No More Learning

The Marquess of Worcester had recently
observed the expansive power of moisture rarefied by heat. After many
experiments he had succeeded in constructing a rude steam engine, which
he called a fire water work, and which he pronounced to be an admirable
and most forcible instrument of propulsion. [131] But the Marquess was
suspected to be a madman, and known to be a Papist. His inventions,
therefore found no favourable reception. His fire water work might,
perhaps, furnish matter for conversation at a meeting of the Royal
Society, but was not applied to any practical purpose. There were no
railways, except a few made of timber, on which coals were carried from
the mouths of the Northumbrian pits to the banks of the Tyne. [132]
There was very little internal communication by water. A few attempts
had been made to deepen and embank the natural streams, but with slender
success. Hardly a single navigable canal had been even projected. The
English of that day were in the habit of talking with mingled admiration
and despair of the immense trench by which Lewis the Fourteenth had
made a junction between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They little
thought that their country would, in the course of a few generations,
be intersected, at the cost of private adventurers, by artificial rivers
making up more than four times the length of the Thames, the Severn, and
the Trent together.

It was by the highways that both travellers and goods generally passed
from place to place; and those highways appear to have been far worse
than might have been expected from the degree of wealth and civilisation
which the nation had even then attained. On the best lines of
communication the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the way
often such as it was hardly possible to distinguish, in the dusk, from
the unenclosed heath and fen which lay on both sides. Ralph Thorseby,
the antiquary, was in danger of losing his way on the great North road,
between Barnby Moor and Tuxford, and actually lost his way between
Doncaster and York. [133] Pepys and his wife, travelling in their own
coach, lost their way between Newbury and Reading. In the course of
the same tour they lost their way near Salisbury, and were in danger of
having to pass the night on the plain. [134] It was only in fine weather
that the whole breadth of the road was available for wheeled vehicles.
Often the mud lay deep on the right and the left; and only a narrow
track of firm ground rose above the quagmire. [135] At such times
obstructions and quarrels were frequent, and the path was sometimes
blocked up during a long time by carriers, neither of whom would break
the way. It happened, almost every day, that coaches stuck fast, until
a team of cattle could be procured from some neighbouring farm, to
tug them out of the slough. But in bad seasons the traveller had to
encounter inconveniences still more serious. Thoresby, who was in the
habit of travelling between Leeds and the capital, has recorded, in
his Diary, such a series of perils and disasters as might suffice for a
journey to the Frozen Ocean or to the Desert of Sahara. On one occasion
he learned that the floods were out between Ware and London, that
passengers had to swim for their lives, and that a higgler had perished
in the attempt to cross. In consequence of these tidings he turned out
of the high road, and was conducted across some meadows, where it was
necessary for him to ride to the saddle skirts in water. [136] In the
course of another journey he narrowly escaped being swept away by an
inundation of the Trent. He was afterwards detained at Stamford four
days, on account of the state of the roads, and then ventured to proceed
only because fourteen members of the House of Commons, who were going
up in a body to Parliament with guides and numerous attendants, took him
into their company. [137] On the roads of Derbyshire, travellers were in
constant fear for their necks, and were frequently compelled to alight
and lead their beasts. [138] The great route through Wales to Holyhead
was in such a state that, in 1685, a viceroy, going to Ireland, was five
hours in travelling fourteen miles, from Saint Asaph to Conway. Between
Conway and Beaumaris he was forced to walk a great part of the way; and
his lady was carried in a litter. His coach was, with much difficulty,
and by the help of many hands, brought after him entire. In general,
carriages were taken to pieces at Conway, and borne, on the shoulders of
stout Welsh peasants, to the Menai Straits. [139] In some parts of Kent
and Sussex, none but the strongest horses could, in winter, get through
the bog, in which, at every step, they sank deep. The markets were often
inaccessible during several months. It is said that the fruits of the
earth were sometimes suffered to rot in one place, while in another
place, distant only a few miles, the supply fell far short of the
demand. The wheeled carriages were, in this district, generally pulled
by oxen. [140] When Prince George of Denmark visited the stately mansion
of Petworth in wet weather, he was six hours in going nine miles; and it
was necessary that a body of sturdy hinds should be on each side of his
coach, in order to prop it. Of the carriages which conveyed his retinue
several were upset and injured. A letter from one of the party has been
preserved, in which the unfortunate courtier complains that, during
fourteen hours, he never once alighted, except when his coach was
overturned or stuck fast in the mud. [141]

One chief cause of the badness of the roads seems to have been the
defective state of the law. Every parish was bound to repair the
highways which passed through it. The peasantry were forced to
give their gratuitous labour six days in the year. If this was not
sufficient, hired labour was employed, and the expense was met by a
parochial rate. That a route connecting two great towns, which have a
large and thriving trade with each other, should be maintained at the
cost of the rural population scattered between them is obviously unjust;
and this injustice was peculiarly glaring in the case of the great North
road, which traversed very poor and thinly inhabited districts, and
joined very rich and populous districts. Indeed it was not in the
power of the parishes of Huntingdonshire to mend a high-way worn by the
constant traffic between the West Riding of Yorkshire and London. Soon
after the Restoration this grievance attracted the notice of Parliament;
and an act, the first of our many turnpike acts, was passed imposing
a small toll on travellers and goods, for the purpose of keeping some
parts of this important line of communication in good repair. [142] This
innovation, however, excited many murmurs; and the other great avenues
to the capital were long left under the old system. A change was at
length effected, but not without much difficulty. For unjust and absurd
taxation to which men are accustomed is often borne far more willingly
than the most reasonable impost which is new. It was not till many
toll bars had been violently pulled down, till the troops had in many
districts been forced to act against the people, and till much blood
had been shed, that a good system was introduced. [143] By slow degrees
reason triumphed over prejudice; and our island is now crossed in every
direction by near thirty thousand miles of turnpike road.

On the best highways heavy articles were, in the time of Charles the
Second, generally conveyed from place to place by stage waggons. In the
straw of these vehicles nestled a crowd of passengers, who could not
afford to travel by coach or on horseback, and who were prevented by
infirmity, or by the weight of their luggage, from going on foot. The
expense of transmitting heavy goods in this way was enormous. From
London to Birmingham the charge was seven pounds a ton; from London to
Exeter twelve pounds a ton. [144] This was about fifteen pence a ton
for every mile, more by a third than was afterwards charged on turnpike
roads, and fifteen times what is now demanded by railway companies.
The cost of conveyance amounted to a prohibitory tax on many useful
articles. Coal in particular was never seen except in the districts
where it was produced, or in the districts to which it could be carried
by sea, and was indeed always known in the south of England by the name
of sea coal.

On byroads, and generally throughout the country north of York and west
of Exeter, goods were carried by long trains of packhorses. These strong
and patient beasts, the breed of which is now extinct, were attended by
a class of men who seem to have borne much resemblance to the Spanish
muleteers. A traveller of humble condition often found it convenient to
perform a journey mounted on a packsaddle between two baskets, under the
care of these hardy guides. The expense of this mode of conveyance was
small. But the caravan moved at a foot's pace; and in winter the cold
was often insupportable. [145]

The rich commonly travelled in their own carriages, with at least four
horses. Cotton, the facetious poet, attempted to go from London to the
Peak with a single pair, but found at Saint Albans that the journey
would be insupportably tedious, and altered his Plan. [146] A coach
and six is in our time never seen, except as part of some pageant. The
frequent mention therefore of such equipages in old books is likely to
mislead us. We attribute to magnificence what was really the effect of a
very disagreeable necessity. People, in the time of Charles the Second,
travelled with six horses, because with a smaller number there was great
danger of sticking fast in the mire. Nor were even six horses always
sufficient. Vanbrugh, in the succeeding generation, described with great
humour the way in which a country gentleman, newly chosen a member of
Parliament, went up to London. On that occasion all the exertions of six
beasts, two of which had been taken from the plough, could not save the
family coach from being embedded in a quagmire.

Public carriages had recently been much improved. During the years which
immediately followed the Restoration, a diligence ran between London and
Oxford in two days. The passengers slept at Beaconsfield. At length, in
the spring of 1669, a great and daring innovation was attempted. It was
announced that a vehicle, described as the Flying Coach, would perform
the whole journey between sunrise and sunset. This spirited undertaking
was solemnly considered and sanctioned by the Heads of the University,
and appears to have excited the same sort of interest which is excited
in our own time by the opening of a new railway. The Vicechancellor, by
a notice affixed in all public places, prescribed the hour and place
of departure. The success of the experiment was complete. At six in the
morning the carriage began to move from before the ancient front of All
Souls College; and at seven in the evening the adventurous gentlemen
who had run the first risk were safely deposited at their inn in London.
[147] The emulation of the sister University was moved; and soon a
diligence was set up which in one day carried passengers from Cambridge
to the capital. At the close of the reign of Charles the Second flying
carriages ran thrice a week from London to the chief towns. But no stage
coach, indeed no stage waggon, appears to have proceeded further north
than York, or further west than Exeter. The ordinary day's journey of
a flying coach was about fifty miles in the summer; but in winter, when
the ways were bad and the nights long, little more than thirty. The
Chester coach, the York coach, and the Exeter coach generally reached
London in four days during the fine season, but at Christmas not till
the sixth day. The passengers, six in number, were all seated in the
carriage. For accidents were so frequent that it would have been
most perilous to mount the roof. The ordinary fare was about twopence
halfpenny a mile in summer, and somewhat more in winter. [148]

This mode of travelling, which by Englishmen of the present day would be
regarded as insufferably slow, seemed to our ancestors wonderfully and
indeed alarmingly rapid. In a work published a few months before the
death of Charles the Second, the flying coaches are extolled as far
superior to any similar vehicles ever known in the world. Their velocity
is the subject of special commendation, and is triumphantly contrasted
with the sluggish pace of the continental posts. But with boasts like
these was mingled the sound of complaint and invective. The interests of
large classes had been unfavourably affected by the establishment of the
new diligences; and, as usual, many persons were, from mere stupidity
and obstinacy, disposed to clamour against the innovation, simply
because it was an innovation. It was vehemently argued that this mode of
conveyance would be fatal to the breed of horses and to the noble art of
horsemanship; that the Thames, which had long been an important nursery
of seamen, would cease to be the chief thoroughfare from London up to
Windsor and down to Gravesend; that saddlers and spurriers would be
ruined by hundreds; that numerous inns, at which mounted travellers had
been in the habit of stopping, would be deserted, and would no longer
pay any rent; that the new carriages were too hot in summer and too cold
in winter; that the passengers were grievously annoyed by invalids and
crying children; that the coach sometimes reached the inn so late that
it was impossible to get supper, and sometimes started so early that
it was impossible to get breakfast. On these grounds it was gravely
recommended that no public coach should be permitted to have more than
four horses, to start oftener than once a week, or to go more than
thirty miles a day. It was hoped that, if this regulation were adopted,
all except the sick and the lame would return to the old mode of
travelling. Petitions embodying such opinions as these were presented to
the King in council from several companies of the City of London, from
several provincial towns, and from the justices of several counties. We
Smile at these things. It is not impossible that our descendants,
when they read the history of the opposition offered by cupidity and
prejudice to the improvements of the nineteenth century, may smile in
their turn. [149]

In spite of the attractions of the flying coaches, it was still usual
for men who enjoyed health and vigour, and who were not encumbered by
much baggage, to perform long journeys on horseback. If the traveller
wished to move expeditiously he rode post. Fresh saddle horses and
guides were to be procured at convenient distances along all the great
lines of road. The charge was threepence a mile for each horse, and
fourpence a stage for the guide. In this manner, when the ways were
good, it was possible to travel, for a considerable time, as rapidly
as by any conveyance known in England, till vehicles were propelled by
steam. There were as yet no post chaises; nor could those who rode
in their own coaches ordinarily procure a change of horses. The King,
however, and the great officers of state were able to command relays.
Thus Charles commonly went in one day from Whitehall to New-market, a
distance of about fifty-five miles through a level country; and this was
thought by his subjects a proof of great activity. Evelyn performed the
same journey in company with the Lord Treasurer Clifford. The coach was
drawn by six horses, which were changed at Bishop Stortford and again at
Chesterford. The travellers reached Newmarket at night. Such a mode of
conveyance seems to have been considered as a rare luxury confined to
princes and ministers. [150]

Whatever might be the way in which a journey was performed, the
travellers, unless they were numerous and well armed, ran considerable
risk of being stopped and plundered. The mounted highwayman, a marauder
known to our generation only from books, was to be found on every main
road. The waste tracts which lay on the great routes near London were
especially haunted by plunderers of this class. Hounslow Heath, on the
Great Western Road, and Finchley Common, on the Great Northern Road,
were perhaps the most celebrated of these spots. The Cambridge scholars
trembled when they approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight.
Seamen who had just been paid off at Chatham were often compelled
to deliver their purses on Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years
earlier by the greatest of poets as the scene of the depredations of
Falstaff. The public authorities seem to have been often at a loss
how to deal with the plunderers. At one time it was announced in the
Gazette, that several persons, who were strongly suspected of being
highwaymen, but against whom there was not sufficient evidence, would be
paraded at Newgate in riding dresses: their horses would also be shown;
and all gentlemen who had been robbed were invited to inspect this
singular exhibition. On another occasion a pardon was publicly offered
to a robber if he would give up some rough diamonds, of immense value,
which he had taken when he stopped the Harwich mail. A short time after
appeared another proclamation, warning the innkeepers that the eye
of the government was upon them. Their criminal connivance, it was
affirmed, enabled banditti to infest the roads with impunity. That these
suspicions were not without foundation, is proved by the dying speeches
of some penitent robbers of that age, who appear to have received from
the innkeepers services much resembling those which Farquhar's Boniface
rendered to Gibbet. [151]

It was necessary to the success and even to the safety of the highwayman
that he should be a bold and skilful rider, and that his manners and
appearance should be such as suited the master of a fine horse. He
therefore held an aristocratical position in the community of thieves,
appeared at fashionable coffee houses and gaming houses, and betted with
men of quality on the race ground. [152] Sometimes, indeed, he was a man
of good family and education. A romantic interest therefore attached,
and perhaps still attaches, to the names of freebooters of this class.
The vulgar eagerly drank in tales of their ferocity and audacity, of
their occasional acts of generosity and good nature, of their amours,
of their miraculous escapes, of their desperate struggles, and of their
manly bearing at the bar and in the cart. Thus it was related of William
Nevison, the great robber of Yorkshire, that he levied a quarterly
tribute on all the northern drovers, and, in return, not only spared
them himself, but protected them against all other thieves; that he
demanded purses in the most courteous manner; that he gave largely to
the poor what he had taken from the rich; that his life was once spared
by the royal clemency, but that he again tempted his fate, and at length
died, in 1685, on the gallows of York. [153] It was related how Claude
Duval, the French page of the Duke of Richmond, took to the road, became
captain of a formidable gang, and had the honour to be named first in a
royal proclamation against notorious offenders; how at the head of his
troop he stopped a lady's coach, in which there was a booty of four
hundred pounds; how he took only one hundred, and suffered the fair
owner to ransom the rest by dancing a coranto with him on the heath;
how his vivacious gallantry stole away the hearts of all women; how
his dexterity at sword and pistol made him a terror to all men; how, at
length, in the year 1670, he was seized when overcome by wine; how dames
of high rank visited him in prison, and with tears interceded for his
life; how the King would have granted a pardon, but for the interference
of Judge Morton, the terror of highwaymen, who threatened to resign his
office unless the law were carried into full effect; and how, after the
execution, the corpse lay in state with all the pomp of scutcheons, wax
lights, black hangings and mutes, till the same cruel Judge, who
had intercepted the mercy of the crown, sent officers to disturb the
obsequies. [154] In these anecdotes there is doubtless a large mixture
of fable; but they are not on that account unworthy of being recorded;
for it is both an authentic and an important fact that such tales,
whether false or true, were heard by our ancestors with eagerness and
faith.

All the various dangers by which the traveller was beset were greatly
increased by darkness. He was therefore commonly desirous of having
the shelter of a roof during the night; and such shelter it was not
difficult to obtain. From a very early period the inns of England
had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent
accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth
century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the
wide chambers and stables of the Tabard in Southwark. The food was of
the best, and the wines such as drew the company on to drink largely.
Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison
gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great
hostelries. The Continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like
them. There were some in which two or three hundred people, with their
horses, could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the
tapestry, above all, the abundance of clean and fine linen was matter
of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were
signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. In the seventeenth century
England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The traveller
sometimes, in a small village, lighted on a public house such as Walton
has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls
were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelt of lavender, and
where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trouts fresh
from the neighbouring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At
the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk,
choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London.
[155] The innkeepers too, it was said, were not like other innkeepers.
On the Continent the landlord was the tyrant of those who crossed the
threshold. In England he was a servant. 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.