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 head quarters. There were houses near Saint James's Park where fops congregated, their The coffee house must not be disThe coffee missed with a cursory mention. houses. 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 news-heads and shoulders covered with black paper 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, in the time of the Commonwealth, 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 Diaries of Pepys, Evelyn, and Teonge, and the Memoirs of Grammont and Reresby. 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.* 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 that 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. *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. One group debated whether Paradise | Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, Lost ought not to have been in rhyme. a different being from the rustic EnglishTo another an envious poetaster de- man. There was not then the intermonstrated that Venice Preserved ought course which now exists between the to have been hooted from the stage. two classes. Only very great men were Under no roof was a greater variety of in the habit of dividing the year befigures to be seen. There were Earls in tween town and country. Few esquires stars and garters, clergymen in cassocks came to the capital thrice in their and bands, pert Templars, sheepish lads lives. Nor was it yet the practice of from the Universities, translators and all citizens in easy circumstances to index makers in ragged coats of frieze. breathe the fresh air of the fields and The great press was to get near the woods during some weeks of every chair where John Dryden sate. In summer. A cockney, in a rural vilwinter that chair was always in the lage, was stared at as much as if he warmest nook by the fire; in summer had intruded into a Kraal of Hottenit stood in the balcony. To bow to the tots. On the other hand, when the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire Racine's last tragedy or of Bossu's manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was treatise on epic poetry, was thought a as easily distinguished from the resiprivilege. A pinch from his snuff box | dent population as a Turk or a Lascar. was an honour sufficient to turn the His dress, his gait, his accent, the manhead of a young enthusiast. There were ner in which he gazed at the shops, coffee houses where the first medical stumbled into the gutters, ran against men might be consulted. Doctor John the porters, and stood under the waterRadcliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose spouts, marked him out as an excellent to the largest practice in London, came subject for the operations of swindlers daily, at the hour when the Exchange and banterers. Bullies jostled him was full, from his house in Bow Street, into the kennel. Hackney coachmen then a fashionable part of the capital, splashed him from head to foot. to Garraway's, and was to be found, Thieves explored with perfect security 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 from 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.* These gregarious habits had no small share in forming the character of the * 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 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 Curll in 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 orators in Halstead's Succinct Genealogies, printed in 1685. 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 St. 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 every thing that nobody else would buy, of secondhand 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 vexations and humiliations which | for conversation at a meeting of the he had undergone. There he was once Royal Society, but was not applied to more a great man, and saw nothing any practical purpose. There were no above himself except when at the railways, except a few made of timber, assizes he took his seat on the bench on which coals were carried from the near the Judge, or when at the muster mouths of the Northumbrian pits to the of the militia he saluted the Lord banks of the Tyne.* There was very Lieutenant. little internal communication by water. A few attempts had been made to deepen and embank the natural streams, of travel of society so imperfect was the but with slender success. Hardly a ling. extreme difficulty which our single navigable canal had been even ancestors found in passing from place projected. The English of that day The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements Difficulty to place. Of all inventions, the alpha- were in the habit of talking with bet and the printing press alone ex-mingled admiration and despair of the cepted, those inventions which abridge immense trench by which Lewis the distance have done most for the civili- Fourteenth had made a junction between sation 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 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. the roads. It was by the highways that both travellers and goods generally Badness of 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 The subjects of Charles the Second then attained. On the best lines of were not, it is true, quite unacquainted communication the ruts were deep, the with that principle which has, in our descents precipitous, and the way often own time, produced an unprecedented such as it was hardly possible to disrevolution in human affairs, which has tinguish, in the dusk, from the unenenabled navies to advance in face of closed heath and fen which lay on both wind and tide, and brigades of troops, sides. Ralph Thoresby, the antiquary, attended by all their baggage and was in danger of losing his way on the artillery, to traverse kingdoms at a pace great North Road, between Barnby equal to that of the fleetest race horse. Moor and Tuxford, and actually lost The Marquess of Worcester had re- his way between Doncaster and York.† cently observed the expansive power of Pepys and his wife, travelling in their moisture rarefied by heat. After many own coach, lost their way between experiments he had succeeded in con- Newbury and Reading. In the course structing a rude steam engine, which of the same tour they lost their way he called a fire water work, and which near Salisbury, and were in danger of he pronounced to be an admirable and having to pass the night on the plain.‡ most forcible instrument of propulsion.* It was only in fine weather that the But the Marquess was suspected to be whole breadth of the road was availa madman, and known to be a Papist. able for wheeled vehicles. Often the His inventions, therefore, found no favourable reception. His fire water work might, perhaps, furnish matter Century of Inventions, 1663, No. 68. * VOL. I. *North's Life of Guildford, 136. 1712. N mud lay deep on the right and the left; | with much difficulty, and by the help and only a narrow track of firm ground of many hands, brought after him enrose above the quagmire.* At such tire. In general, carriages were taken times obstructions and quarrels were to pieces at Conway, and borne, on the frequent, and the path was sometimes shoulders of stout Welsh peasants, to blocked up during a long time by car- the Menai Straits.* In some parts of riers, neither of whom would break the Kent and Sussex, none but the strongway. It happened, almost every day, est horses could, in winter, get through that coaches stuck fast, until a team of the bog, in which, at every step, they cattle could be procured from some sank deep. The markets were often neighbouring farm, to tug them out of inaccessible during several months. It the slough. But in bad seasons the is said that the fruits of the earth traveller had to encounter inconveni- were sometimes suffered to rot in one ences still more serious. Thoresby, who place, while in another place, distant was in the habit of travelling between only a few miles, the supply fell far Leeds and the capital, has recorded, in short of the demand. The wheeled his Diary, such a series of perils and carriages were, in this district, generally disasters as might suffice for a journey pulled by oxen.† When Prince George to the Frozen Ocean or to the Desert of of Denmark visited the stately mansion Sahara. On one occasion he learned of Petworth in wet weather, he was that the floods were out between Ware six hours in going nine miles; and it and London, that passengers had to was necessary that a body of sturdy swim for their lives, and that a higgler hinds should be on each side of his had perished in the attempt to cross. coach, in order to prop it. Of the carIn consequence of these tidings he riages which conveyed his retinue seveturned out of the high road, and was ral were upset and injured. A letter conducted across some meadows, where from one of the party has been preit was necessary for him to ride to the served, in which the unfortunate coursaddle skirts in water. In the course tier complains that, during fourteen of another journey he narrowly escaped hours, he never once alighted, except being swept away by an inundation of when his coach was overturned or stuck the Trent. He was afterwards detained fast in the mud.‡ at Stamford four days, on account of One chief cause of the badness of the state of the roads, and then ven- the roads seems to have been the detured to proceed only because fourteen fective state of the law. Every parish members of the House of Commons, was bound to repair the highways who were going up in a body to Par-which passed through it. The peasanliament with guides and numerous at- try were forced to give their gratuitous tendants, took him into their company.‡ On the roads of Derbyshire, travellers 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 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 great part of the way; and his lady was carried in a litter. His coach was, *Pepys's Diary, Feb. 28. 1660. § Tour in Derbyshire, by J. Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, 1662. Cotton's Angler, 1676. 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 inha *Correspondence of Henry Earl of Clarendon, Dec 30. 1685, Jan. 1. 1686. + Postlethwaite's Dict., Roads; History of Hawkhurst, in the Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica. Annals of Queen Anne, 1703, Appendix, No. 3. bited 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 travellers and goods, for the purpose of keeping some parts of this important line of communication in good repair.* 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. By slow degrees reason triumphed over prejudice; and our island is now crossed in every direction by near thirty thousand miles of turnpike road. 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.* 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 Alban's that the journey would be insupportably tedious, and altered his plan. 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 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 pas-us. We attribute to magnificence what sengers, 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. This was about fifteen pence a ton for every mile, more by a third than was afterwards 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 *Loidis and Elmete; Marshall's Rural Economy of England. In 1739 Roderic Random came from Scotland to Newcastle on a packhorse. † Cotton's Epistle to J. Bradshaw. |