BOOKS.
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ENGLAND 1N THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.* Mn. SYDNEY deserves some credit for expending a good deal of labour in the compilation of this book, and readers ignorant of the history and literature of the last century may find much in it that is amusing, and a little, perhaps, that is instructive. Judging from the motto from Carlyle on the title-page, Mr. Sydney appears to think that, in describing the external characteristics of the age, we shall arrive at " its inward principle," and " whither it was tending;" but to this end his gossiping chapters fail to contribute. It is almost inevitable, too, in a work of this kind, that representations gleaned from the romances, plays, and pamphlets of the period, illustrative of customs and manners, and collected together as a picture of the century, should he eminently mis- leading. It is not a general truth that " a fashionable lady of the last century seldom awoke until nearly noon ;" that her afternoons were spent in the toy-shops in company with her lap- dog and monkey, while her evenings were passed at the card- table. A sketch from the Taller leads Mr. Sydney to add that, " if the weather proved so unfavourable that a belle was obliged to stop at home, she racked her brains to kill the time ; and if she failed in this, had recourse to the bottle." With equal reasonableness might Mr. Sydney declare that the toilet-table of every fine lady in Pope's day was covered, like Belinda's, with "puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billets-doux ;" or that the offensive verses written by Swift prove the grossness of the Irish clergy in his day. The writer allows, indeed, that there were many women who spent their days more wisely; but he adds the broad and unverifiable assertions, that for every woman who lived like Richardson's Lady Bradshaigh, "there were ten whose mode of living differed little, if at all, from that which has just been indicated," and that " between husbands and wives in general at this time, hardly any unanimity as regards tastes and recreations can be said to have existed."
If we may judge from this and from a number of similar passages, Mr. Sydney is too apt to regard verse-makers and satirists as though they were exact and scrupulous chroniclers.
The author is an optimist, and apparently, like Macaulay, estimates a nation's progress by its material comforts. In clumsy English he exclaims :-
"Let him turn in which direction he may, where will the mechanic to-day 'find things in anything like the same state in which they were in the last century P Can he lay his finger upon a commodity consumed by all classes of the people that is not either of better quality or of improved manufacture P Can he point to any article of male or female wearing apparel worn even by the poorest of the population that is not at the present day of • Eng/and and the English in the Eighteenth Century. Chapters in the Social History of the Time. By William Connor Sydney. London : Ward and Downey. a quality far superior to that which was then in general use among the wealthy ? And may not the same be truly said with respect to food P Will it be denied that the masses live upon nothing, or at any rate expend their earnings upon nothing as the mainstay of their subsistence, except the best and the costliest of all the commonly cultivated productions of the Boil ? "
The writer who thinks it passing strange that with all these advantages, and the use of free libraries and lecture-halls, the working classes should " perpetually grumble and strike," has.
evidently yet to learn that the secret of content is not to be found in good living. The growth of luxury and wealth in the upper classes, and the increase of wages in the lower, do not necessarily enlarge a nation's capacity of enjoyment. They may add to the wear-and-tear of life, and by making larger demands upon its energy, rob it of repose. Our great-grand- fathers, by Mr. Sydney's own admission, lived far easier lives than we do. At the same time, they enjoyed and endured much which would be intolerable in these more refined days.
Cruelty in our age is veiled under the garb of science ; in the last century it was rampant in the sports of the peoples Cock-fighting and bull-baiting were the delight of the aris- tocracy, as well as of the common people, and the prize-fights of the period were not confined to men. Mr. Sydney quotes an advertisement that appeared in 1716, announcing that a wild bull would be turned loose at Hockley-in-the-Hole " with fireworks all over him ;" and a newspaper paragraph, dated 1768, announces a fight between two women for a new shift valued at half-a-guinea. " The battle was won by a woman called Bruising Peg, who beat her antagonist in a terrible manner " Addison and Swift describe the atrocities com- mitted by the Mohawks in the early years of the century, and how the law could be defied fifty years later may be read in the pages of Boswell. What Charles Lamb calls the " sweet security of streets " was unknown in the Queen Anne period and under the first two Georges, as every reader will remem- ber who is familiar with Gay's Trivia, and with the shameless autobiography of Colley Cibber's daughter, Mrs. Charke. Gallants of the Lovelace type pursued their vocation with effrontery, and duelling, against which Steele uttered a noble protest, was the mark of a fine gentleman. "A gentleman,' wrote Lord Chesterfield, " is every man who, with a tolerable suit of clothes, a sword by his side, and a watch and snuff- box in his pockets, asserts himself to be a gentleman, swears with energy that he will be treated as such, and that he will cut the throat of any man who presumes to say the contrary."' If it were not that by far the larger number of the men distinguished for birth, statesmanship, or letters in the eighteenth century died at a comparatively early age, we might be inclined to think that the capacity they displayed for hard drinking showed a greater toughness of constitution than their descendants possess. Pope's friend, Lord Bathurst, who, as Sterne said, was a prodigy at eighty-five, and had all the wit and promptness of a man of thirty, was an exception to the almost universal rule, and his vitality was not due to great abstemiousness, if we may credit the tale, which is also due to Sterne, that when about eighty-nine years of age, "having some friends with him at his country seat, and being loth to part with them one night, his son, the Lord Chancellor,• objected to sitting up any longer, and left the room. As soon as he was gone, the lively old Peer said : Come, my good friends,.
since the old gentleman is gone to bed, I think we may venture to crack another bottle." Dr. Johnson remembered the time when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night," and he said that before his days of total abstinence, be had drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it. Convivial habits, from the early years of the century to the close of it, prevailed in high life, as well as in the lower orders, among the statesmen of Queen Anne and.
the statesmen of George III.
Another prominent evil of that age which seems to have been lightly regarded, was the excessive severity of the criminal code. The over-sensitiveness of our time objects to the caning of a refractory youth ; a century ago, he was liable to be hanged for picking a pocket, and, as Mr. Sydney- truly observes, processions of criminals to Tyburn were constantly to be witnessed. The heads on Temple Bar, which provoked a lively witticism from Goldsmith as he walked under it with Johnson, were a familiar, every-day sight in the London of the Georges, and the gallows formed. a prominent sign of the age throughout the country. The want of sympathy upon occasions that seem most fitted. to have called it forth, was a mark of the common people in the last century. In his Voyage to Lisbon, Fielding relates how his great weakness, for he was then a dying man, called forth the jests of the sailors ; and the poor inmates of Bedlam, who were treated with far less consideration than the wild beasts in our Zoological Gardens, were exhibited as a public show. Criminals, too, were exhibited in Newgate before mounting the cart for Tyburn. Defoe in the pillory had the good fortune to win the favour of the mob, neither did he lose his ears, as Pope avers ; but sometimes the loss of ears was not the worst punishment the pillory brought with it, for stones and sticks, dead dogs and dead cats, were generally hurled at the unhappy victims, and death was occasionally the result. Pressing to death was one of the hideous punishments of the time, and in the latest quarter of the century women were burnt to death for counterfeiting coin. Mr. Sydney, by- the-way, says that the last heads exposed on Temple Bar were those of men concerned in the Rebellion of '45. A similar state- ment is made by Mr. Hare in his Walks Round London ; but Samuel Rogers, who was born in 1763, " well remembers " seeing one on a pole, and also another bare pole from which the head had dropped,—so that, if the statement of these writers is correct, one head must have remained thus exposed for at least five-and-twenty years.
It is strange that Dr. Johnson should have advocated the public procession of criminals, saying that if they did not draw spectators, they failed in their purpose. "The old method," he said, " was most satisfactory to all parties ; the public was gratified by a procession, the criminal was sup- ported by it." Mr. Sydney points out that in the year in which Johnson made this assertion there were fifty-one execu- tions in the capital alone, and that two years later the number had increased to ninety-seven.
The eighteenth century was in some respects, no doubt, a brutal age, but it gave the country much also that is of enduring worth, and its vigour is at least as conspicuous as its defects. It is natural that in a compilation of this character, the dark side of the age should be made the most prominent. In refinement and social progress, and possibly in the higher qualities that make a nation truly great, the century now drawing to an end has a whiter page than its predecessor. Our material superiority is incontestable ; but the life of a nation, like the life of an individual, is not dependent, as Mr. Sydney seems to think, on the things which it possesses. Truly has the greatest poetical teacher of our age said that " by the Soul only, the Nations shall be great and free."
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