machinery, was positively dearer than seems to follow that the proportion of at present. Among the commodities the English people which received pafor which the labourer would have had rochial relief then must have been larger to pay higher in 1685 than his posterity than the proportion which receives renow pay were sugar, salt, coals, candles, lief now. It is good to speak on such soap, shoes, stockings, and generally all questions with diffidence: but it has articles of clothing and all articles of certainly never yet been proved that bedding. It may be added, that the pauperism was a less heavy burden or old coats and blankets would have been, a less serious social evil during the last not only more costly, but less service-quarter of the seventeenth century than able than the modern fabrics. it is in our own time.*

Number of paupers.

It must be remembered that those In one respect it must be admitted labourers who were able to that the progress of civilisation has dimaintain themselves and their minished the physical comforts of a families by means of wages were not portion of the poorest class. It has the most necessitous members of the already been mentioned that, before the community. Beneath them lay a large Revolution, many thousands of square class which could not subsist without miles, now enclosed and cultivated, were some aid from the parish. There can marsh, forest, and heath. Of this wild hardly be a more important test of the land much was, by law, common, and condition of the common people than much of what was not common by law the ratio which this class bears to the was worth so little that the proprietors whole society. At present the men, suffered it to be common in fact. In women, and children who receive relief such a tract, squatters and trespassers appear from the official returns to be, were tolerated to an extent now unin bad years, one tenth of the inhabi-known. The peasant who dwelt there tants of England, and, in good years, could, at little or no charge, procure one thirteenth. Gregory King esti- occasionally some palatable addition to mated them in his time at about a his hard fare, and provide himself with fourth; and this estimate, which all our fuel for the winter. He kept a flock of respect for his authority will scarcely geese on what is now an orchard rich prevent us from calling extravagant, with apple blossoms. He snared wild was pronounced by Davenant eminently fowl on the fen which has long since judicious. been drained and divided into corn We are not quite without the means fields and turnip fields. He cut turf of forming an estimate for ourselves. among the furze bushes on the moor The poor rate was undoubtedly the hea- which is now a meadow bright with viest tax borne by our ancestors in those clover and renowned for butter and days. It was computed, in the reign of * Fourteenth Report of the Poor Law ComCharles the Second, at near seven hun-missioners, Appendix B. No. 2. Appendix C. dred thousand pounds a year, much more No. 1. 1848. Of the two estimates of the poor than the produce either of the excise rate mentioned in the text one was formed by Arthur Moore, the other, some years later, by or of the customs, and little less than Richard Dunning. Moore's estimate will be half the entire revenue of the crown. found in Davenant's Essay on Ways and The poor rate went on increasing ra- Means; Dunning's in Sir Frederick Eden's valupidly, and appears to have risen in a estimate the paupers and beggars in 1696, at short time to between eight and nine the incredible number of 1,330,000 out of a hundred thousand a year, that is to say, population of 5,500,000. In 1846 the number of persons who received relief appears from the to one sixth of what it now is. The official returns to have been only 1,332,089 out population was then less than a third of a population of about 17,000,000. It ought of what it now is. The minimum of also to be observed that, in those returns, a wages, estimated in money, was half of pauper must very often be reckoned more what it now is; and we can therefore hardly suppose that the average allowance made to a pauper can have been more than half of what it now is.

It

able work on the poor. King and Davenant

than once.

I would advise the reader to consult De Foe's

pamphlet entitled "Giving Alms no Charity," and the Greenwich tables which will be found in Mr. M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary under the head Prices.

Benefits

the com

mon people from the pro

cheese. The progress of agriculture and | from the mollifying influence of civilithe increase of population necessarily sation on the national character. The deprived him of these privileges. But groundwork of that character has indeed against this disadvantage a long been the same through many generaderived by list of advantages is to be set tions, in the sense in which the groundoff. Of the blessings which civi- work of the character of an individual lisation and philosophy bring may be said to be the same when he is gress of ci- with them a large proportion a rude and thoughtless schoolboy and vilisation. is common to all ranks, and when he is a refined and accomplished would, if withdrawn, be missed as pain- man. It is pleasing to reflect that the fully by the labourer as by the peer. public mind of England has softened The market place which the rustic can while it has ripened, and that we have, now reach with his cart in an hour was, in the course of ages, become, not only a hundred and sixty years ago, a day's a wiser, but also a kinder people. There journey from him. The street which is scarcely a page of the history or now affords to the artisan, during the lighter literature of the seventeenth whole night, a secure, a convenient, and century which does not contain some a brilliantly lighted walk was, a hun- proof that our ancestors were less hudred and sixty years ago, so dark after mane than their posterity. The dissunset that he would not have been cipline of workshops, of schools, of priable to see his hand, so ill paved that vate families, though not more efficient he would have run constant risk of than at present, was infinitely harsher. breaking his neck, and so ill watched Masters, well born and bred, were in that he would have been in imminent the habit of beating their servants. danger of being knocked down and Pedagogues knew no way of imparting plundered of his small earnings. Every knowledge but by beating their pupils. bricklayer who falls from a scaffold, Husbands, of decent station, were not every sweeper of a crossing who is ashamed to beat their wives. The imrun over by a carriage, may now have placability of hostile factions was such his wounds dressed and his limbs set as we can scarcely conceive. Whigs with a skill such as, a hundred and were disposed to murmur because Stafsixty years ago, all the wealth of a great ford was suffered to die without seeing lord like Ormond, or of a merchant his bowels burned before his face. Toprince like Clayton, could not have pur-ries reviled and insulted Russell as his chased. Some frightful diseases have coach passed from the Tower to the been extirpated by science; and some scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields.* As have been banished by police. The little mercy was shown by the populace term of human life has been lengthened to sufferers of a humbler rank. If an over the whole kingdom, and especially offender was put into the pillory, it was in the towns. The year 1685 was not well if he escaped with life from the accounted sickly; yet in the year 1685 shower of brickbats and paving stones.† more than one in twenty-three of the If he was tied to the cart's tail, the inhabitants of the capital died.* At crowd pressed round him, imploring present only one inhabitant of the ca- the hangman to give it the fellow well, pital in forty dies annually. The dif- and make him howl. Gentlemen arference in salubrity between the London ranged parties of pleasure to Bridewell of the nineteenth century and the Lon-on court days, for the purpose of seeing don of the seventeenth century is very far greater than the difference between London in an ordinary year and London in a year of cholera.

Still more important is the benefit which all orders of society, and especially the lower orders, have derived

The deaths were 23,222.- Petty's Political Arithmetic.

the wretched women who beat hemp there whipped.§ A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman burned for coining, excited less sym* Burnet, i. 560.

+ Muggleton's Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit.

Tom Brown describes such a scene in lines which I do not venture to quote. § Ward's London Spy.

pathy than is now felt for a galled horse | forward with eager speed, should be conor an overdriven ox. Fights compared stantly looking backward with tender with which a boxing match is a refined regret. But these two propensities, and humane spectacle were among the inconsistent as they may appear, can favourite diversions of a large part of easily be resolved into the same printhe town. Multitudes assembled to see ciple. Both spring from our impatience gladiators hack each other to pieces of the state in which we actually are. with deadly weapons, and shouted with That impatience, while it stimulates us delight when one of the combatants to surpass preceding generations, dislost a finger or an eye. The prisons poses us to overrate their happiness. were hells on earth, seminaries of every It is, in some sense, unreasonable and crime and of every disease. At the ungrateful in us to be constantly disassizes the lean and yellow culprits contented with a condition which is brought with them from their cells to constantly improving. But, in truth, the dock an atmosphere of stench and there is constant improvement precisely pestilence which sometimes avenged because there is constant discontent. them signally on bench, bar, and jury. If we were perfectly satisfied with the But on all this misery society looked present, we should cease to contrive, to with profound indifference. Nowhere labour, and to save with a view to the could be found that sensitive and rest- future. And it is natural that, being less compassion which has, in our time, dissatisfied with the present, we should extended a powerful protection to the form a too favourable estimate of the factory child, to the Hindoo widow, to past. the negro slave, which pries into the In truth we are under a deception stores and watercasks of every emigrant similar to that which misleads the ship, which winces at every lash laid traveller in the Arabian desert. Beon the back of a drunken soldier, which neath the caravan all is dry and bare: will not suffer the thief in the hulks to but far in advance, and far in the rear, be ill fed or overworked, and which has is the semblance of refreshing waters. repeatedly endeavoured to save the life The pilgrims hasten forward and find even of the murderer. It is true that nothing but sand where, an hour before, compassion ought, like all other feel- they had seen a lake. They turn their ings, to be under the government of eyes and see a lake where, an hour reason, and has, for want of such go- before, they were toiling through sand. vernment, produced some ridiculous and A similar illusion seems to haunt nasome deplorable effects. But the more tions through every stage of the long we study the annals of the past the more progress from poverty and barbarism shall we rejoice that we live in a mer-to the highest degrees of opulence and ciful age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. Every class doubtless has gained largely by this great moral change: but the class which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the most defenceless. The general effect of the evidence which has been submitted to the reader seems hardly to admit of doubt. Yet, in spite of happiness evidence, many will still image to themselves the England of nerations. the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we live. It may at first sight seem strange that society, while constantly moving

Delusion which leads men to overrate the

of preceding ge

civilisation. But, if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which I would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our

towns than they now die on the coast of | ries which are now unknown, or confined Guiana. We too shall, in our turn, be to a few, may be within the reach of outstripped, and in our turn be envied. every diligent and thrifty working man. It may well be, in the twentieth cen- And yet it may then be the mode to tury, that the peasant of Dorsetshire assert that the increase of wealth and may think himself miserably paid with the progress of science have benefited twenty shillings a week; that the car- the few at the expense of the many, and penter at Greenwich may receive ten to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria shillings a day; that labouring men as the time when England was truly may be as little used to dine without merry England, when all classes were meat as they now are to eat rye bread; bound together by brotherly sympathy, that sanitary police and medical dis- when the rich did not grind the faces coveries may have added several more of the poor, and when the poor did not years to the average length of human envy the splendour of the rich. life; that numerous comforts and luxu

Death of

CHAPTER IV.

THE death of King Charles the Second | slight attack of what was supposed to took the nation by surprise. be gout, from rambling as usual. He Charles II. His frame was naturally strong, now spent his mornings in his laboraand did not appear to have suffered tory, where he amused himself with from excess. He had always been experiments on the properties of mermindful of his health even in his plea- cury. His temper seemed to have sures; and his habits were such as suffered from confinement. He had promise a long life and a robust old no apparent cause for disquiet. His age. Indolent as he was on all occa- kingdom was tranquil: he was not in sions which required tension of the pressing want of money: his power mind, he was active and persevering in was greater than it had ever been: the bodily exercise. He had, when young, party which had long thwarted him had been renowned as a tennis player, and been beaten down; but the cheerfulwas, even in the decline of life, an inde-ness which had supported him against fatigable walker. His ordinary pace adverse fortune had vanished in this was such that those who were admitted season of prosperity. A trifle now to the honour of his society found it difficult to keep up with him. He rose early, and generally passed three or four hours a day in the open air. He might be seen, before the dew was off the grass, in Saint James's Park, stridng among the trees, playing with his spaniels, and flinging corn to his ducks; and these exhibitions endeared him to the common people, who always love to see the great unbend.†

At length, towards the close of the year 1684, he was prevented, by a

sufficed to depress those elastic spirits which had borne up against defeat, exile, and penury. His irritation fre quently showed itself by looks and words such as could hardly have been expected from a man so eminently distinguished by good humour and good breeding. It was not supposed however that his constitution was seriously impaired.*

His palace had seldom presented a gayer or a more scandalous appearance than on the evening of Sunday the first of February 1685.† Some grave persons

Burnet, i. 605, 606.; Welwood; North's Life of Guildford, 251.

+ I may take this opportunity of mentioning that whenever I give only one date, I

who had gone thither, after the fashion | of Vossius, the wit of Waller, were of that age, to pay their duty to their daily employed to flatter and amuse sovereign, and who had expected that, her. But her diseased mind required on such a day, his court would wear a stronger stimulants, and sought them decent aspect, were struck with astonish-in gallantry, in basset, and in usquement and horror. The great gallery baugh.* While Charles flirted with his of Whitehall, an admirable relic of the three sultanas, Hortensia's French page, magnificence of the Tudors, was crowded a handsome boy, whose vocal performwith revellers and gamblers. The King ances were the delight of Whitehall, sate there chatting and toying with and were rewarded by numerous presents three women, whose charms were the of rich clothes, ponies, and guineas, boast, and whose vices were the dis-warbled some amorous verses.† A grace, of three nations. Barbara Palmer, party of twenty courtiers was seated Duchess of Cleveland, was there, no at cards round a large table on which longer young, but still retaining some gold was heaped in mountains. Even traces of that superb and voluptuous then the king had complained that loveliness which twenty years before he did not feel quite well. He had overcame the hearts of all men. There no appetite for his supper: his rest too was the Duchess of Portsmouth, that night was broken; but on the whose soft and infantine features were following morning he rose, as usual, lighted up with the vivacity of France. early. Hortensia Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, and niece of the great Cardinal, completed the group. She had been early removed from her native Italy to the court where her uncle was supreme. His power and her own attractions had drawn a crowd of illustrious suitors round her. Charles himself, during his exile, had sought her hand in vain. No gift of nature or of fortune seemed to be wanting to her. Her face was beautiful with the rich beauty of the South, her understanding quick, her manners graceful, her rank exalted, her possessions immense; but her ungovernable passions had turned all these blessings into curses. She had found the misery of an ill assorted marriage intolerable, had fled from her husband, had abandoned her vast wealth, and, after having astonished Rome and Piedmont by her adventures, had fixed her abode in England. Her house was the favourite resort of men of wit and pleasure, who, for the sake of her smiles and her table, endured her frequent fits *Saint Evremond, passim; St. Réal, Méof insolence and ill humour. Roches-moires de la Duchesse de Mazarin; Rochester and Godolphin sometimes forgot the ter's Farewell; Evelyn's Diary, Sept. 6. 1676, cares of state in her company. Barillon and Saint Evremond found in her draw-mond's Letter to Déry. + Evelyn's Diary, Jan. 28. 168; Saint Evreing room consolation for their long Evelyn's Diary, Feb. 4. 168. banishment from Paris. The learning $ Roger North's Life of Sir Dudley North, 170.; The True Patriot Vindicated, or a Jusfollow the old style, which was, in the seven-tification of his Excellency the Eteenth century, the style of England: but I Burnet, i. 605. The Treasury Books prove reckon the year from the first of January. that Burnet had good intelligence.

To that morning the contending factions in his council had, during some days, looked forward with anxiety. The struggle between Halifax and Rochester seemed to be approaching a decisive crisis. Halifax, not content with having already driven his rival from the Board of Treasury, had undertaken to prove him guilty of such dishonesty or neglect in the conduct of the finances as ought to be punished by dismission from the public service. It was even whispered that the Lord President would probably be sent to the Tower. The King had promised to inquire into the matter. The second of February had been fixed for the investigation; and several officers of the revenue had been ordered to attend with their books on that day.§ But a great turn of fortune was at hand.

Scarcely had Charles risen from his bed when his attendants perceived that his utterance was indistinct, and that his thoughts seemed to be wandering.

June 11. 1699.

of R-;