beverage. The quantity of ment in London, or even to visit Lon- beer consumed in those days was indeed don frequently, were pleasures in which enormous. For beer then was to the only the great proprietors could in- middle and lower classes, not only all dulge. It may be confidently affirmed that beer now is, but all that wine, tea, that of the squires whose names were and ardent spirits now are. It was only then in the Commissions of Peace and at great houses, or on great occasions, that foreign drink was placed on the board. The ladies of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast, retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left the gentlemen to their ale and tobacco. The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table. It was very seldom that the country gentleman caught glimpses of the great world; and what he saw of it tended rather to confuse than to enlighten his understanding. His opinions respecting religion, government, foreign countries and former times, having been derived, not from study, from observation, or from conversation with enlightened companions, but from such traditions as were current in his own small circle, were the opinions of a child. He adhered to them, however, with the obstinacy which is generally found in ignorant men accustomed to be fed with flattery. His animosities were numerous and bitter. He hated Frenchmen and Italians, Scotchmen and Irishmen, Papists and Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, Quakers and Jews. Towards London and Londoners he felt an aversion which more than once produced important political effects. His wife and daughter were in tastes and acquirements below a housekeeper or a stillroom maid of the present day. They stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and made the crust for the venison pasty. arms of all his neighbours, and could tell which of them had assumed supporters without any right, and which of them were so unfortunate as to be greatgrandsons of aldermen. He was a magistrate, and, as such, administered gratuitously to those who dwelt around him a rude patriarchal justice, which, in spite of innumerable blunders and of occasional acts of tyranny, was yet better than no justice at all. He was an officer of the trainbands; and his military dignity, though it might move the mirth of gallants who had served a campaign in Flanders, raised his character in his own eyes and in the eyes of his neighbours. Nor indeed was his soldiership justly a subject of derision. In every county there were elderly gentlemen who had seen service which was no child's play. One had been knighted by Charles the First, after the battle of Edgehill. Another still wore a patch over the scar which he had received at Naseby. A third had defended his old house till Fairfax had blown in the door with a petard. The presence of these old Cavaliers, with their old swords and holsters, and with their old stories about Goring and Lunsford, gave to the musters of militia an earnest and warlike aspect which would otherwise have been wanting. Even those country gentlemen who were too young to have themselves exchanged blows with the cuirassiers of the Parliament had, from childhood, been surrounded by the traces of recent war, and fed with stories of the martial exploits of their fathers and uncles. Thus the character of the English esquire of the seventeenth century was compounded of two elements which we seldom or never find united. His ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be considered as From this description it might be supposed that the English esquire of the seventeenth century did not materially differ from a rustic miller or alehouse keeper of our time. There are, however, some important parts of his character still to be noted, which will greatly modify this estimate. Unlet-indicating a nature and a breeding tered as he was and unpolished, he was still in some most important points a gentleman. He was a member of a proud and powerful aristocracy, and was distinguished by many both of the good and of the bad qualities which belong to aristocrats. His family pride was beyond that of a Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and coats of thoroughly plebeian. Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had, in large measure, both the virtues and the vices which flourish among men set from their birth in high place, and used to respect themselves and to be respected by others. It is not easy for a generation accustomed to find chivalrous sentiments only in company with liberal studies and polished manners to his own Treasury had deserted him, image to itself a man with the deport-and enabled him to gain a complete ment, the vocabulary, and the accent victory over the opposition; nor can of a carter, yet punctilious on matters there be any doubt that they would of genealogy and precedence, and ready have shown equal loyalty to his brother to risk his life rather than see a stain James, if James would, even at the last cast on the honour of his house. It is moment, have refrained from outraging however only by thus joining together their strongest feeling. For there was things seldom or never found together in one institution, and one only, which our own experience, that we can form they prized even more than hereditary a just idea of that rustic aristocracy monarchy; and that institution was which constituted the main strength of the Church of England. Their love of the armies of Charles the First, and the Church was not, indeed, the effect which long supported, with strange of study or meditation. Few among fidelity, the interests of his descend- them could have given any reason, drawn from Scripture or ecclesiastical history, for adhering to her doctrines, her ritual, and her polity; nor were they, as a class, by any means strict observers of that code of morality which is common to all Christian sects. But the experience of many ages proves that men may be ready to fight to the death, and to persecute without pity, for a religion whose creed they do not understand, and whose precepts they habitually disobey.* ants. The clergy. The rural clergy were even more vehement in Toryism than the rural gentry, and were a class scarcely less important. It is to be observed, however, that the individual clergyman, as compared with the individual gentleman, then ranked much lower than in our days. The main sup The gross, uneducated, untravelled country gentleman was commonly a Tory: but, though devotedly attached to hereditary monarchy, he had no partiality for courtiers and ministers. He thought, not without reason, that Whitehall was filled with the most corrupt of mankind, and that of the great sums which the House of Commons had voted to the crown since the Restoration part had been embezzled by cunning politicians, and part squandered on buffoons and foreign courtezans. His stout English heart swelled with indignation at the thought that the government of his country should be subject to French dictation. Being himself generally an old Cavalier, or the son of an old Cavalier, he reflected with bitter resentment on the ingrati-port of the Church was derived from tude with which the Stuarts had requited their best friends. Those who heard him grumble at the neglect with which he was treated, and at the profusion with which wealth was lavished on the bastards of Nell Gwynn and Madam Carwell, would have supposed him ripe for rebellion. But all this ill humour lasted only till the throne was really in danger. It was precisely when those whom the sovereign had loaded with wealth and honours shrank from his side that the country gentle-lows that the rectors and vicars must men, so surly and mutinous in the season of his prosperity, rallied round him in a body. Thus, after murmuring twenty years at the misgovernment of Charles the Second, they came to his rescue in his extremity, when his own Secretaries of State and the Lords of the tithe; and the tithe bore to the rent a much smaller ratio than at present. King estimated the whole income of the parochial and collegiate clergy at only four hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year; Davenant at only five hundred and forty-four thousand a year. It is certainly now more than seven times as great as the larger of these two sums. The average rent of the land has not, according to any estimate, increased proportionally. It fol have been, as compared with the neighbouring knights and squires, much *My notion of the country gentleman of the seventeenth century has been derived from sources too numerous to be recapitulated. I those who have studied the history and the must leave my description to the judgment of lighter literature of that age. |