when the crown passed from Charles the Second to his brother. Such a description, composed from scanty and dispersed materials, must necessarily be very imperfect. Yet it may perhaps correct some false notions which would make the subsequent narrative unintelligible or uninstructive. wars, no hostile standard has been seen her but as a trophy. While revolutions har taken place all around us, our government has never once been subverted by violence. During 5 more than a hundred years there has beet our island no tumult of sufficient importan to be called an insurrection; nor has the been once borne down either by popular fury or by regal tyranny: public credit has bee been pure: even in times which by Englis men might be justly called evil times, we hav enjoyed what almost every other nation in the world would have considered as an ample mea ure of civil and religious freedom. Every m has felt entire confidence that the state weak protect him in the possession of what had bee earned by his diligence and hoarded by bself-denial. Under the benignant influence o If we would study with profit the history of our ancestors, we must be constantly on our guard against the delusions which the well 10 held sacred: the administration of justice he known names of families, places, and offices naturally produce, and must never forget that the country of which we read was a very different country from that in which we live. In every experimental science there is a tend- 15 ency towards perfection. In every human being there is a wish to ameliorate his own condition. These two principles have often sufficed, even when counteracted by great public calamities and by bad institutions, 20 peace and liberty, science has flourished, au to carry civilisation rapidly forward. No ordinary misfortune, no ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a nation wretched, as the constant progress of physical knowledge and the constant effort of every 25 man to better himself will do to make a nation prosperous. It has often been found that profuse expenditure, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, con- 30 own fields. The inhabitant of the town wouk flagrations, inundations, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it. It can easily be proved that, in our own land, the national wealth has, during at least six centur- 35 mere, the Cheddar Cliffs and Beachy Head ies, been almost uninterruptedly increasing; that it was greater under the Tudors than under the Plantagenets; that it was greater under the Stuarts than under the Tudors; has been applied to practical purposes on a scale never before known. The consequer? is that a change to which the history of the old world furnishes no parallel has taken plac in our country. Could the England of 1655 be, by some magical process, set before or eyes, we should not know one landscape in a hundred or one building in ten thousand. The country gentleman would not recognize he not recognise his own street. Everything has been changed, but the great features of nature, and a few massive and durable works of humsa art. We might find out Snowdon and Winder We might find out here and there a Norman minster, or a castle which witnessed the wars of the Roses. But with such rare exceptions, everything would be strange to us. Many that, in spite of battles, sieges and confisca- 40 thousands of square miles which are now portentously rapid, and has proceeded, during rich corn land and meadow, intersected by green hedgerows, and dotted with villages and pleasant country seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see straggling huts built of wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world The capital itself would shrink to dimensions on the south of the Thames. Not less strange to us would be the garb and manners of the people, the furniture and the equipages, the interior of the shops and dwellings. Such a change in the state of a nation seems to be at least as well entitled to the notice of a his torian as any change of the dynasty or of the ministry. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY SQUIRE (From the same) tankard with drovers and hop merchants. His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and pronunciation were such as We should be much mistaken if we pictured to ourselves the squires of the seventeenth 5 we should now expect to hear only from the century as men bearing a close resemblance to their descendants, the county members and chairmen of quarter sessions with whom we are familiar. The modern country gentle most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests, scurrilous terms of abuse, were uttered with the broadest accent of his province. It was easy to discern from the first words which he spoke, man generally receives a liberal education, 10 whether he came from Somersetshire or York shire. He troubled himself little about decorating his abode, and, if he attempted decoration, seldom produced anything but deformity. The litter of a farmyard gathered under the passes from a distinguished school to a distinguished college, and has ample opportunity to become an excellent scholar. He has generally seen something of foreign countries. A considerable part of his life has generally been 15 windows of his bedchamber, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew close to his hall door. His table was loaded with coarse plenty; and guests were cordially welcomed to it. But as the habit of drinking to excess was general in the class to which he belonged, and as his fortune did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies daily with claret or canary, strong beer was the ordinary beverage. The quantity of beer consumed in those days was lower and middle classes, not only all that beer is, but all that wine, tea, and ardent spirits now are. It was only at great houses, or on great occasions, that foreign drink was placed upon 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. passed in the capital; and the refinements of the capital follow him into the country. There is perhaps no class of dwellings so pleasing as the rural seats of the English gentry. In the parks and pleasure grounds, nature, dressed 20 yet not disguised by art, wears her most alluring form. In the buildings, good sense and good taste combine to produce a happy union of the comfortable and the graceful. The pictures, the musical instruments, the 25 indeed enormous. For beer then was to the library, in any other country would be considered as proving the owner to be an eminently polished and accomplished man. A country gentleman who witnessed the Revolution was probably in receipt of about a fourth part of 30 the rent which his acres now yield to his posterity. He was, therefore, as compared with his posterity, a poor man, and was generally under the necessity of residing, with little interruption, on his estate. To travel on the 35 Continent, to maintain an establishment in London, or even to visit London frequently, were pleasures in which only the great proprietors could indulge. It may be confidently affirmed that of the squires whose names were 40 then in the Commissions of Peace and Lieutenancy not one in twenty went to 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 45 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 sign his name to a Mitti- 50 If he went to school and to college, he generally returned before he was twenty to the seclusion of the old hall, and there, unless his mind were very happily constituted by nature, soon forgot his academical pursuits in 55 rural business and pleasures. His chief serious employment was the care of his property. He examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a mus. 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. essentially a partisan, and had, in large meas ure, both the virtues and the vices which flourish among men set from their birth in high place, and used to respect themselve 5 and to be respected by others. It is not esey for a generation accustomed to find chivalrous sentiments only in company with libera studies and polished manners, to image t himself a man with the deportment, the 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 the present time. There are, however, some important parts of his character still to be noted, which will greatly modify this estimate. Unlettered as he was and unpolished, he was still in some 10 vocabulary, and the accent of a carter, ye 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 punctilious on matters of genealogy and precedence, and ready to risk his life rather then see a stain cast on the honor of his house. I: is, however, only by thus joining together aristocrats. His family pride was beyond that 15 things seldom or never found together in or own experience, that we can form a just ides of that rustic aristocracy which constituted the main strength of the armies of Charles the First, and which long supported, with THE COFFEE HOUSE (From the same) The coffee house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention. It might indeed at that time have been not improperly called a most important political institution. No Parliament had sat for years. The municipsi council of the City had ceased to speak the sense of the citizens. Public meetings, ha rangues, resolutions, and the rest of the modera machinery of agitation had not yet come into of a Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and coats of arms of all his neighbors, and could tell which of them had assumed supporters without any right, and which of them were so unfortunate as to be grandsons 20 strange fidelity, the interest of his descendants 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 25 than no justice at all. He was an officer of the trainband;1 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 30 his neighbors. 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 35 fashion. 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 40 old swords and holsters, and with their old stories about Goring and Lunsford,2 gave to the musters of the militia an earnest and warlike aspect which would otherwise have been wanting. Even those country gentlemen who were 45 town, and of being able to pass evenings 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 their uncles. 50 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 55 long seen with uneasiness the growth of this time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian. Yet he was 1 The militia. 2 Two unprincipled Royalist leaders. Nothing resembling the moders newspaper 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 beer set up by a Turkey merchant, who had acquired among the Mahometans a taste for their favorite beverage. The convenience of being able to make appointments in any part of the 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 new power in the state. An attempt had been 1 Edmund Burke on one occasion referring to the Re porters' Gallery, said "Yonder sits the Fourth Estate. more important than them all." whether Paradise Lost ought not to have been in rhyme. To another an envious poetaster demonstrated that Venice Preserved ought to have been hooted from the stage. Under 5 no roof was a greater variety of figures to be seen. There were Earls in stars and garters, clergymen in cassocks and bands, pert Templars, sheepish lads from the Universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats 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 con- 10 of frieze. The great press was to get near the stantly 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, chair where John Dryden sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion and that those who wished to find a gentle- 15 of Racine's last tragedy or of Bossu's treatise man 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 20 rank and profession, and every shade of religious and political opinion, had its own headquarters. There were houses near St. James's Park where fops congregated, their heads and shoulders covered with black or flaxen wigs, 25 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 30 and reprobation through their noses; Jew 2 on epic poetry," was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff box was an honour sufficient to turn the head of a young enthusiast. There were coffee houses where the first medical men might be consulted. Doctor John Radcliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose to the largest practice in London, came daily, at the hour when the Exchange was full, from his house in Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the capital, to Garraway's, and was to be found, 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, coffee houses where dark eyed money changers from Venice and 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 Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, a different being from the rustic Eng 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 35 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 40 lishman. There was not then the intercourse 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 guard 45 lives. Nor was it yet the practice of all citiroom: 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 than at Will's. That celebrated 50 truded into a Kraal of Hottentots. On the 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 which now exists between the two classes. Only very great men were in the habit of dividing the year between town and country. Few esquires came to the capital thrice in their zens in easy circumstances to breathe the fresh air of the fields and woods during some weeks of every summer. A cockney, in a rural village, was stared at as much as if he had in other hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, for Perraults and the moderns, a faction for 55 his gait, his accent, the manner in which he Boileau and the ancients. One group debated A character in The Relapse by Vanbrugh. 3 Charles Perrault (1628-1703), a distinguished French critic, precipitated the long dispute on the relative merits of the ancient and modern writers. Nicholas Boileau (1636-1711) defended the ancients against Perrault's support of the moderns. Venice Preserved was a play by Otway, 1682. René Le Bossu (1631-1680), who published his Traité du poème épique in 1675. gazed at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor's show. Moneydroppers, sore 10 from the cart's tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the most honest friendly gentlemen he had ever seen. Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed themselves on him for 15 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 everything that nobody else would 20 are to be wrought under the instrumentality will feel the moral dignity of his nature eralled.” He speaks also of physical knowledge as "beitz the means of useful occupation and rations recreation;" of "the pleasures of knowledg 5 superseding "the indulgence of sensual petite," and of its "contributing to the int lectual and moral improvement of the munity." Accordingly, he very consistenth wishes it to be set before "the female as well as the male portion of the population;" otherwise, as he truly observes, "great injustice would be done to the well-educated and virtuous women of the place. They are to "have equal power and equal influence with others." It will be difficult to exhaust the reflections which rise in the mind on reading avowals of this nature. The first question which obviously suggests itself is how these wonderful moral effects of the physical sciences. Can the process be analyzed and drawn out, or does it act like a dose or a charm which comes into geners use empirically? Does Sir Robert Peel mean for the result, so it is; you have but to drench the popular mind with physics, and moral and religious advancement follows on the whole, in spite of individual failures? Yet buy, of second-hand 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 25 to say, that whatever be the occult reasons 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 he had undergone. There he was 30 where has the experiment been tried on so once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant. John Henry Newman 1801-1890 KNOWLEDGE AND CHARACTER (From Discussions and Arguments, 1841) large a scale as to justify such anticipations Or rather, does he mean, that, from the nature of the case, he who is imbued with science and literature, unless adverse influences interfere, 35 cannot but be a better man? It is natural and becoming to seek for some clear ideas of the meaning of so dark an oracle. To know is one thing, to do is another; the two thing are altogether distinct. A man knows he should 40 get up in the morning,-he lies a-bed; he knows he should not lose his temper, yet he cannot keep it. A labouring man knows he shoul: not go to the ale-house and his wife knows she should not filch when she goes out charing. ness of a duty is not all one with the performance of it. There are then, large families of instances, to say the least, in which men may become wiser, without becoming better; what. A distinguished Conservative statesman tells 45 but, nevertheless, in these cases, the consciouus from a town-hall of Tamworth that "in becoming wiser a man will become better;" meaning by wiser more conversant with the facts and theories of physical science; and that such a man will "rise at once in the scale of 50 then, is the meaning of this great maxim in intellectual and moral existence." "That," he adds, "is my belief." He avows, also, that the fortunate individual whom he is describing, by being "accustomed to such contemplations, the mouth of its promulgators? Mr. Bentham would answer, that the knowledge which carries virtue along with it, is the knowledge how to take care of number one The drainage gutter, which ran through the middle 55-a clear appreciation of what is pleasurable of the street. 7 Sharpers who pretended to find a coin, which they themselves had dropped, and return it to the owner in order to win his confidence. They were frequently punished by being tied to a cart and whipped through the streets. what painful, and what promotes the one and prevents the other. An uneducated man is ever mistaking his own interest, and standing in the way of his own true enjoyments. Use |