of the supply of African slaves to the Spanish West Indies, and its own laws against domestic crimes were as savage as its measures to repress crime were inefficient. A hundred and sixty offences were punishable with death. There was neither pity for the criminal, nor horror at the crime, but there was a great deal of curiosity. Famous offenders, like Jack Sheppard and Dr. Dodd, were exhibited by the turnkeys in the press-room for two hours before execution at a shilling a head. Criminals had the chance of being released from jail by the hangman; insolvent debtors at the Fleet and the Marshalsea might linger for years amid horrors unspeakable till small-pox or jail-fever ransomed them. Yet Englishmen who viewed these atrocities of their law as matters of course, cherished a keen suspicion of designs against their liberty. They scented despotism in Walpole's wisely-conceived Excise Bill, and plots against their commerce in Bolingbroke's project for a treaty of free trade with France; but they outlawed three-quarters of the population of Ireland, and did all that in them lay to destroy the whole of its trade. The House of Commons was made up half of placemen. For a member to be reputed inaccessible to a bribe weighed down the odium of a life passed in concerting schemes for subverting the dynasty. Parliament," says Mr. Lecky, "was thoroughly vicious in its constitution, narrow, corrupt, and often despotic in its tendencies;" yet it reflected fairly enough the national will, and registered obediently the national decision that this minister should resign and that minister govern.

ond's "absurd, ungrateful, and perfidious partiality for Hanover." But they had accepted them for their sovereigns once for all. The sentimental devotion to the house of Stuart professed by millions when George the First ascended the throne, and not repudiated during the reign of his son, was a mere will-o'-thewisp deluding foreign powers into a belief that they could retort attacks from England by lighting the flames of civil war. The nation burst into periodical paroxysms of passion for war; but it hired Hessians to fight its battles. Englishmen who thought it quite natural that the kingdom should mix itself with European politics, and the quarrels of thrones based on enormous armies, continued to declaim against standing armies in England. Lord Bath lamented in 1760, when the nation was exulting in the triumphs of the Seven Years' War, that our nobility, born to be the guardians of the Constitution against prerogative, solicit the badge of military subjection, not merely to serve their country in times of danger, which would be commendable, but in expectation of being continued soldiers when tranquillity shall be restored."

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Above all, the erection of barracks was resisted, even by so calm and temperate a jurist as Blackstone; and a soldier like General Wade acknowledged that "the people of this kingdom have been taught to associate the ideas of barracks and slavery, like darkness and the devil." They saw nothing so very atrocious in the manning of the navy by the pressgang; nor did they extend their tenderness for their own liberties to any regard for the condition of the soldiers. These were so scandalously neglected that in 1707, sickness, want of firing, bad barracks, and desertion reduced the garrison of Portsmouth by half in less than a year and a half.

The first George remained a petty German prince to his death, and the second, though he could speak a kind of English, cared more for the electorate than all the fortunes of England. But they never violated the British Constitution, or pil- The picture of the eighteenth century, laged the public domain, and their wars, as painted by Mr. Lecky, has abundance whether or not undertaken in the inter- of harsh shadows. The shadows are, ests of Hanover, were more fruitful to perhaps, painted a little deeper than they England than the great victories of Marl- need have been; and exceptions may have borough. Their court was mean and been sometimes offered as instances. coarse, and their private lives did not But the account as a whole is scarcely exbear inspection; but their German envi- aggerated. The charge, however, popuronings set them apart from ordinary larly brought against the age is not that it English society, and their vices did not was immoral and cruel, but that it was injure the tone of public life a hundredth dull. On the contrary, the century, if part as much as the profligacy of Charles only it be looked at close enough, is seen the Second, or even of James. Their to be full of life and color. It was a hard subjects did not affect to love or admire them. They sympathized heartily with Pitt's invectives against George the Sec

fate for a writer whose bold and vivid pen sketched, so that they actually live before us, the varied phases of English life,

from the country squire's household and formerly when its interference was usethe miseries of a British man-of-war, to less or worse. It has shown by its facthe humors of a prime minister's levée in tory and educational legislation that it Lincoln's Inn Fields, that the necessity of omitted formerly to interfere when it was supporting existence should have com- its duty to interfere. But it is only in pelled him to libel his own times by a his- tracing the history of the eighteenth centory which is about as broadly philosoph- tury that we begin to be conscious of such ical as an Annual Register, and as abso- shortcomings in the State and the legislutely without the local color of an Annual lature. We are ready to complain of the Register as one of Pinnock's Catechisms. age for being barren of the political and But the task in which Smollett did not social reforms in which the nineteenth attempt to succeed is not one to be lightly century has been rich. We do not cenundertaken. The only mode in which it sure the seventeenth century for such could be really achieved would be by deficiencies, for in those times we never treating the century more as matter for a expect to find them supplied. The interdrama than a history. Lord Macaulay mingling of classes which set in with the might have done it; but it would have Revolution, and was encouraged by the been necessary for him to live to a hun- Whig régime, gave Parliament, in spite of dred instead of to sixty. Mr. Lecky has all its rotten boroughs, a sense that it produced two charming volumes, gener- represented the whole of the nation, and ous and liberal in sentiment, picturesque inspired courage to interfere with class in style, and running over with informa- interests. In the seventeenth, as in eartion, laboriously collected and skilfully sifted. He has selected St. John and Walpole, and Pitt and Wesley, as types of the movements and counter-movements of the century, or rather its first three quarters. He has admirably delineated their characters and careers, and he has connected them with groups of essays, full of the variety, and point, and thought we should have anticipated from his previous works, on the social and political phenomena of the time, and the prejudiced mistakes of Mr. Froude. But when we have read them we find ourselves still asking, "What, then, is the secret of the eigh teenth century? What has it which other centuries of English history have not? What has it not which they have?"

lier centuries, different classes had allied to secure the nation's constitutional rights against the crown and court; but there was no solid fusion. Occasionally a member of one class passed into another, but he ceased to belong to the class he had sprung from. Trade and manufactures and financing were the social solvent which the last century applied to England. The great landowners bought out the small; but contractors of loans and merchants, and, later in the century, the so-called "nabobs " bought out both. Even borough-mongering, with all its mischievous and immoral scandals, promoted the general tendency by tempering the dominant country-gentleman element in Parliament with the capitalist element. Government by a Whig aristocracy, or A history of society would be the tru- oligarchy, gave vogue to the economical est history of the eighteenth century. Its aspects of politics which Whiggism had work was the fusion of classes. The En- always encouraged. When the House of glish Constitution was formed by a series Lords displayed as much interest in the of struggles from the reign of John to Bank Charter as in the balance of power that of William the Third. The reigns of in Europe, the House of Commons, notAnne and the Georges could contribute withstanding only landowners could be nothing to the history of the Constitution members, was not likely to resist very in its broad outlines. Those had already successfully the tendency of the age to been defined before the century opened; attach special importance to trade and but the full operation of the Constitution commerce. Mr. Lecky says: "A compewas as yet far from ascertained. Its tition of economy reigned in all parties. principles were understood, but they had The questions which excited most internot been thoroughly applied. The pres- est in Parliament were chiefly financial ent century has shown, by its Reform Acts, and its repeal of an infinity of legal disabilities and some legal immunities, that the Constitution had not been followed out to its logical conclusions. It has shown by its financial and commercial measures that the State often interfered

and commercial ones." A century in which a Parliament, with a majority made up of country gentlemen, attends more closely to finance and trade than to questions of constitutional safeguards and foreign politics, is already on the threshold of current history. Mr. Lecky is sur

George the Second Parliament was coming to understand that it was answerable for the whole country. When Mr. Lecky expresses surprise at the inertness it showed in accepting its liability, he is measuring the age by a standard still in process of creation.

Englishmen were studying each other in the eighteenth century; they had not yet formed the conception that they might or ought to legislate for the conduct of each other's homes. An Englishman's

prised that St. John could not win favor for his proposed treaty of commerce with France. On the contrary, the wonder is not that merchants were so short-sighted as not to perceive the advantages of free trade with France, but that the merchants possessed power to rouse the passionate interest of the whole country in the defeat of a measure which they feared might diminish the profits of a class. Mr. Lecky points out the rottenness of a multitude of constituencies. Nothing was done to cure the evil in the eigh-house was still his castle; but a castle teenth century; but in the eighteenth century the scandal of rotten boroughs began to be understood and condemned. In the reigns of Elizabeth, and even Charles the First, there were as many rotten boroughs; but they caused little or no odium. The country took them for granted, and candidates for them could scarcely be found.

ceases to be much of a fastness when the minutest details of its internal arrangements become the concern of all its neighbors. The eighteenth century was an age when the favorite classic was Horace, and the favorite poet was Pope, who never wrote a line which was not an epigram, and did not inclose a portrait. The jewels of his verse, so exquisitely cut that we pardon some want of purity in the water, occupy a niche in English literature from which they will never be dislodged. But we can form but a faint surmise of the impression they must have made on his contemporaries. We admire the archer and listen with literary delight to the sharp whirr of the arrow; his own age followed it to its mark, and shuddered or mocked at the scream of its victim. Every line of Pope is a witness how, in the eighteenth century, courtiers and citizens, statesmen and men of letters, watched one another in cities; every page

The eighteenth century is so much more like the century which followed than those which preceded, that the temptation is natural to compare it with later times rather than the earlier. Thus Mr. Lecky remarks, as we have seen, that "in no respect does the legislation of this period present a more striking contrast to that of the nineteenth century than in the almost complete absence of attempts to alleviate the social condition of the poorer classes, or to soften the more repulsive features of English life." It is perfectly true, just as is his other observation that "the vast development of the British of Boswell tells how they conversed. empire, and of manufacturing industry, the extension of publicity, and the growth of an inquiring and philanthropic spirit that discerns abuses in every quarter, have together immeasurably increased both the range and the complexity of legislation. In the early Hanoverian period the number of questions treated was very small, and few subjects were much attended to which did not directly affect party interests." But no one would think of blaming the Parliaments of James the First, or Charles the Second, for not reforming social abuses, or providing wholesome dwellings for the working classes. Parliament in those days did not strive to soften repulsive features of English life, because it had no sense of an obligation to interfere with such matters. It had no sense of such an obligation, because classes were not sufficiently intermingled to make the representatives of the nation feel that they had the right or duty to meddle with matters which were the concern of private persons. By the reign of

Later on Crabbe records, in tales which our generation has not the wit to appreciate, how the same spirit of personal criticism moved the village. Classes were breaking up and melting into each other. The town was experimenting in rural life, though satisfied as yet to acclimatize itself at Bath and Tunbridge Wells, and try the pleasures, hitherto unknown, of the seashore. The country was migrating to the towns. A wave of mutual curiosity was rolling over and through English society. Dettingen and Minden were toughly contested fields, and Frederick's campaigns had a certain political importance to England; but to the England of the Georges they were most of all important as furnishing illimitable themes for talk. Chesterfield lamented after the Convention of Closterseven, that we were no longer a nation." Are we to suppose that he ceased his polished trifling for an afternoon, or savored a scandalous anecdote a whit the less? Methodism scourged the frivolities of

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