No More Learning

Never was an Englishman more
at home than when he took his ease in his inn. Even men of fortune, who
might in their own mansions have enjoyed every luxury, were often in
the habit of passing their evenings in the parlour of some neighbouring
house of public entertainment. They seem to have thought that comfort
and freedom could in no other place be enjoyed with equal perfection.
This feeling continued during many generations to be a national
peculiarity. The liberty and jollity of inns long furnished matter to
our novelists and dramatists. Johnson declared that a tavern chair was
the throne of human felicity; and Shenstone gently complained that no
private roof, however friendly, gave the wanderer so warm a welcome as
that which was to be found at an inn.

Many conveniences, which were unknown at Hampton Court and Whitehall in
the seventeenth century, are in all modern hotels. Yet on the whole it
is certain that the improvement of our houses of public entertainment
has by no means kept pace with the improvement of our roads and of our
conveyances. Nor is this strange; for it is evident that, all other
circumstances being supposed equal, the inns will be best where the
means of locomotion are worst. The quicker the rate of travelling, the
less important is it that there should be numerous agreeable resting
places for the traveller. A hundred and sixty years ago a person who
came up to the capital from a remote county generally required, by the
way, twelve or fifteen meals, and lodging for five or six nights. If he
were a great man, he expected the meals and lodging to be comfortable,
and even luxurious. At present we fly from York or Exeter to London by
the light of a single winter's day. At present, therefore, a traveller
seldom interrupts his journey merely for the sake of rest and
refreshment. The consequence is that hundreds of excellent inns
have fallen into utter decay. In a short time no good houses of that
description will be found, except at places where strangers are likely
to be detained by business or pleasure.

The mode in which correspondence was carried on between distant places
may excite the scorn of the present generation; yet it was such as might
have moved the admiration and envy of the polished nations of antiquity,
or of the contemporaries of Raleigh and Cecil. A rude and imperfect
establishment of posts for the conveyance of letters had been set up by
Charles the First, and had been swept away by the civil war. Under the
Commonwealth the design was resumed. At the Restoration the proceeds of
the Post Office, after all expenses had been paid, were settled on the
Duke of York. On most lines of road the mails went out and came in only
on the alternate days. In Cornwall, in the fens of Lincolnshire, and
among the hills and lakes of Cumberland, letters were received only once
a week. During a royal progress a daily post was despatched from the
capital to the place where the court sojourned. There was also daily
communication between London and the Downs; and the same privilege was
sometimes extended to Tunbridge Wells and Bath at the seasons when those
places were crowded by the great. The bags were carried on horseback day
and night at the rate of about five miles an hour. [156]

The revenue of this establishment was not derived solely from the charge
for the transmission of letters. The Post Office alone was entitled to
furnish post horses; and, from the care with which this monopoly was
guarded, we may infer that it was found profitable. [157] If, indeed, a
traveller had waited half an hour without being supplied he might hire a
horse wherever he could.

To facilitate correspondence between one part of London and another was
not originally one of the objects of the Post Office. But, in the
reign of Charles the Second, an enterprising citizen of London, William
Dockwray, set up, at great expense, a penny post, which delivered
letters and parcels six or eight times a day in the busy and crowded
streets near the Exchange, and four times a day in the outskirts of
the capital. This improvement was, as usual, strenuously resisted. The
porters complained that their interests were attacked, and tore down the
placards in which the scheme was announced to the public. The excitement
caused by Godfrey's death, and by the discovery of Coleman's papers, was
then at the height. A cry was therefore raised that the penny post was a
Popish contrivance. The great Doctor Oates, it was affirmed, had hinted
a suspicion that the Jesuits were at the bottom of the scheme, and that
the bags, if examined, would be found full of treason. [158] The utility
of the enterprise was, however, so great and obvious that all opposition
proved fruitless. As soon as it became clear that the speculation would
be lucrative, the Duke of York complained of it as an infraction of his
monopoly; and the courts of law decided in his favour. [159]

The revenue of the Post Office was from the first constantly increasing.
In the year of the Restoration a committee of the House of Commons,
after strict enquiry, had estimated the net receipt at about twenty
thousand pounds. At the close of the reign of Charles the Second, the
net receipt was little short of fifty thousand pounds; and this was then
thought a stupendous sum. The gross receipt was about seventy thousand
pounds. The charge for conveying a single letter was twopence for eighty
miles, and threepence for a longer distance. The postage increased in
proportion to the weight of the packet. [160] At present a single letter
is carried to the extremity of Scotland or of Ireland for a penny; and
the monopoly of post horses has long ceased to exist. Yet the gross
annual receipts of the department amount to more than eighteen hundred
thousand pounds, and the net receipts to more than seven hundred
thousand pounds. It is, therefore, scarcely possible to doubt that the
number of letters now conveyed by mail is seventy times the number which
was so conveyed at the time of the accession of James the Second. [161]

No part of the load which the old mails carried out was more important
than the newsletters. In 1685 nothing like the London daily paper of
our time existed, or could exist. Neither the necessary capital nor
the necessary skill was to be found. Freedom too was wanting, a want as
fatal as that of either capital or skill. The press was not indeed at
that moment under a general censorship. The licensing act, which had
been passed soon after the Restoration, had expired in 1679. Any person
might therefore print, at his own risk, a history, a sermon, or a poem,
without the previous approbation of any officer; but the Judges were
unanimously of opinion that this liberty did not extend to Gazettes, and
that, by the common law of England, no man, not authorised by the crown,
had a right to publish political news. [162] While the Whig party was
still formidable, the government thought it expedient occasionally to
connive at the violation of this rule. During the great battle of the
Exclusion Bill, many newspapers were suffered to appear, the Protestant
Intelligence, the Current Intelligence, the Domestic Intelligence, the
True News, the London Mercury. [163] None of these was published oftener
than twice a week. None exceeded in size a single small leaf. The
quantity of matter which one of them contained in a year was not more
than is often found in two numbers of the Times. After the defeat of the
Whigs it was no longer necessary for the King to be sparing in the
use of that which all his Judges had pronounced to be his undoubted
prerogative. At the close of his reign no newspaper was suffered to
appear without his allowance: and his allowance was given exclusively
to the London Gazette. The London Gazette came out only on Mondays and
Thursdays. The contents generally were a royal proclamation, two or
three Tory addresses, notices of two or three promotions, an account
of a skirmish between the imperial troops and the Janissaries on the
Danube, a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand
cockfight between two persons of honour, and an advertisement offering a
reward for a strayed dog. The whole made up two pages of moderate size.
Whatever was communicated respecting matters of the highest moment was
communicated in the most meagre and formal style. Sometimes, indeed,
when the government was disposed to gratify the public curiosity
respecting an important transaction, a broadside was put forth giving
fuller details than could be found in the Gazette: but neither the
Gazette nor any supplementary broadside printed by authority ever
contained any intelligence which it did not suit the purposes of the
Court to publish. The most important parliamentary debates, the most
important state trials recorded in our history, were passed over in
profound silence. [164] In the capital the coffee houses supplied in
some measure the place of a journal. Thither the Londoners flocked, as
the Athenians of old flocked to the market place, to hear whether
there was any news. There men might learn how brutally a Whig, had been
treated the day before in Westminster Hall, what horrible accounts the
letters from Edinburgh gave of the torturing of Covenanters, how grossly
the Navy Board had cheated the crown in the Victualling of the fleet,
and what grave charges the Lord Privy Seal had brought against the
Treasury in the matter of the hearth money. But people who lived at a
distance from the great theatre of political contention could be
kept regularly informed of what was passing there only by means of
newsletters. To prepare such letters became a calling in London, as it
now is among the natives of India. The newswriter rambled from coffee
room to coffee room, collecting reports, squeezed himself into the
Sessions House at the Old Bailey if there was an interesting trial, nay
perhaps obtained admission to the gallery of Whitehall, and noticed how
the King and Duke looked. In this way he gathered materials for weekly
epistles destined to enlighten some county town or some bench of rustic
magistrates. Such were the sources from which the inhabitants of the
largest provincial cities, and the great body of the gentry and clergy,
learned almost all that they knew of the history of their own time. We
must suppose that at Cambridge there were as many persons curious
to know what was passing in the world as at almost any place in the
kingdom, out of London. Yet at Cambridge, during a great part of the
reign of Charles the Second, the Doctors of Laws and the Masters of
Arts had no regular supply of news except through the London Gazette.
At length the services of one of the collectors of intelligence in
the capital were employed. That was a memorable day on which the first
newsletter from London was laid on the table of the only coffee room
in Cambridge. [165] At the seat of a man of fortune in the country the
newsletter was impatiently expected. Within a week after it had arrived
it had been thumbed by twenty families. It furnished the neighboring
squires with matter for talk over their October, and the neighboring
rectors with topics for sharp sermons against Whiggery or Popery.
Many of these curious journals might doubtless still be detected by a
diligent search in the archives of old families. Some are to be found
in our public libraries; and one series, which is not the least valuable
part of the literary treasures collected by Sir James Mackintosh, will
be occasionally quoted in the course of this work. [166]

It is scarcely necessary to say that there were then no provincial
newspapers. Indeed, except in the capital and at the two Universities,
there was scarcely a printer in the kingdom. The only press in England
north of Trent appears to have been at York. [167]

It was not only by means of the London Gazette that the government
undertook to furnish political instruction to the people. That journal
contained a scanty supply of news without comment. Another journal,
published under the patronage of the court, consisted of comment without
news. This paper, called the Observator, was edited by an old Tory
pamphleteer named Roger Lestrange. Lestrange was by no means deficient
in readiness and shrewdness; and his diction, though coarse, and
disfigured by a mean and flippant jargon which then passed for wit in
the green room and the tavern, was not without keenness and vigour. But
his nature, at once ferocious and ignoble, showed itself in every line
that he penned. When the first Observators appeared there was some
excuse for his acrimony. The Whigs were then powerful; and he had to
contend against numerous adversaries, whose unscrupulous violence might
seem to justify unsparing retaliation. But in 1685 all the opposition
had been crushed. A generous spirit would have disdained to insult a
party which could not reply, and to aggravate the misery of prisoners,
of exiles, of bereaved families: but; from the malice of Lestrange the
grave was no hiding place, and the house of mourning no sanctuary. In
the last month of the reign of Charles the Second, William Jenkyn, an
aged dissenting pastor of great note, who had been cruelly persecuted
for no crime but that of worshipping God according to the fashion
generally followed throughout protestant Europe, died of hardships and
privations at Newgate. The outbreak of popular sympathy could not be
repressed. The corpse was followed to the grave by a train of a hundred
and fifty coaches. Even courtiers looked sad. Even the unthinking King
showed some signs of concern. Lestrange alone set up a howl of savage
exultation, laughed at the weak compassion of the Trimmers, proclaimed
that the blasphemous old impostor had met with a most righteous
punishment, and vowed to wage war, not only to the death, but after
death, with all the mock saints and martyrs. [168] Such was the spirit
of the paper which was at this time the oracle of the Tory party, and
especially of the parochial clergy.

Literature which could be carried by the post bag then formed the
greater part of the intellectual nutriment ruminated by the country
divines and country justices. The difficulty and expense of conveying
large packets from place to place was so great, that an extensive work
was longer in making its way from Paternoster Row to Devonshire or
Lancashire than it now is in reaching Kentucky. How scantily a rural
parsonage was then furnished, even with books the most necessary to a
theologian, has already been remarked. The houses of the gentry were
not more plentifully supplied. Few knights of the shire had libraries so
good as may now perpetually be found in a servants' hall or in the back
parlour of a small shopkeeper. An esquire passed among his neighbours
for a great scholar, if Hudibras and Baker's Chronicle, Tarlton's Jests
and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay in his hall window among
the fishing rods and fowling pieces. No circulating library, no book
society, then existed even in the capital: but in the capital those
students who could not afford to purchase largely had a resource. The
shops of the great booksellers, near Saint Paul's Churchyard, were
crowded every day and all day long with readers; and a known customer
was often permitted to carry a volume home. In the country there was
no such accommodation; and every man was under the necessity of buying
whatever he wished to read. [169]

As to the lady of the manor and her daughters, their literary stores
generally consisted of a prayer book and receipt book. But in truth
they lost little by living in rural seclusion. For, even in the highest
ranks, and in those situations which afforded the greatest facilities
for mental improvement, the English women of that generation were
decidedly worse educated than they have been at any other time since
the revival of learning. At an early period they had studied the
masterpieces of ancient genius. In the present day they seldom bestow
much attention on the dead languages; but they are familiar with the
tongue of Pascal and Moliere, with the tongue of Dante and Tasso,
with the tongue of Goethe and Schiller; nor is there any purer or more
graceful English than that which accomplished women now speak and write.
But, during the latter part of the seventeenth century, the culture
of the female mind seems to have been almost entirely neglected. If
a damsel had the least smattering of literature she was regarded as a
prodigy. Ladies highly born, highly bred, and naturally quick witted,
were unable to write a line in their mother tongue without solecisms
and faults of spelling such as a charity girl would now be ashamed to
commit. [170]

The explanation may easily be found. Extravagant licentiousness,
the natural effect of extravagant austerity, was now the mode;
and licentiousness had produced its ordinary effect, the moral and
intellectual degradation of women. To their personal beauty, it was the
fashion to pay rude and impudent homage. But the admiration and desire
which they inspired were seldom mingled with respect, with affection,
or with any chivalrous sentiment. The qualities which fit them to
be companions, advisers, confidential friends, rather repelled than
attracted the libertines of Whitehall. In that court a maid of honour,
who dressed in such a manner as to do full justice to a white bosom,
who ogled significantly, who danced voluptuously, who excelled in pert
repartee, who was not ashamed to romp with Lords of the Bedchamber and
Captains of the Guards, to sing sly verses with sly expression, or to
put on a page's dress for a frolic, was more likely to be followed and
admired, more likely to be honoured with royal attentions, more likely
to win a rich and noble husband than Jane Grey or Lucy Hutchinson would
have been. In such circumstances the standard of female attainments was
necessarily low; and it was more dangerous to be above that standard
than to be beneath it. Extreme ignorance and frivolity were thought less
unbecoming in a lady than the slightest tincture of pedantry. Of the
too celebrated women whose faces we still admire on the walls of Hampton
Court, few indeed were in the habit of reading anything more valuable
than acrostics, lampoons, and translations of the Clelia and the Grand
Cyrus.

The literary acquirements, even of the accomplished gentlemen of that
generation, seem to have been somewhat less solid and profound than at
an earlier or a later period. Greek learning, at least, did not flourish
among us in the days of Charles the Second, as it had flourished before
the civil war, or as it again flourished long after the Revolution.
There were undoubtedly scholars to whom the whole Greek literature,
from Homer to Photius, was familiar: but such scholars were to be found
almost exclusively among the clergy resident at the Universities, and
even at the Universities were few, and were not fully appreciated. At
Cambridge it was not thought by any means necessary that a divine should
be able to read the Gospels in the original. [171] Nor was the standard
at Oxford higher. When, in the reign of William the Third, Christ
Church rose up as one man to defend the genuineness of the Epistles
of Phalaris, that great college, then considered as the first seat
of philology in the kingdom, could not muster such a stock of Attic
learning as is now possessed by several youths at every great public
school. It may easily be supposed that a dead language, neglected at the
Universities, was not much studied by men of the world. In a former age
the poetry and eloquence of Greece had been the delight of Raleigh and
Falkland. In a later age the poetry and eloquence of Greece were the
delight of Pitt and Fox, of Windham and Grenville. But during the
latter part of the seventeenth century there was in England scarcely one
eminent statesman who could read with enjoyment a page of Sophocles or
Plato.

Good Latin scholars were numerous. The language of Rome, indeed, had not
altogether lost its imperial prerogatives, and was still, in many parts
of Europe, almost indispensable to a traveller or a negotiator. To speak
it well was therefore a much more common accomplishment shall in our
time; and neither Oxford nor Cambridge wanted poets who, on a great
occasion, could lay at the foot of the throne happy imitations of
the verses in which Virgil and Ovid had celebrated the greatness of
Augustus.

Yet even the Latin was giving way to a younger rival. France united at
that time almost every species of ascendency. Her military glory was
at the height. She had vanquished mighty coalitions. She had dictated
treaties. She had subjugated great cities and provinces. She had forced
the Castilian pride to yield her the precedence. She had summoned
Italian princes to prostrate themselves at her footstool. Her authority
was supreme in all matters of good breeding, from a duel to a minuet.
She determined how a gentleman's coat must be cut, how long his peruke
must be, whether his heels must be high or low, and whether the lace
on his hat must be broad or narrow. 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.