No More Learning

In literature she gave law to the
world. The fame of her great writers filled Europe. No other country
could produce a tragic poet equal to Racine, a comic poet equal to
Moliere, a trifler so agreeable as La Fontaine, a rhetorician so skilful
as Bossuet. The literary glory of Italy and of Spain had set; that of
Germany had not yet dawned. The genius, therefore, of the eminent men
who adorned Paris shone forth with a splendour which was set off to full
advantage by contrast. France, indeed, had at that time an empire over
mankind, such as even the Roman Republic never attained. For, when Rome
was politically dominant, she was in arts and letters the humble pupil
of Greece. France had, over the surrounding countries, at once the
ascendency which Rome had over Greece, and the ascendency which Greece
had over Rome. French was fast becoming the universal language, the
language of fashionable society, the language of diplomacy. At several
courts princes and nobles spoke it more accurately and politely than
their mother tongue. In our island there was less of this servility than
on the Continent. Neither our good nor our bad qualities were those of
imitators. Yet even here homage was paid, awkwardly indeed and sullenly,
to the literary supremacy of our neighbours. The melodious Tuscan, so
familiar to the gallants and ladies of the court of Elizabeth, sank into
contempt. A gentleman who quoted Horace or Terence was considered in
good company as a pompous pedant. But to garnish his conversation with
scraps of French was the best proof which he could give of his parts
and attainments. [172] New canons of criticism, new models of style
came into fashion. The quaint ingenuity which had deformed the verses of
Donne, and had been a blemish on those of Cowley, disappeared from our
poetry. Our prose became less majestic, less artfully involved, less
variously musical than that of an earlier age, but more lucid, more
easy, and better fitted for controversy and narrative. In these changes
it is impossible not to recognise the influence of French precept and of
French example. Great masters of our language, in their most dignified
compositions, affected to use French words, when English words, quite as
expressive and sonorous, were at hand: [173] and from France was imported
the tragedy in rhyme, an exotic which, in our soil, drooped, and
speedily died.

It would have been well if our writers had also copied the decorum which
their great French contemporaries, with few exceptions, preserved; for
the profligacy of the English plays, satires, songs, and novels of that
age is a deep blot on our national fame. The evil may easily be traced
to its source. The wits and the Puritans had never been on friendly
terms. There was no sympathy between the two classes. They looked on
the whole system of human life from different points and in different
lights. The earnest of each was the jest of the other. The pleasures
of each were the torments of the other. To the stern precisian even the
innocent sport of the fancy seemed a crime. To light and festive natures
the solemnity of the zealous brethren furnished copious matter of
ridicule. From the Reformation to the civil war, almost every writer,
gifted with a fine sense of the ludicrous, had taken some opportunity of
assailing the straighthaired, snuffling, whining saints, who christened
their children out of the Book of Nehemiah, who groaned in spirit at
the sight of Jack in the Green, and who thought it impious to taste plum
porridge on Christmas day. At length a time came when the laughers began
to look grave in their turn. The rigid, ungainly zealots, after having
furnished much good sport during two generations, rose up in arms,
conquered, ruled, and, grimly smiling, trod down under their feet the
whole crowd of mockers. The wounds inflicted by gay and petulant malice
were retaliated with the gloomy and implacable malice peculiar to bigots
who mistake their own rancour for virtue. The theatres were closed.
The players were flogged. The press was put under the guardianship of
austere licensers. The Muses were banished from their own favourite
haunts, Cambridge and Oxford. Cowly, Crashaw, and Cleveland were ejected
from their fellowships. The young candidate for academical honours was
no longer required to write Ovidian epistles or Virgilian pastorals, but
was strictly interrogated by a synod of lowering Supralapsarians as to
the day and hour when he experienced the new birth. Such a system was
of course fruitful of hypocrites. Under sober clothing and under visages
composed to the expression of austerity lay hid during several years
the intense desire of license and of revenge. At length that desire was
gratified. The Restoration emancipated thousands of minds from a yoke
which had become insupportable. The old fight recommenced, but with an
animosity altogether new. It was now not a sportive combat, but a war to
the death. The Roundhead had no better quarter to expect from those whom
he had persecuted than a cruel slavedriver can expect from insurgent
slaves still bearing the marks of his collars and his scourges.

The war between wit and Puritanism soon became a war between wit and
morality. The hostility excited by a grotesque caricature of virtue did
not spare virtue herself. Whatever the canting Roundhead had regarded
with reverence was insulted. Whatever he had proscribed was favoured.
Because he had been scrupulous about trifles, all scruples were treated
with derision. Because he had covered his failings with the mask of
devotion, men were encouraged to obtrude with Cynic impudence all their
most scandalous vices on the public eye. Because he had punished illicit
love with barbarous severity, virgin purity and conjugal fidelity were
made a jest. To that sanctimonious jargon which was his Shibboleth, was
opposed another jargon not less absurd and much more odious. As he never
opened his mouth except in scriptural phrase, the new breed of wits and
fine gentlemen never opened their mouths without uttering ribaldry of
which a porter would now be ashamed, and without calling on their Maker
to curse them, sink them, confound them, blast them, and damn them.

It is not strange, therefore, that our polite literature, when it
revived with the revival of the old civil and ecclesiastical polity,
should have been profoundly immoral. A few eminent men, who belonged to
an earlier and better age, were exempt from the general contagion. The
verse of Waller still breathed the sentiments which had animated a more
chivalrous generation. Cowley, distinguished as a loyalist and as a man
of letters, raised his voice courageously against the immorality which
disgraced both letters and loyalty. A mightier poet, tried at once by
pain, danger, poverty, obloquy, and blindness, meditates, undisturbed by
the obscene tumult which raged all around him, a song so sublime and so
holy that it would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal
Virtues whom he saw, with that inner eye which no calamity could darken,
flinging down on the jasper pavement their crowns of amaranth and gold.
The vigourous and fertile genius of Butler, if it did not altogether
escape the prevailing infection, took the disease in a mild form. But
these were men whose minds had been trained in a world which had passed
away. They gave place in no long time to a younger generation of
wits; and of that generation, from Dryden down to Durfey, the common
characteristic was hard-hearted, shameless, swaggering licentiousness,
at once inelegant and inhuman. The influence of these writers was
doubtless noxious, yet less noxious than it would have been had they
been less depraved. The poison which they administered was so strong
that it was, in no long time, rejected with nausea. None of them
understood the dangerous art of associating images of unlawful pleasure
with all that is endearing and ennobling. None of them was aware that a
certain decorum is essential even to voluptuousness, that drapery may
be more alluring than exposure, and that the imagination may be far more
powerfully moved by delicate hints which impel it to exert itself, than
by gross descriptions which it takes in passively.

The spirit of the Antipuritan reaction pervades almost the whole polite
literature of the reign of Charles the Second. But the very quintessence
of that spirit will be found in the comic drama. The playhouses, shut
by the meddling fanatic in the day of his power, were again crowded. To
their old attractions new and more powerful attractions had been added.
Scenery, dresses, and decorations, such as would now be thought mean or
absurd, but such as would have been esteemed incredibly magnificent by
those who, early in the seventeenth century, sate on the filthy benches
of the Hope, or under the thatched roof of the Rose, dazzled the eyes
of the multitude. The fascination of sex was called in to aid the
fascination of art: and the young spectator saw, with emotions unknown
to the contemporaries of Shakspeare and Johnson, tender and sprightly
heroines personated by lovely women. From the day on which the theatres
were reopened they became seminaries of vice; and the evil propagated
itself. The profligacy of the representations soon drove away sober
people. The frivolous and dissolute who remained required every year
stronger and stronger stimulants. Thus the artists corrupted the
spectators, and the spectators the artists, till the turpitude of the
drama became such as must astonish all who are not aware that extreme
relaxation is the natural effect of extreme restraint, and that an age
of hypocrisy is, in the regular course of things, followed by all age of
impudence.

Nothing is more characteristic of the times than the care with which
the poets contrived to put all their loosest verses into the mouths of
women. The compositions in which the greatest license was taken were the
epilogues. They were almost always recited by favourite actresses; and
nothing charmed the depraved audience so much as to hear lines grossly
indecent repeated by a beautiful girl, who was supposed to have not yet
lost her innocence [174].

Our theatre was indebted in that age for many plots and characters
to Spain, to France, and to the old English masters: but whatever our
dramatists touched they tainted. In their imitations the houses of
Calderon's stately and highspirited Castilian gentlemen became sties of
vice, Shakspeare's Viola a procuress, Moliere's Misanthrope a ravisher,
Moliere's Agnes an adulteress. Nothing could be so pure or so heroic but
that it became foul and ignoble by transfusion through those foul and
ignoble minds.

Such was the state of the drama; and the drama was the department of
polite literature in which a poet had the best chance of obtaining a
subsistence by his pen. The sale of books was so small that a man of the
greatest name could hardly expect more than a pittance for the copyright
of the best performance. There cannot be a stronger instance than the
fate of Dryden's last production, the Fables. That volume was published
when he was universally admitted to be the chief of living English
poets. It contains about twelve thousand lines. The versification is
admirable, the narratives and descriptions full of life. To this day
Palamon and Arcite, Cymon and Iphigenia, Theodore and Honoria, are
the delight both of critics and of schoolboys. The collection includes
Alexander's Feast, the noblest ode in our language. For the copyright
Dryden received two hundred and fifty pounds, less than in our days has
sometimes been paid for two articles in a review. [175] Nor does the
bargain seem to have been a hard one. For the book went off slowly; and
the second edition was not required till the author had been ten years
in his grave. By writing for the theatre it was possible to earn a much
larger sum with much less trouble. Southern made seven hundred pounds by
one play. [176] Otway was raised from beggary to temporary affluence
by the success of his Don Carlos. [177] Shadwell cleared a hundred and
thirty pounds by a single representation of the Squire of Alsatia. [178]
The consequence was that every man who had to live by his wit wrote
plays, whether he had any internal vocation to write plays or not.
It was thus with Dryden. As a satirist he has rivalled Juvenal. As a
didactic poet he perhaps might, with care and meditation, have rivalled
Lucretius. Of lyric poets he is, if not the most sublime, the most
brilliant and spiritstirring. But nature, profuse to him of many rare
gifts, had withheld from him the dramatic faculty. Nevertheless all the
energies of his best years were wasted on dramatic composition. He
had too much judgment not to be aware that in the power of exhibiting
character by means of dialogue he was deficient. That deficiency he
did his best to conceal, sometimes by surprising and amusing incidents,
sometimes by stately declamation, sometimes by harmonious numbers,
sometimes by ribaldry but too well suited to the taste of a profane and
licentious pit. Yet he never obtained any theatrical success equal to
that which rewarded the exertions of some men far inferior to him in
general powers. He thought himself fortunate if he cleared a hundred
guineas by a play; a scanty remuneration, yet apparently larger than he
could have earned in any other way by the same quantity of labour. [179]

The recompense which the wits of that age could obtain from the public
was so small, that they were under the necessity of eking out
their incomes by levying contributions on the great. Every rich
and goodnatured lord was pestered by authors with a mendicancy
so importunate, and a flattery so abject, as may in our time seem
incredible. The patron to whom a work was inscribed was expected to
reward the writer with a purse of gold. The fee paid for the dedication
of a book was often much larger than the sum which any publisher would
give for the copyright. Books were therefore frequently printed merely
that they might be dedicated. This traffic in praise produced the effect
which might have been expected. Adulation pushed to the verge, sometimes
of nonsense, and sometimes of impiety, was not thought to disgrace a
poet. Independence, veracity, selfrespect, were things not required
by the world from him. In truth, he was in morals something between a
pandar and a beggar.

To the other vices which degraded the literary character was added,
towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second, the most savage
intemperance of party spirit. The wits, as a class, had been impelled
by their old hatred of Puritanism to take the side of the court, and had
been found useful allies. Dryden, in particular, had done good service
to the government. His Absalom and Achitophel, the greatest satire of
modern times had amazed the town, had made its way with unprecedented
rapidity even into rural districts, and had, wherever it appeared
bitterly annoyed the Exclusionists and raised the courage of the Tories.
But we must not, in the admiration which we naturally feel for noble
diction and versification, forget the great distinctions of good and
evil. The spirit by which Dryden and several of his compeers were at
this time animated against the Whigs deserves to be called fiendish. The
servile Judges and Sheriffs of those evil days could not shed blood
as fast as the poets cried out for it. Calls for more victims, hideous
jests on hanging, bitter taunts on those who, having stood by the King
in the hour of danger, now advised him to deal mercifully and generously
by his vanquished enemies, were publicly recited on the stage, and, that
nothing might be wanting to the guilt and the shame, were recited by
women, who, having long been taught to discard all modesty, were now
taught to discard all compassion. [180]

It is a remarkable fact that, while the lighter literature of England
was thus becoming a nuisance and a national disgrace, the English genius
was effecting in science a revolution which will, to the end of time,
be reckoned among the highest achievements of the human intellect. Bacon
had sown the good seed in a sluggish soil and an ungenial season. He
had not expected an early crop, and in his last testament had solemnly
bequeathed his fame to the next age. During a whole generation his
philosophy had, amidst tumults wars, and proscriptions, been slowly
ripening in a few well constituted minds. While factions were struggling
for dominion over each other, a small body of sages had turned away with
benevolent disdain from the conflict, and had devoted themselves to the
nobler work of extending the dominion of man over matter. As soon
as tranquillity was restored, these teachers easily found attentive
audience. For the discipline through which the nation had passed had
brought the public mind to a temper well fitted for the reception of the
Verulamian doctrine. The civil troubles had stimulated the faculties of
the educated classes, and had called forth a restless activity and an
insatiable curiosity, such as had not before been known among us. Yet
the effect of those troubles was that schemes of political and religious
reform were generally regarded with suspicion and contempt. During
twenty years the chief employment of busy and ingenious men had been to
frame constitutions with first magistrates, without first magistrates,
with hereditary senates, with senates appointed by lot, with annual
senates, with perpetual senates. In these plans nothing was omitted. All
the detail, all the nomenclature, all the ceremonial of the imaginary
government was fully set forth, Polemarchs and Phylarchs, Tribes and
Galaxies, the Lord Archon and the Lord Strategus. Which ballot boxes
were to be green and which red, which balls were to be of gold and which
of silver, which magistrates were to wear hats and which black velvet
caps with peaks, how the mace was to be carried and when the heralds
were to uncover, these, and a hundred more such trifles, were gravely
considered and arranged by men of no common capacity and learning.
[181] But the time for these visions had gone by; and, if any steadfast
republican still continued to amuse himself with them, fear of public
derision and of a criminal information generally induced him to keep
his fancies to himself. It was now unpopular and unsafe to mutter a word
against the fundamental laws of the monarchy: but daring and ingenious
men might indemnify themselves by treating with disdain what had lately
been considered as the fundamental laws of nature. The torrent which
had been dammed up in one channel rushed violently into another. The
revolutionary spirit, ceasing to operate in politics, began to exert
itself with unprecedented vigour and hardihood in every department
of physics. The year 1660, the era of the restoration of the old
constitution, is also the era from which dates the ascendency of the new
philosophy. In that year the Royal Society, destined to be a chief agent
in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms, began to exist.
[182] In a few months experimental science became all the mode. The
transfusion of blood, the ponderation of air, the fixation of mercury,
succeeded to that place in the public mind which had been lately
occupied by the controversies of the Rota. Dreams of perfect forms of
government made way for dreams of wings with which men were to fly from
the Tower to the Abbey, and of doublekeeled ships which were never to
founder in the fiercest storm. All classes were hurried along by the
prevailing sentiment. Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and Puritan,
were for once allied. Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles, princes,
swelled the triumph of the Baconian philosophy. Poets sang with emulous
fervour the approach of the golden age. Cowley, in lines weighty
with thought and resplendent with wit, urged the chosen seed to take
possession of the promised land flowing with milk and honey, that land
which their great deliverer and lawgiver had seen, as from the summit
of Pisgah, but had not been permitted to enter. [183] Dryden, with more
zeal than knowledge, joined voice to the general acclamation to enter,
and foretold things which neither he nor anybody else understood. The
Royal Society, he predicted, would soon lead us to the extreme verge of
the globe, and there delight us with a better view of the moon. [184]
Two able and aspiring prelates, Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, and Wilkins,
Bishop of Chester, were conspicuous among the leaders of the movement.
Its history was eloquently written by a younger divine, who was rising
to high distinction in his profession, Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop
of Rochester. Both Chief Justice Hale and Lord Keeper Guildford stole
some hours from the business of their courts to write on hydrostatics.
Indeed it was under the immediate direction of Guildford that the
first barometers ever exposed to sale in London were constructed. [185]
Chemistry divided, for a time, with wine and love, with the stage and
the gaming table, with the intrigues of a courtier and the intrigues
of a demagogue, the attention of the fickle Buckingham. Rupert has the
credit of having invented mezzotinto; from him is named that curious
bubble of glass which has long amused children and puzzled philosophers.
Charles himself had a laboratory at Whitehall, and was far more active
and attentive there than at the council board. It was almost necessary
to the character of a fine gentleman to have something to say about air
pumps and telescopes; and even fine ladies, now and then, thought it
becoming to affect a taste for science, went in coaches and six to
visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke forth into cries of delight at
finding that a magnet really attracted a needle, and that a microscope
really made a fly loom as large as a sparrow. [186]

In this, as in every great stir of the human mind, there was doubtless
something which might well move a smile. It is the universal law that
whatever pursuit, whatever doctrine, becomes fashionable, shall lose a
portion of that dignity which it had possessed while it was confined to
a small but earnest minority, and was loved for its own sake alone. It
is true that the follies of some persons who, without any real
aptitude for science, professed a passion for it, furnished matter of
contemptuous mirth to a few malignant satirists who belonged to the
preceding generation, and were not disposed to unlearn the lore of their
youth. [187] But it is not less true that the great work of interpreting
nature was performed by the English of that age as it had never before
been performed in any age by any nation. The spirit of Francis Bacon was
abroad, a spirit admirably compounded of audacity and sobriety. There
was a strong persuasion that the whole world was full of secrets of high
moment to the happiness of man, and that man had, by his Maker, been
entrusted with the key which, rightly used, would give access to
them. There was at the same time a conviction that in physics it was
impossible to arrive at the knowledge of general laws except by the
careful observation of particular facts. Deeply impressed with these
great truths, the professors of the new philosophy applied themselves
to their task, and, before a quarter of a century had expired, they had
given ample earnest of what has since been achieved. Already a reform
of agriculture had been commenced. New vegetables were cultivated. New
implements of husbandry were employed. New manures were applied to the
soil. [188] Evelyn had, under the formal sanction of the Royal Society,
given instruction to his countrymen in planting. Temple, in his
intervals of leisure, had tried many experiments in horticulture, and
had proved that many delicate fruits, the natives of more favoured
climates, might, with the help of art, be grown on English ground.
Medicine, which in France was still in abject bondage, and afforded an
inexhaustible subject of just ridicule to Moliere, had in England become
an experimental and progressive science, and every day made some
new advance in defiance of Hippocrates and Galen. The attention of
speculative men had been, for the first time, directed to the important
subject of sanitary police. The great plague of 1665 induced them to
consider with care the defective architecture, draining, and ventilation
of the capital. The great fire of 1666 afforded an opportunity for
effecting extensive improvements. The whole matter was diligently
examined by the Royal Society; and to the suggestions of that body must
be partly attributed the changes which, though far short of what the
public welfare required, yet made a wide difference between the new
and the old London, and probably put a final close to the ravages of
pestilence in our country. [189] At the same time one of the founders
of the Society, Sir William Petty, created the science of political
arithmetic, the humble but indispensable handmaid of political
philosophy. No kingdom of nature was left unexplored. To that period
belong the chemical discoveries of Boyle, and the earliest botanical
researches of Sloane. It was then that Ray made a new classification
of birds and fishes, and that the attention of Woodward was first drawn
towards fossils and shells. One after another phantoms which had haunted
the world through ages of darkness fled before the light. Astrology and
alchymy became jests. Soon there was scarcely a county in which some of
the Quorum did not smile contemptuously when an old woman was brought
before them for riding on broomsticks or giving cattle the murrain. But
it was in those noblest and most arduous departments of knowledge
in which induction and mathematical demonstration cooperate for the
discovery of truth, that the English genius won in that age the most
memorable triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of statics on
a new foundation. Edmund Halley investigated the properties of the
atmosphere, the ebb and flow of the sea, the laws of magnetism, and the
course of the comets; nor did he shrink from toil, peril and exile in
the cause of science. While he, on the rock of Saint Helena, mapped the
constellations of the southern hemisphere, our national observatory was
rising at Greenwich: and John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal,
was commencing that long series of observations which is never mentioned
without respect and gratitude in any part of the globe. But the glory
of these men, eminent as they were, is cast into the shade by the
transcendent lustre of one immortal name. In Isaac Newton two kinds of
intellectual power, which have little in common, and which are not often
found together in a very high degree of vigour, but which nevertheless
are equally necessary in the most sublime departments of physics, were
united as they have never been united before or since. There may have
been minds as happily constituted as his for the cultivation of pure
mathematical science: there may have been minds as happily constituted
for the cultivation of science purely experimental; but in no other mind
have the demonstrative faculty and the inductive faculty coexisted in
such supreme excellence and perfect harmony. Perhaps in the days of
Scotists and Thomists even his intellect might have run to waste, as
many intellects ran to waste which were inferior only to his. Happily
the spirit of the age on which his lot was cast, gave the right
direction to his mind; and his mind reacted with tenfold force on the
spirit of the age. In the year 1685 his fame, though splendid, was only
dawning; but his genius was in the meridian.
His great work, that work
which effected a revolution in the most important provinces of natural
philosophy, had been completed, but was not yet published, and was just
about to be submitted to the consideration of the Royal Society.

It is not very easy to explain why the nation which was so far before
its neighbours in science should in art have been far behind them. Yet
such was the fact. It is true that in architecture, an art which is half
a science, an art in which none but a geometrician can excel, an art
which has no standard of grace but what is directly or indirectly
dependent on utility, an art of which the creations derive a part, at
least, of their majesty from mere bulk, our country could boast of one
truly great man, Christopher Wren; and the fire which laid London in
ruins had given him an opportunity, unprecedented in modern history, of
displaying his powers. The austere beauty of the Athenian portico,
the gloomy sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was like almost all
his contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of
appreciating; but no man born on our side of the Alps, has imitated with
so much success the magnificence of the palacelike churches of Italy.
Even the superb Lewis has left to posterity no work which can bear a
comparison with Saint Paul's. But at the close of the reign of Charles
the Second there was not a single English painter or statuary whose name
is now remembered. This sterility is somewhat mysterious; for painters
and statuaries were by no means a despised or an ill paid class. Their
social position was at least as high as at present. Their gains, when
compared with the wealth of the nation and with the remuneration of
other descriptions of intellectual labour, were even larger than at
present. Indeed the munificent patronage which was extended to artists
drew them to our shores in multitudes. Lely, who has preserved to us
the rich curls, the full lips, and the languishing eyes of the frail
beauties celebrated by Hamilton, was a Westphalian. He had died in 1680,
having long lived splendidly, having received the honour of knighthood,
and having accumulated a good estate out of the fruits of his skill.
His noble collection of drawings and pictures was, after his decease,
exhibited by the royal permission in the Banqueting House at Whitehall,
and was sold by auction for the almost incredible sum of twenty-six
thousand pounds, a sum which bore a greater proportion to the fortunes
of the rich men of that day than a hundred thousand pounds would bear
to the fortunes of the rich men of our time. [190] Lely was succeeded by
his countryman Godfrey Kneller, who was made first a knight and then a
baronet, and who, after keeping up a sumptuous establishment, and after
losing much money by unlucky speculations, was still able to bequeath
a large fortune to his family. The two Vandeveldes, natives of Holland,
had been tempted by English liberality to settle here, and had produced
for the King and his nobles some of the finest sea pieces in the world.
Another Dutchman, Simon Varelst, painted glorious sunflowers and tulips
for prices such as had never before been known. Verrio, a Neapolitan,
covered ceilings and staircases with Gorgons and Muses, Nymphs and
Satyrs, Virtues and Vices, Gods quaffing nectar, and laurelled princes
riding in triumph. The income which he derived from his performances
enabled him to keep one of the most expensive tables in England. For his
pieces at Windsor alone he received seven thousand pounds, a sum then
sufficient to make a gentleman of moderate wishes perfectly easy for
life, a sum greatly exceeding all that Dryden, during a literary life of
forty years, obtained from the booksellers. [191] Verrio's assistant
and successor, Lewis Laguerre, came from France. The two most celebrated
sculptors of that day were also foreigners. Cibber, whose pathetic
emblems of Fury and Melancholy still adorn Bedlam, was a Dane. Gibbons,
to whose graceful fancy and delicate touch many of our palaces,
colleges, and churches owe their finest decorations, was a Dutchman.
Even the designs for the coin were made by French artists. Indeed, it
was not till the reign of George the Second that our country could glory
in a great painter; and George the Third was on the throne before she
had reason to be proud of any of her sculptors.

It is time that this description of the England which Charles the Second
governed should draw to a close. Yet one subject of the highest moment
still remains untouched. Nothing has yet been said of the great body
of the people, of those who held the ploughs, who tended the oxen, who
toiled at the looms of Norwich, and squared the Portland stone for Saint
Paul's. Nor can very much be said. The most numerous class is precisely
the class respecting which we have the most meagre information. In those
times philanthropists did not yet regard it as a sacred duty, nor had
demagogues yet found it a lucrative trade, to talk and write about the
distress of the labourer. History was too much occupied with courts and
camps to spare a line for the hut of the peasant or the garret of the
mechanic. The press now often sends forth in a day a greater quantity of
discussion and declamation about the condition of the working man than
was published during the twenty-eight years which elapsed between the
Restoration and the Revolution. But it would be a great error to infer
from the increase of complaint that there has been any increase of
misery.

The great criterion of the state of the common people is the amount
of their wages; and as four-fifths of the common people were, in the
seventeenth century, employed in agriculture, it is especially important
to ascertain what were then the wages of agricultural industry. On this
subject we have the means of arriving at conclusions sufficiently exact
for our purpose.

Sir William Petty, whose mere assertion carries great weight, informs us
that a labourer was by no means in the lowest state who received for
a day's work fourpence with food, or eightpence without food. Four
shillings a week therefore were, according to Petty's calculation, fair
agricultural wages. [192]

That this calculation was not remote from the truth we have
abundant proof. About the beginning of the year 1685 the justices of
Warwickshire, in the exercise of a power entrusted to them by an Act of
Elizabeth, fixed, at their quarter sessions, a scale of wages for
the county, and notified that every employer who gave more than the
authorised sum, and every working man who received more, would be liable
to punishment. The wages of the common agricultural labourer, from
March to September, were fixed at the precise amount mentioned by Petty,
namely four shillings a week without food. From September to March the
wages were to be only three and sixpence a week. [193]

But in that age, as in ours, the earnings of the peasant were very
different in different parts of the kingdom. The wages of Warwickshire
were probably about the average, and those of the counties near the
Scottish border below it: but there were more favoured districts. In
the same year, 1685, a gentleman of Devonshire, named Richard Dunning,
published a small tract, in which he described the condition of the poor
of that county. That he understood his subject well it is impossible to
doubt; for a few months later his work was reprinted, and was, by
the magistrates assembled in quarter sessions at Exeter, strongly
recommended to the attention of all parochial officers. According to
him, the wages of the Devonshire peasant were, without food, about five
shillings a week. [194]

Still better was the condition of the labourer in the neighbourhood of
Bury Saint Edmund's. The magistrates of Suffolk met there in the spring
of 1682 to fix a rate of wages, and resolved that, where the labourer
was not boarded, he should have five shillings a week in winter, and six
in summer. [195]

In 1661 the justices at Chelmsford had fixed the wages of the Essex
labourer, who was not boarded, at six shillings in winter and seven in
summer. This seems to have been the highest remuneration given in
the kingdom for agricultural labour between the Restoration and the
Revolution; and it is to be observed that, in the year in which this
order was made, the necessaries of life were immoderately dear. Wheat
was at seventy shillings the quarter, which would even now be considered
as almost a famine price. [196]

These facts are in perfect accordance with another fact which seems to
deserve consideration. It is evident that, in a country where no man can
be compelled to become a soldier, the ranks of an army cannot be filled
if the government offers much less than the wages of common rustic
labour. At present the pay and beer money of a private in a regiment of
the line amount to seven shillings and sevenpence a week. This stipend,
coupled with the hope of a pension, does not attract the English
youth in sufficient numbers; and it is found necessary to supply the
deficiency by enlisting largely from among the poorer population of
Munster and Connaught. The pay of the private foot soldier in 1685 was
only four shillings and eightpence a week; yet it is certain that the
government in that year found no difficulty in obtaining many thousands
of English recruits at very short notice. The pay of the private foot
soldier in the army of the Commonwealth had been seven shillings a
week, that is to say, as much as a corporal received under Charles the
Second; [197] and seven shillings a week had been found sufficient to fill
the ranks with men decidedly superior to the generality of the people.
On the whole, therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that, in the
reign of Charles the Second, the ordinary wages of the peasant did not
exceed four shillings a week; but that, in some parts of the kingdom,
five shillings, six shillings, and, during the summer months, even seven
shillings were paid. At present a district where a labouring man earns
only seven shillings a week is thought to be in a state shocking to
humanity. The average is very much higher; and in prosperous counties,
the weekly wages of husbandmen amount to twelve, fourteen, and even
sixteen shillings. The remuneration of workmen employed in manufactures
has always been higher than that of the tillers of the soil. In the year
1680, a member of the House of Commons remarked that the high wages
paid in this country made it impossible for our textures to maintain a
competition with the produce of the Indian looms. An English mechanic,
he said, instead of slaving like a native of Bengal for a piece of
copper, exacted a shilling a day. [198] Other evidence is extant,
which proves that a shilling a day was the pay to which the English
manufacturer then thought himself entitled, but that he was often forced
to work for less. The common people of that age were not in the habit
of meeting for public discussion, of haranguing, or of petitioning
Parliament. No newspaper pleaded their cause. It was in rude rhyme
that their love and hatred, their exultation and their distress, found
utterance. A great part of their history is to be learned only from
their ballads. One of the most remarkable of the popular lays chaunted
about the streets of Norwich and Leeds in the time of Charles the Second
may still be read on the original broadside. It is the vehement and
bitter cry of labour against capital. It describes the good old times
when every artisan employed in the woollen manufacture lived as well
as a farmer. But those times were past. Sixpence a day was now all that
could be earned by hard labour at the loom. If the poor complained that
they could not live on such a pittance, they were told that they were
free to take it or leave it. For so miserable a recompense were the
producers of wealth compelled to toil rising early and lying down late,
while the master clothier, eating, sleeping, and idling, became rich by
their exertions. A shilling a day, the poet declares, is what the weaver
would have if justice were done. [199] We may therefore conclude that,
in the generation which preceded the Revolution, a workman employed in
the great staple manufacture of England thought himself fairly paid if
he gained six shillings a week.

It may here be noticed that the practice of setting children prematurely
to work, a practice which the state, the legitimate protector of those
who cannot protect themselves, has, in our time, wisely and humanely
interdicted, prevailed in the seventeenth century to an extent which,
when compared with the extent of the manufacturing system, seems almost
incredible. At Norwich, the chief seat of the clothing trade, a little
creature of six years old was thought fit for labour. Several writers
of that time, and among them some who were considered as eminently
benevolent, mention, with exultation, the fact that, in that single
city, boys and girls of very tender age created wealth exceeding what
was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve thousand pounds a
year. [200] The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the
more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age
has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are,
with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence
which discerns and the humanity which remedies them.

When we pass from the weavers of cloth to a different class of artisans,
our enquiries will still lead us to nearly the same conclusions. During
several generations, the Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital have kept a
register of the wages paid to different classes of workmen who have been
employed in the repairs of the building. From this valuable record it
appears that, in the course of a hundred and twenty years, the daily
earnings of the bricklayer have risen from half a crown to four and
tenpence, those of the mason from half a crown to five and threepence,
those of the carpenter from half a crown to five and fivepence, and
those of the plumber from three shillings to five and sixpence.

It seems clear, therefore, that the wages of labour, estimated in money,
were, in 1685, not more than half of what they now are; and there were
few articles important to the working man of which the price was not,
in 1685, more than half of what it now is. Beer was undoubtedly much
cheaper in that age than at present. Meat was also cheaper, but was
still so dear that hundreds of thousands of families scarcely knew
the taste of it. [201] In the cost of wheat there has been very little
change. The average price of the quarter, during the last twelve years
of Charles the Second, was fifty shillings. Bread, therefore, such as is
now given to the inmates of a workhouse, was then seldom seen, even on
the trencher of a yeoman or of a shopkeeper. The great majority of the
nation lived almost entirely on rye, barley, and oats.

The produce of tropical countries, the produce of the mines, the
produce of machinery, was positively dearer than at present. Among the
commodities for which the labourer would have had to pay higher in
1685 than his posterity now pay were sugar, salt, coals, candles,
soap, shoes, stockings, and generally all articles of clothing and all
articles of bedding. It may be added, that the old coats and blankets
would have been, not only more costly, but less serviceable than the
modern fabrics.

It must be remembered that those labourers who were able to maintain
themselves and their families by means of wages were not the most
necessitous members of the community. Beneath them lay a large class
which could not subsist without some aid from the parish. There can
hardly be a more important test of the condition of the common people
than the ratio which this class bears to the whole society. At present,
the men, women, and children who receive relief appear from the official
returns to be, in bad years, one tenth of the inhabitants of England,
and, in good years, one thirteenth. Gregory King estimated them in his
time at about a fourth; and this estimate, which all our respect for
his authority will scarcely prevent us from calling extravagant, was
pronounced by Davenant eminently judicious.

We are not quite without the means of forming an estimate for ourselves.
The poor rate was undoubtedly the heaviest tax borne by our ancestors in
those days. It was computed, in the reign of Charles the Second, at near
seven hundred thousand pounds a year, much more than the produce either
of the excise or of the customs, and little less than half the entire
revenue of the crown. The poor rate went on increasing rapidly, and
appears to have risen in a short time to between eight and nine hundred
thousand a year, that is to say, to one sixth of what it now is. The
population was then less than a third of what it now is. The minimum
of wages, estimated in money, was half of 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 seems to follow that the
proportion of the English people which received parochial relief then
must have been larger than the proportion which receives relief now. It
is good to speak on such questions with diffidence: but it has certainly
never yet been proved that pauperism was a less heavy burden or a less
serious social evil during the last quarter of the seventeenth century
than it is in our own time. [202]

In one respect it must be admitted that the progress of civilization has
diminished the physical comforts of a portion of the poorest class. It
has already been mentioned that, before the Revolution, many thousands
of square miles, now enclosed and cultivated, were marsh, forest, and
heath. Of this wild land much was, by law, common, and much of what was
not common by law was worth so little that the proprietors suffered it
to be common in fact. In such a tract, squatters and trespassers were
tolerated to an extent now unknown. The peasant who dwelt there could,
at little or no charge, procure occasionally some palatable addition to
his hard fare, and provide himself with fuel for the winter. He kept a
flock of geese on what is now an orchard rich with apple blossoms.
He snared wild fowl on the fell which has long since been drained and
divided into corn-fields and turnip fields. He cut turf among the furze
bushes on the moor which is now a meadow bright with clover and renowned
for butter and cheese. The progress of agriculture and the increase of
population necessarily deprived him of these privileges. But against
this disadvantage a long list of advantages is to be set off. Of the
blessings which civilisation and philosophy bring with them a large
proportion is common to all ranks, and would, if withdrawn, be missed
as painfully by the labourer as by the peer. The market-place which the
rustic can now reach with his cart in an hour was, a hundred and sixty
years ago, a day's journey from him. The street which now affords to
the artisan, during the whole night, a secure, a convenient, and a
brilliantly lighted walk was, a hundred and sixty years ago, so dark
after sunset that he would not have been able to see his hand, so ill
paved that he would have run constant risk of breaking his neck, and so
ill watched that he would have been in imminent danger of being knocked
down and plundered of his small earnings. Every bricklayer who falls
from a scaffold, every sweeper of a crossing who is run over by a
carriage, may now have his wounds dressed and his limbs set with a skill
such as, a hundred and sixty years ago, all the wealth of a great
lord like Ormond, or of a merchant prince like Clayton, could not have
purchased. Some frightful diseases have been extirpated by science;
and some have been banished by police. The term of human life has been
lengthened over the whole kingdom, and especially in the towns. The year
1685 was not accounted sickly; yet in the year 1685 more than one in
twenty-three of the inhabitants of the capital died. [203] At present
only one inhabitant of the capital in forty dies annually. The
difference in salubrity between the London of the nineteenth century
and the London 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 from the mollifying influence
of civilisation on the national character. The groundwork of that
character has indeed been the same through many generations, in the
sense in which the groundwork of the character of an individual may be
said to be the same when he is a rude and thoughtless schoolboy and when
he is a refined and accomplished man. It is pleasing to reflect that the
public mind of England has softened while it has ripened, and that we
have, in the course of ages, become, not only a wiser, but also a kinder
people. There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature
of the seventeenth century which does not contain some proof that our
ancestors were less humane than their posterity. The discipline of
workshops, of schools, of private families, though not more efficient
than at present, was infinitely harsher. Masters, well born and bred,
were in the habit of beating their servants. Pedagogues knew no way of
imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils. Husbands, of decent
station, were not ashamed to beat their wives. The implacability of
hostile factions was such as we can scarcely conceive. Whigs were
disposed to murmur because Stafford was suffered to die without seeing
his bowels burned before his face. Tories reviled and insulted Russell
as his coach passed from the Tower to the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn
Fields. [204] As little mercy was shown by the populace to sufferers of
a humbler rank. If an offender was put into the pillory, it was well
if he escaped with life from the shower of brickbats and paving stones.
[205] If he was tied to the cart's tail, the crowd pressed round him,
imploring the hangman to give it the fellow well, and make him howl.
[206] Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure to Bridewell on court
days for the purpose of seeing the wretched women who beat hemp there
whipped. [207] A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman
burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt for a galled
horse or an overdriven ox. Fights compared with which a boxing match is
a refined and humane spectacle were among the favourite diversions of a
large part of the town. Multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack each
other to pieces with deadly weapons, and shouted with delight when one
of the combatants lost a finger or an eye. The prisons were hells on
earth, seminaries of every crime and of every disease. At the assizes
the lean and yellow culprits brought with them from their cells to the
dock an atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged them
signally on bench, bar, and jury. But on all this misery society looked
with profound indifference. Nowhere could be found that sensitive
and restless compassion which has, in our time, extended a powerful
protection to the factory child, to the Hindoo widow, to the negro
slave, which pries into the stores and watercasks of every emigrant
ship, which winces at every lash laid on the back of a drunken
soldier, which will not suffer the thief in the hulks to be ill fed or
overworked, and which has repeatedly endeavoured to save the life
even of the murderer. It is true that compassion ought, like all other
feelings, to be under the government of reason, and has, for want of
such government, produced some ridiculous and some deplorable effects.
But the more we study the annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice
that we live in a merciful 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 evidence, many
will still image to themselves the England of 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 forward with
eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret.
But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily
be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of
the state in which we actually are. That impatience, while it stimulates
us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their
happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful in us to be
constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving.
But, in truth, there is constant improvement precisely because there is
constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present,
we should cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the
future. And it is natural that, being dissatisfied with the present, we
should form a too favourable estimate of the past.

In truth we are under a deception similar to that which misleads the
traveller in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and
bare: but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of
refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward and find nothing but sand
where an hour before they had seen a lake. They turn their eyes and see
a lake where, an hour before, they were toiling through sand. A similar
illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress
from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and
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 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 Guiana. We too shall, in our turn, be
outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth
century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably
paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may
receive ten shillings a day; that labouring men may be as little used to
dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that sanitary police
and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average
length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now
unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent
and thrifty working man. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that
the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited
the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen
Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all
classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did
not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the
splendour of the rich.




CHAPTER IV.

THE death of King Charles the Second took the nation by surprise. His
frame was naturally strong, and did not appear to have suffered from
excess. He had always been mindful of his health even in his pleasures;
and his habits were such as promise a long life and a robust old age.
Indolent as he was on all occasions which required tension of the mind,
he was active and persevering in bodily exercise. He had, when young,
been renowned as a tennis player, [208] and was, even in the decline of
life, an indefatigable walker. His ordinary pace was such that those who
were admitted 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
St. James's Park, striding 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. [209]

At length, towards the close of the year 1684, he was prevented, by a
slight attack of what was supposed to be gout, from rambling as usual.
He now spent his mornings in his laboratory, where he amused himself
with experiments on the properties of mercury. His temper seemed to have
suffered from confinement. He had no apparent cause for disquiet. His
kingdom was tranquil: he was not in pressing want of money: his power
was greater than it had ever been: the party which had long thwarted
him had been beaten down; but the cheerfulness which had supported him
against adverse fortune had vanished in this season of prosperity. A
trifle now sufficed to depress those elastic spirits which had borne
up against defeat, exile, and penury. His irritation frequently 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. [210]

His palace had seldom presented a gayer or a more scandalous appearance
than on the evening of Sunday the first of February 1685. [211] Some
grave persons who had gone thither, after the fashion of that age, to
pay their duty to their sovereign, and who had expected that, on such a
day, his court would wear a decent aspect, were struck with astonishment
and horror. The great gallery of Whitehall, an admirable relic of the
magnificence of the Tudors, was crowded with revellers and gamblers. The
king sate there chatting and toying with three women, whose charms were
the boast, and whose vices were the disgrace, of three nations. Barbara
Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, was there, no longer young, but still
retaining some traces of that superb and voluptuous loveliness which
twenty years before overcame the hearts of all men. There too was the
Duchess of Portsmouth, whose soft and infantine features were lighted up
with the vivacity of France. 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.