ENGLAND UNDER THE REGENCY.* Ma. ASHTON may be called a

book-maker by profession, and he is proud of his vocation. In a passage, curious alike for its egotism, confusion of thought, and doubtful English, the writer says :-

" If I want to give a living touch to this book, I must still quote, because to be honest, I must do it. Others assimilate bodily or paraphrase facts ; then they are men of genius,' and they call me in reviews a mere compiler.' Granted ; I take the latter as a compliment, for I give the very living age and sink myself ; because the quotations are better than can now be written—they are of the time. We have novels—we have plays, mostly imaginative, because of the ignorance of the writer ; but an honest historian ought only to give the history of the time as he has found it, and to any one who has conscientiously worked, the crass ignorance and superficial knowledge of the present day is stupendous."

This extract will suffice, perhaps, to show that the compliment

Mr. Ashton accepts is the only one he is likely to receive. As a master of scissors and paste, he deserves some praise. The book is not without its uses, and amidst an oiler podrida of

unconnected newspaper cuttings, the reader may find some suggestive matter and a certain measure of amusement. The caricatures illustrate the state of the time as much as the

letterpress, and are vastly more amusing. Some of the best are by Cruikshank and Gilray, and there was scope for their pencils in days when the most worthless of men presided over the destinies of England. Leigh Hunt, it will be re- membered, was imprisoned for making a remark on the Prince Regent's appearance ; but his gout and his corpulence, his dissipation and his dress, were the constant theme of satire ;

and so much was " the First Gentleman of Europe " disliked during the period of the Regency, that on appearing in public he was sometimes greeted with groans and hisses, and was forced to escape from this unpleasant greeting by putting his horses to their full speed. The prints of the time present the Regent in every kind of absurd position ; but the age was a coarse one, and Mr. Ashton states that some of them are too coarse for reproduction.

England during the Regency had many features unknown in our day. The sale of a wife by auction, so graphically described by Mr. Hardy in one of his novels, was not unknown in 1815, when three women were sold by their husbands at Smithfield, one of them being a beautiful and well-dressed young lady, who

"was brought to the market in a coach and exposed to the view of her purchaser with a silk halter round her shoulders."

In the Morning Chronicle of March, 1808, appeared an advertisement of fifty-four " well-seasoned Jamaica slaves to be let or sold." Very recently, on reviewing a work on Trial by Duel, we mentioned that it lingered on until abolished

by statute in 1819, after the celebrated case of " Ashford v. Thornton." Mr. Ashton relates the details of the trial. The prisoner Thornton, who was accused of drowning a young woman, threw down a glove for the appellant to take up. Counsel then addressed the Court with a counter-plea for the appellant. In the course of his speech, he said : " It would appear to me extraordinary indeed, if the person who murdered the sister, should, as the law exists in these enlightened times, be allowed to prove his innocence by murdering the brother also, or at least by an attempt to do so." To this Lord Ellen-

• S0611 England under the Regency. By John Ashton. With 90 Illustration. 2 vole. London: Ward and Downey. MO.

borough replied : "It is the law of England; we must not call it murder." Ultimately, the accused man was discharged without bail, "the appellant declining the challenge to combat according to ancient usage." Some years previously, a mer- chant was posted at Lloyd's as a coward for refusing a challenge, and a criminal information was brought against two persons for this indignity. Lord Ellenborough, who tried the case, denounced this " spurious chivalry" of the counting- house in strong language. " These tradesmen," he said, " instead of posting their books are posting one another."

Apparently it was not the folly of duelling that drew this protest from Lord Ellenborough, but the incongruity of business men deeming it necessary to defend their honour in this way.

Dr. Johnson's defence of duelling was still held as valid in 1812. Mr. Ashton considers that the duel was " dying out," but he makes a precisely contrary statement, and assuredly a more correct one, on a later page. " Affairs of honour " were, indeed, frequent among ordinary English gentlemen, and also among public men. A few instances will suffice. In 1809, Lord Castlereagh challenged Canning, and wounded him ; three years later, O'Connell challenged D'Esterre, and killed him; in 1822, Boswell's son, Sir Alexander, was killed in a duel; in 1829, the Duke of Wellington challenged the Earl of Winchelsea ; and in 1827, Sir Walter Scott, on anticipating a challenge from a French General for some statements in his We of Napoleon, wrote that if the quarrel were thrust upon him, he would not refuse to fight. " He shall not dis- honour the country through my sides, I can assure him." By- the-way, Mr. Ashton's statement that on the death of Pye, the Laureate, Scott was a candidate for the honour of being his successor, may convey an erroneous impression. A candi- date is commonly regarded as a person who offers himself as fit for an appointment. The post, on the contrary, when offered to Scott, was promptly declined, and he did all he could at the same time to secure it for his friend Southey.

In the years of the Regency, while England was engaged in fighting Napoleon, the country was burdened with French prisoners. It was calculated that they cost £1,000 a day, " exclusive of building materials used for their prisons." A large number managed to escape, and hundreds of officers broke their parole. Still the country swarmed with French soldiers, for it was stated in August, 1814, that more than sixty-seven thousand prisoners had been sent to France since the conclusion of the peace. That year we had also nearly four thousand American prisoners to feed and guard. Great was the distress in the country, and the Regent appears to have been more deeply in debt than ever. There is good reason to believe, said a newspaper of the day, that treble £339,000, the known excess stated in the Journals of Parlia- ment, " would not release the Prince Regent from his pecuniary embarrassment ; " and there can be little exaggera- tion in this statement. " If he had been a manufacturing town," says Thackeray, "or a populous rural district, or an army of five thousand men, he would not have cost more.

He spent £10,000 a year for the coats on his back.

The nation gave him more money, and more, and more. The sum is past counting." The poor suffered severely, but there

was no lack of money in the country ; and when the Allied Sovereigns came to London, a banquet was given by the Cita+.

" on a scale of magnificence never since equalled." There were heavy dinners in those days, and there was the grossest extravagance :—

" Rarities in vegetables," Mr. Ashton writes, "fetched a price such as we should not now dream of paying. Vide the following : It is a standing order in the wealthy Company of Grocers to have plenty of green pease at their dinner when they do not exceed the price of four guineas a quart ; this year [1814] they were not to be obtained under the price of six guineas, and in consequence the members were obliged so far to narrow their indulgence as to put up with turtle, turbot, venison, house lamb, turkey, poultry, asparagus, and French beans."

Whether this statement be true, or, which is more probable, a canard, it is still a sign of the times. Such wiz the eagerness for luxuries, that some enterprising Lapland•:re brought over for sale a large quantity of frozen game ; but they had come to the wrong market, and an import duty of £50, and £10 freight from Harwich to London, must, one would think, have rained their trade. They travelled, however, all over the country, and were a popular exhibition.

Corn riots occurred in London and in the provinces, and then, as now, mob-orators inflamed the passions of the people.

The Spa Field Riots and the Luddite Riots, indeed, belong to history, and the latter, which were directed against machinery, recall a line in the Rejected Addresses. Drunkenness, as all the world knows, was a vice more leniently regarded in those days than it is now, and we read of a dinner of Volunteers, 54 in number, at which the liquor charges by the landlord amounted to 126 bottles of port, 48 of sherry, 64 half-crown bowls of punch, and 20 of negus, besides ale and porter. The amount charged was disputed, and the innkeeper brought an action, which may be said to have ended in his favour, since the jury only reduced the price claimed for the port-wine by sixpence a bottle. The men of those days had also a capacity for eating denied to us. Mr. Ashton gives the bill-of-fare of a Mayor of Chester, who on January 1st, 1811, gave a dinner to two hundred of his friends, which would suffice for more than twice that number of guests now. Prize-fights were in vogue, bull-baiting was not made illegal until 1835, and cock-fighting was patronised by the highest gentlemen in the land. Gambling, the most prominent vice of our day, was equally prominent, though in another form perhaps, during the Regency.

Among the amusements of the time, we read, as we may in our own, of female rowing-matches and cricket-matches ; but these sports were then of a vulgar order. Dandy-horses were to be purchased in Long Acre, and their rate of speed is said to have been from eight to ten miles an hour. The Regent, it is needless to say, had his own little amusements, and on one occasion is said to have had supper in the kitchen of the Pavilion. (The waltz was introduced into this country about the year 1813, and provoked, as we all know, the satire of Byron. " Waltzing," says Mr. Ashton, " was considered by some as awfully wicked. It may be. Personally, my dancing days are over; but I never felt particularly sinful when waltzing.") Fast driving was a sport of the wealthy, and then, as now, young men of fashion drove public coaches. " In 1818, there were thirty-seven coaches which left and returned to Brighton daily." Two years ago, a coachman drove from Piccadilly to Brighton and back within eight hours. A news- paper of 1816 states : "A new coach was started by some Jehus in the spring to run to Brighton, a distance of fifty-two miles, in six hours, with a pledge that if they did not accom- plish the journey in that time, they would carry the passengers gratis, to accomplish which the horses were kept upon a gallop all the way; and notwithstanding this great risk, the coach was always filled with passengers. In one of the journeys the coachman broke three whips. In one week fifteen horses died." Mr. Ashton adds that the authorities interfered, as they considered this speed both dangerous and cruel. Stage- coach travelling was a pleasant method of locomotion in summer weather ; but in winter great was the suffering of outside passengers, and the compiler records instances in which they were frozen to death. On one occasion, the Exeter mail-coach was attacked by a lioness ; on another, the Hamp- stead stage was blown over by the wind.

When Mr. Ashton speaks in his own person he amuses the reader, but generally at his own expense. A considerable part of the compilation has but slight connection with the " Social Life of England under the Regency." If, however, there is much in the volumes that is irrelevant, there is little that will not serve for pastime in an idle hour.