1689-1714.] ANIMOSITIES OF THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. 55 little "from a rustic miller or ale-house keeper of our time;" and paint their wives and daughters "in tastes and acquirements below a housekeeper or a still-room maid of the present day." The country gentleman's "unrefined sensuality;" his "language and pronunciation such as we should now expect. to hear only from the most ignorant clowns;" his "oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse;" his habitual intoxication "with strong beer;" his "bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop-merchants "-are given as characteristics of the country gentleman "of the time when the crown passed from Charles II. to his brother." But some sketches of the country gentleman, written in 1711-sketches which will endure as long as our language-may be set in merciful contrast to the highly coloured composition. of our eloquent contemporary, "derived from sources too numerous to be recapitulated." With the sir Roger de Coverley of Addison and Steele we live for a month at his house in the country, and see only sober and staid servants, and a chaplain, who was chosen for plain sense rather than learning, and as “a man that understood a little of backgammon." Will Wimble, an idle younger brother to a baronet, describes a "large cock-pheasant," and how he caught "the huge jack;" but we do not see him and the host laid under the table. The knight's knowledge is not extensive. He takes care to parade his acquaintance with Baker's Chronicle; and tells that there is fine reading in the casualties of Henry IV.'s reign. But he does not pretend to be what he is not, and he has a reverence for the intellectual qualities of his visitor from London. Nor is he ill-bred, haughty, and insolent, as Burnet describes the class. With true politeness he lets his guest rise or go to bed when he pleases; dine in his own chamber, or at the general table; sit still and say nothing without being called upon to be merry. He indeed is somewhat dictatorial and exclusive at church; and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides himself; counts the congregation to see if any of his tenants are missing; and when John Mathews kicks his heels, calls out to him to mind what he is about, and not disturb the congregation. But he is compassionate even to the hare that he rescues from his hounds; and when he is doubting whether he ought not, as a justice of the peace, to commit the gipsy as a vagrant, he ends by crossing her hand with a piece of money. This, it may be said, is the fancy-picture of the most gentle of the great English humourists. But all the life-like traits of past manners must be derived from similar sources. Those who describe their own age with the greatest bitterness of satire are not always the most trustworthy. The exceptional cases of gross vice and degrading ignorance in the gentry may be as often mistaken as characteristics of a class, as the ruffians and outcasts of a great city may be mistaken for specimens of the hard-working and ill-paid tenants of its hovels and garrets. The most repulsive feature in the character of the English Country Gentleman of the time of William and Anne is his political and religious bigotry. He does not only avoid the company of his neighbour for their difference of opinion, but he positively hates him. This is not a quiescent humour, whose chief evil is to destroy good fellowship. It takes the practical form of one continued struggle for political supremacy. The dominion of King without * Macaulay, vol. i. chap. iii. 56 THE NOBILITY. [1639-1714. Parliament he knows has passed away; the most devoted Tory has no serious hopes that it can be brought back again. If the nation were to call over the son of James II., he fancies that, although the young Stuart is a papist, there will be no interference with the national religion; and although the exiled family have been taught from their cradles to venerate a heaven-appointed despotism, that they will not be despots. Whig and Tory accept parliamentary government as an accomplished fact, and they will each see what they can make of it for their own advantage. Both parties had their strongholds in the boroughs that had representatives without population. If they could manage the country districts that were populous, they might wholly control the troublesome cities and towns. The machinery of both sides was unlimited bribery. The degradation of the briber was as great as that of the bribed. "This corruption has become a national crime, having infected the lowest as well as the highest amongst us," writes Berkeley in 1721. The base politics of that age drew from the high-minded churchman the following noble denunciation: "God grant the time be not near, when men shall say, 'this island was once inhabited by a religious, brave, sincere people, of plain uncorrupt manners, respecting inbred worth rather than titles and appearances, assertors of liberty, lovers of their country, jealous of their own rights, and unwilling to infringe the rights of others; improvers of learning and useful arts, enemies to luxury, tender of other men's lives and prodigal of their own; inferior in nothing to the old Greeks or Romans, and superior to each of those people in the perfections of the other. Such were our ancestors during their rise and greatness; but they degenerated, grew servile flatterers of men in power, adopted epicurean notions, became venal, corrupt, injurious, which drew upon them the hatred of God and man, and occasioned their final ruin."" * The Nobility-the "temporal lords "-were, as they always had been, a most important portion of the rural aristocracy. Some resided for considerable periods of the year in their mansions upon their great estates. Their aggregate income was very nearly equal to one half of the income of the whole body of the esquires. They were the lords-lieutenant of counties, and, as such, had the control of the militia force of the kingdom. They were not attended to county meetings by hundreds of gentry wearing their liveries, as in the feudal days; they could not call out to the field their thousands of vassals. But they nevertheless mainly swayed the course of political action, under the system which we call "constitutional." As born legislators their direct power was far greater than in the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth, they made far more overt attempts to determine the composition of the Lower House. Yet, perhaps, all things considered, they were then, as a body, the most incapable of taking a large view of the destinies of their country, and of nourishing a deep sympathy with the condition of the people. But nevertheless they could not segregate themselves from the people. They could not repose in safety upon exclusive pretensions; and thus they headed the Revolution, and imparted to it the somewhat aristocratic character which it has taken more than another century * Berkeley, "Works," vol. ii. p. 197. 1689-1714.] THE NOBILITY AND ESQUIRES IN LONDON. 57 to repair. They made no attempt to proportion representation by the numbers of the represented, or by the amount they paid in taxation: They had no very clear insight into the changes which had been produced by the rise of the trading classes. They made no exertions to better the condition of the poorest. They did not train their children to discharge the high functions to which they were born. They had them taught dancing, fencing, and riding. It looks like a satire when Burnet recommends that the sons of the nobility should be instructed in geography and history. Nevertheless, he admits that in his time, four or five lords, by their knowledge, good judgment, and integrity, had raised the house of peers to a pitch of reputation that seemed beyond expectation.* The desire of the nobility and other landowners to congregate in London was not an unnatural one, and was in some degree absolutely necessary when the Parliamentary system of government became the rule under which England was to live. The jealousy of commerce, and of the use of foreign commodities, made the patriot of the end of the seventeenth century mildly reprove the growing desire of the rich to gather round the seat of luxury and fashion; as the despot of the beginning of the century had attempted forcibly to restrain this desire. "Heretofore," writes the descendant of John Hampden, "the gentry and nobility of England lived altogether in the country, where they continually spent the product of the land. Now they all flock to London, where their way of living is quite different from that used heretofore; and they do not expend in proportion the third part of things of our product, to what they did when they lived among their neighbours." We know, at the present day, that the chief evils of absenteeship are moral evils; that the landlord who is a mere receiver of rents, without taking thought for the general welfare of the humbler classes upon his estates, does not do his duty in that state of life to which he has been called. "The yeomen and gentlemen of smaller estates," adds Mr. Hampden, "are now, generally speaking, the only constant residents in the country." But even the gentlemen of smailer estates were frequently craving for "a Journey to London." The dramatists and essayists exhibit the figures which the boorish squire, and his wife and daughters, presented in the novel pleasures and temptations of the metropolis. The squire was too often in the tavern, where he was told the wits and the quality were ready to welcome the stranger. Here he drank punch, the favourite beverage, and found it stronger than his strongest October; or he played at hazard with sharpers, and went home penniless. His ladies resorted to the theatre, which was not a school of morality. They walked in the New Spring Gardens in their "hoop petticoats;" and thus "invested in whalebone" thought themselves "sufficiently secured against the approaches of an ill-bred fellow."§ But the smart gentlemen who hovered about "this new-fashioned rotunda" could still whisper such words of compliment as ladies dare not now read in Wycherley and Congreve. "The Folly," a floating Coffee House, where ladies of very different degrees of respectability were entertained by the + "Own Time," vol. vi. p. 207. + Tract of 1692, in "State Tracts published during the reign of William III." VOL. V.-129. 58 THE CLERGY. [1689-1714. beaux of the reign of Anne, was another place of genteel resort, which the lower popular literature has described with sympathising coarseness. To the country visitors of London the fashionable amusement of the masquerade was the most dangerous of pleasures. It was in vain that the preacher and the moralist denounced this as a contagion of the worst kind. The duchess and the courtezan equally frequented such an assemblage-the peer of parliament and the mercer's apprentice from Covent Garden. The mask made the licentious even more free than in their ordinary talk; and though an English lady could bear many coarse jokes and sly allusions without blushing, from the masquerade she would take back to her wondering friends such specimens of "polite conversation" as would corrupt the most secluded districts for half a century. These excursions of the gentry to London, however rare, at any rate spread the worst follies of the town. The neglect of the indigent at home-the neglect not of mere almsgiving but of kindly intercourse-was certainly one of the evil consequences of the habitual residence, and even of the occasional sojourn, of the gentry in the metropolis. The worldly estate of the great body of the Clergy may in some degree account for the low estimate of their condition and character which has been taken at this period. Their political action we shall have to describe, in their senseless dislike of the great man who had saved the English Church from ruin, and their puerile hankerings after the dynasty that they had united to eject. The revenue of each of the twenty-six "spiritual lords" has been reckoned at about three times as much as that of an esquire. The income of "eminent clergymen" is estimated for each at little more than one-fourth of that of a gentleman. The lesser clergyman ranks, in point of the annual means for the support of his family, as below the small freeholder; a little above the farmer; and not very much above the handicraftsman. These incomes being taken upon the average of ten thousand livings, would undoubtedly leave some of the clergy with a pittance not higher than that of the common 1689-1714.] THE CLERGY. 59 seaman, and even of the out-door labourer. Can we wonder, therefore, that servility and coarseness were considered the characteristics of the class? They went from the Grammar-school to the College upon an exhibition or a sizarship which had its own humiliations. If fortunate, they began their career as Chaplains in noble or other privileged households, where it was a blessed fate if they were treated with as much respect as was bestowed upon the butler. When they obtained a benefice they had to perform the most menial labours to extract from it the means of subsistence. In this last stage, can we wonder that some might be found, instead of taking rank as gentlemen, drinking ale and smoking with the village cowkeeper? Perhaps it was not the worst society for them. But in spite of these familiar pictures of the addiction of the country parson to low company, and of his necessary connection with mean labours, may we not consider that there were many who felt an honest pride in ploughing their own field, and feeding their own hogs; whose wives were spinning the wool of their own sheep, and whose daughters were scouring their bricked kitchen, without mental degradation? Burnet, who was a severe censurer of his brethren, admits that the greatest part of them live without scandal; but in the very next sentence he says, "I have observed the clergy, in all the places throughout which I have travelled-Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Dissenters: but of them all our clergy are much the most remiss in their labours in private, and the least severe in their lives." * In another place he speaks of the zeal of the Romish clergy, and of Dissenters; "but I must own, that the main body of our clergy has always appeared dead and lifeless to me, and instead of animating one another, they seem rather to lay one asleep." The right reverend friend of William III. had sustained many mortifications from the restlessness of the great body of the country clergy; from their intolerance; from their extravagant notions of Church supremacy; from their narrow views of political affairs. The eminent divines of that day were great scholars and great reasoners. The whole course of human thought was tending to the actual rather than to the ideal. The philosophy of Locke may be traced in many a powerful religious argument which could confound the sceptic, but could not rouse the indifferent. The divinity of that generation, and indeed of the next, was for the most part formal and unimpassioned. Methodism arose; and the most ignorant of the human race found nourishment and hope in words which came home to their bosoms and understandings. Tillotson reasoning to the benchers of Lincoln's Inn, and Whitefield moving the colliers of Bristol to tears, are contrasts of which the lessons were not speedily learnt in the Church, but which when learnt could not be easily forgotten. The historian of his own time, to do him justice, saw what was chiefly wanting to make the clergy efficient for good. He exhorted them "to labour more," instead of cherishing extravagant notions of the authority of the Church. If to an exemplary course of life in their own persons, " clergymen would add a little more labour,-not only performing public offices, and preaching to the edification of the people, but watching over them, instructing them, exhorting, reproving, and comforting them, as occasion is given, from house to house, making their calling the business of their whole life,— * "Own Time," vol vi. p. 183. + Ibid. p. 179. |