CHAPTER THE EIGHTH. ON THE NATIONAL INDUSTRY AND THE LITERATURE, MANNERS, CUSTOMS, AND CONDITION OP THE PEOPLE.
THAT improvement was not stationary during the period we have just been describing, will be inferred from the fact that, in 1625, Science called a hackney-coach into existence. Though in these days invention would seem to be at a stand if it went no further than the point we have indicated, still the hackney-carriage was a decided advance on the slow coaches of previous centuries. From a print of the period we perceive that the newly-invented vehicles resembled in shape something between a steam locomotive and a covered railway luggage-van, or in other words, exhibited a sort of combination of the 'bus and the boiler. The hackney-coachman did not long enjoy a monopoly, for in 1634 Sir Sanders Duncomb thrust a pair of poles through an old sentry-box, and calling it a sedan, started it as a "turn out" for his own convenience. The arrangement seeming to give satisfaction, he obtained a patent for fourteen in all, and S. D. advertised the careful removal of ladies and gentlemen by means of his new invention.
In the year 1630, London began to exhibit symptoms of outgrowing its strength, and fresh buildings within three miles of the gates were prohibited. So long as the metropolis extended on all sides alike, there could have been nothing to fear, for it would have been as broad as it was long, at any rate. It is a curious fact that those persons who had money in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not know what to do with it. They had been in the habit of keeping it in the Royal Mint, till Charles the First got into the ugly habit of going down to that establishment, clearing off the whole of the cash it contained, calling it a loan, and never paying it back again. The capitalists next tried the experiment of lodging their cash with their clerks and apprentices, and unfortunately it soon became current coin of the realm, for the clerks and apprentices all ran away with it. "The moneyed men, listening at last," says Anderson, "to these admoney-tory lessons, began to place their cash in the hands of goldsmiths," but these gentlemen used to pick out the heaviest coins and make a profit by the sweating process, so that instead of living by the sweat of their own brows, they lived by the sweating of other people's money. This was the origin of the banking business, which began in, or near, Sweeting's Alley, then called Sweating's Alley, from the practices we have mentioned.
Gardening industry made wonderfully rapid strides during this era, for the peas were well drilled, the cabbages made to stand at ease in the open air, and the turnips to take close order at the commencement of the seventeenth century. Cherries soon after came amongst the English people, with a degree of cherry bounce that the beauty and delicacy of the fruit perhaps warranted. The apple was welcomed with enthusiasm, and Samuel Hartlib, a gardener of the day—week, month or year—was so affected by the flourishing growth of an apple-tree he had planted, that the well-known expression, "Go it, my pippin!" burst from his lips, and has taken its place in popularity with the Eureka of the old philosopher. The hops also presented themselves as candidates for British favour, and were soon at the top of the poll in all directions.
The woollen manufacturers of England acquired importance at a very early date; but the secret of dyeing the cloth could never be discovered, and every failure only threw a wretched stain upon national ingenuity. At length a Dutchman settled himself, in 1643, at Bow, and announced, by a notice in his bow-window, his intention to get a living by dyeing upon an entirely new principle. Hitherto the English had miserably failed in this branch of art, for when they attempted to master the dye and keep it under their control, it was always sure to come off with flying colours. The Dutchman of Bow had determined to conquer, even in dyeing, and he not only succeeded in producing a single shade, but he made such hits with his shots, that customers might safely stand the hazard of the dye, if they brought their orders to his establishment. He taught the art to the English, the fastness of whose colours had been previously shown in the extreme rapidity of their running.
In 1622. hemp and flax having been introduced ready dressed into this country, the rope manufacture twined itself with the industrial institutions of England. There had been always a prejudice against the use of coal for domestic purposes; but on its value in manufactures being discovered, it acquired a higher character, though its best friends were never able to say that coal after all is not so black as it had been painted. It was extensively employed in iron manufactories, which had greatly advanced; and we have seen an old woodcut of a saw which is one of those very "wise saws" that maybe considered equal to the best of our "modern instances."
Knowing the danger of playing with edge tools, we forbear to speak of them any longer in a sportive strain, and turn to the state of music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Henry the Eighth himself was a composer, if we are to believe Sir John Hawkins, but we suspect that the monarch's well-known overtures to the Pope may have misled the musical historian. There were several writers of madrigals, a class of production whose name has been ingeniously but ignorantly supposed to have reference to the mad wriggles into which the music throws itself.
Charles the First was an adept in the pleasing science, and pretended to play on the viol, though not without a sad viol-ation of some of the rules of harmony. He was, however, fond of melody, which, like everything else of a cheerful and agreeable nature, received a sad blow from the dull puritanical humbugs who rose into importance at the time of the Commonwealth. These psalm-singing sycophants were so fond of hearing their own melancholy and monotonous voices, that no accompaniments were allowed: and thus, to use the impassioned pun of Smith, * "one of the most disgusting specimens of an organised hypocrisy that the world ever saw was carried on entirely without the use of organs."
The Fine Arts flourished in England under Charles the First, who was a scholar, a man of taste, a gentleman, and, in fact, everything but what he ought to have been—namely, a good sovereign. He employed Vandyke to take off his head, or rather multiply it frequently, as if he felt a foreboding of his eventually losing it. He was also the patron of Inigo Jones, the architect of several public buildings, and of his own fortune.
The drama is a subject so exciting to antiquarian speculation, that we are afraid of losing ourselves in the mists of ages by plunging into it. We cannot hope to surpass in sagacity some of those ingenious annotators of the present day, who have had such a keen eye to Gammer Gurton's needle, that they actually trace its existence to so remote a date as some few years before the birth of its author. ** We need not particularise the various dramatic authors who gave lustre to the Elizabethan period, nor shall we fall into the affectation of talking about Master Beaumont, Master Fletcher, Master Jonson, Master Shakspeare, Master Deekes, and Master Hey wood, as if they had been so many precocious young gentlemen or juvenile prodigies of which the present age is somewhat prodigal.
* For further particulars of Smith, see the "London
Directory."
** See Wright—who, by the way, was generally wrong—in his
"Historia Histrionica."
The Long Parliament put down all stage plays, for the miserable mummers of whom that assembly was composed were desirous of having all the acting to themselves, though they made a very poor burlesque of the parts of statesmen and patriots. It has been ingeniously suggested by Mr. Collier, in his History of Dramatic Poetry, that the Puritanical Parliament suppressed the drama and dramatists less on conscientious grounds than from the fear of being made the subject of well-merited satire. The same feeling which would urge a legislature of pickpockets to abolish the police might have actuated the Republicans in their zeal to get rid of that moral watch which a well regulated state will always keep over cant and villainy.
[Original Size]
If, however, dramatic performances were scarce during the ascendency of Cromwell and the Puritans, the public—had they known how to appreciate it—would not have been without food for mirth in the very ludicrous exhibitions which the events of the day were perpetually furnishing. The career of Cromwell himself might have suggested an amusing spectacle to those who are in the habit of turning to the ridiculous side of everything. A brewer on the throne, endeavouring to unite republican simplicity with royal state, presents to the imagination a figure almost as grotesque as that of an elephant on the tight-rope—an idea in which there is that rare combination of ponderosity and levity, which Cromwell's conduct on the protectorat elbow, or supreme arm-chair, will be found to have realised. His unwieldy gambols and great preponderance over all below him, were most fatal to that balance of power which can never be sustained without an equality of pressure and an equality of resistance on all sides.
Our survey of the literature of the seventeenth century would be incomplete if we were to omit to notice the 3rd of November, 1640, as being the date of the earliest English newspaper. It bore the name of the "Diurnal Occurrences; or, Daily Proceedings of Both Houses," but though it professed to give daily news, it was only a weekly periodical. There arose rapidly a provincial press, but its pretensions were slight, and News from Hull, Truths from York, Warranted Tidings from Ireland, were the names of some of the chief of these country newspapers. Their leading articles were not much in the style we are accustomed to at the present day; but the ancient order of penny-a-liners seemed to be ever agog for these precocious gooseberries, showers of frogs, and fading reminiscences of oldest inhabitants, that are still the staple of the productions of this humble class of contributors. It is a remarkable coincidence that the circulation of the blood and the circulation of newspapers should both have belonged to this period of our country's history.
Furniture and costume improved wonderfully in this age, and the wealthy became less chary of expense in their chairs, while they began to sleep on down, or, in other words, to feather their nests with great luxuriance. The clothes of the times of the two Charles's were made much too large for the wearers, and may be considered characteristic of the loose habits of the period. The hair was cut short by the Republican party, or Roundheads, in memory of whom the culprits at Clerkenwell and other prisons are cropped exceedingly close, though this is not the only point of resemblance between the modern rogues and the old regicides.
The condition of the people was not very enviable in the era we have described, and it is a remarkable as well as a most instructive fact, that commonwealth is usually synonymous with common poverty. Wages were invariably low, for a man-servant who could thrash a cornfield and kill a hog, received only fifty shillings per annum. Poverty and knavery, begging and filching, were at their height under the reign of the Puritans; for "Like master, like man" was at all times a proverb that could be thoroughly relied upon.