CHELSEA HOSPITAL.

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The popular sports and amusements still, however, were of the usual description. All the old cruel sports of bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and cock-fights, which the Puritans had suppressed, came back with royalty. Horse-racing was in vogue; and gambling was such a fever amongst the wealthy, that many great estates were squandered at cards; and the Duke of St. Albans, when more than eighty years of age, and quite blind, used to sit at the gaming-table from day to day, with a man beside him to tell him the cards. Billiards, chess, backgammon, and cribbage were in great request; and bowls, ninepins, boat-racing, yacht-racing, running at the ring, were sports both with the people and the gentry. Ladies joined in playing at bowls; skating was introduced by the courtiers, who had spent much time in Holland. Swimming and foot-races were fashionable. Colonel Blood planned to shoot Charles once when he went to swim in the Thames near Chelsea, and the Duke of Monmouth, as we have seen, in his popular tour ran races against all comers, first without boots, and then beat them running in his boots whilst the others ran without.

Charles prided himself on his pedestrian feats. The common people were as much delighted as their ancestors with all the exhibitions of Bartholomew Fair and Smithfield, of fire-eaters, jugglers, rope-dancers, dancing dogs and monkeys, Punch, feats of strength, and travelling theatres, where some Scripture story was represented, as is yet the case on the Continent.

In the country, life continued to move on at its usual rate. Land had not approached to anything like its present value, and education was an immense way farther behind, so that a large number of the aristocracy, including nearly the whole of the squirearchy, continued to live on their estates, and rarely made a visit to London. The ravages which the Civil War had made in all parts of the country had left traces on many a rental which were yet far from being obliterated; and the contempt into which the clerical office had fallen since the Reformation, and absorption of the Church lands, left one outlet for the sons of the squirearchy at this time little available. The landed gentry, therefore, for the most part continued to occupy a position of much local importance, but, with few exceptions, did not mingle with the great world of London, or aspire to lead in social or political rivalry on the national arena. The squire was on the bench and at the quarter sessions; he was often colonel of the militia, and knew his importance in the country; but beyond that he was little heard of except when civil strife called him out to defend the altar and the throne. But within his own little world he was all in all, proud of his power, and prouder of his pedigree; but if the Squire Westerns of Fielding's time are faithfully portrayed, how much more rustic, Toryfied, and confined in the range of their ideas and experience must they have been nearly two hundred years before. Few of them had the ambition to distinguish themselves by literary attainments—such accomplishments they left to the Drydens and Danbys of the metropolis. Many heirs of estates, therefore, at this era never went to a university, or, if they did, made but a brief abode there, and returned little better for the sojourn, depending on their property to give them all the éclat they aspired to. To enjoy the sports of the field, attend the county race meeting and county ball, to live surrounded by huntsmen and gamekeepers, to keep a coarse but exuberant table, and to terminate the day's sport by a drunken carouse, included the pursuits and habits of three-fourths of this class.

As these gentry went little to town, their manners were proportionally rustic, and their circle of ideas confined, but from their confinement the more sturdy. Toryism of the extremest type was rampant amongst them. Church and State, and the most hearty contempt of everything like Dissent and of foreigners, were regarded as the only maxims for Englishmen; and the most absolute submission of the peasantry to the despotic squirearchy was exacted. In a justice-room if a man was poor it was taken for granted that he was wrong. Justice Shallows and Dogberrys were not the originals of the pages of Shakespeare, but of the country bench of magistrates and its constabulary. Ideas travelled slowly, for books were few. A Bible, a Common Prayer-book, and a "Guillim's Heraldry" were the extent of many a gentleman's library. Newspapers were suppressed by the restrictions on the press during the latter part of Charles's reign; and the news-letters which supplied the country contained a very meagre amount of facts, but no discussion.

There were few coaches, except in the districts immediately round London, or to the distance of twenty or thirty miles, and the roads were in general impassable in winter. On all but the main lines of highway, pack-horses carried the necessary merchandise from place to place through deep narrow tracks, some of which remain to our time. It took four or five days to reach London by coach from Chester, York, or Bristol, and this was attended by perils and discomforts that made travellers loth to encounter such a journey, and often to make their wills before starting. Macaulay has summed up the terrors of the road, as given by our Diarists, in the following passage:—"On the best lines of communication the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the ways often such that it was hardly possible to distinguish them in the dusk from the unenclosed heath and fen on both sides. Ralph Thoresby, the antiquary, was in danger of losing his way on the Great North Road between Barnby Moor and Tuxford, and actually lost his way between Doncaster and York; Pepys and his wife, travelling in their own coach, lost their way between Newbury and Reading. In the course of the same tour they lost their way near Salisbury, and were in danger of having to pass the night on the plain. It was only in fine weather that the whole breadth of the road was available for wheeled vehicles. Often the mud lay deep on the right and the left, and only a narrow track of firm ground rose above the quagmire. At such times obstructions and quarrels were common, and the pass was frequently blocked up during a long time by carriers neither of whom would give way. It happened almost every day that coaches stuck fast, until a team of cattle could be procured from some neighbouring farm to tug them out of the slough. But in bad seasons the travellers had to encounter inconveniences still more serious. Thoresby, who was in the habit of travelling between Leeds and the capital, has recorded in his Diary such a series of perils and disasters as might suffice for a journey to the Frozen Ocean, or to the desert of Sahara. On one occasion he learned that the floods were out between Ware and London, that passengers had to swim for their lives, and that a higgler had perished in the attempt to cross. In consequence of these tidings he turned out of the high road, and was conducted across some meadows, when it was necessary for him to ride to the skirts in water. In the course of another journey he narrowly escaped being swept away by an inundation of the Trent. He was afterwards detained at Stamford four days, on account of the state of the roads, and then ventured to proceed only because fourteen members of the House of Commons, who were going up in a body to Parliament, with guides and numerous attendants, took him into their company. On the roads of Derbyshire travellers were in constant fear for their necks, and were frequently compelled to alight and lead their beasts. The great route through Wales to Holyhead was in such a state that, in 1685, a viceroy, going to Ireland, was five hours travelling fourteen miles—from St. Asaph to Conway. Between Conway and Beaumaris he was forced to walk a great part of the way, and his lady was carried in a litter. His coach was, with much difficulty, and by the help of many hands, brought after him entire. In general, carriages were taken to pieces at Conway and borne on the shoulders of stout Welsh peasants to the Menai Straits. In some parts of Kent and Sussex none but the strongest horses could, in winter, get through the bog, in which at every step they sank deep. The markets were often inaccessible during several months. It is said the fruits of the earth were sometimes suffered to rot in one place, while in another place, distant only a few miles, the supply fell short of the demand. The wheeled carriages in this district were generally pulled by oxen. When Prince George of Denmark visited the stately mansion of Petworth in wet weather he was six hours going nine miles; and it was necessary that a body of sturdy hinds should be on each side of his coach, in order to prop it. Of the carriages which conveyed his retinue several were upset and injured. A letter from one of the party has been preserved, in which the unfortunate courtier complains that, during fourteen hours, he never once alighted, except when his coach was overturned or stuck fast in the mud."

To avoid the nuisance of carriages on such roads the habit prevailed of travelling on horseback; but then it was necessary to go well armed, and, if possible, in company, for the country was infested with highwaymen. The adventures of horsemen were commonly as numerous and exciting as those of the folk who used carriages, though mails and carriages were also frequently stopped by the highwaymen of the day. To abate the difficulties of the road, on the Restoration the turnpike system was adopted—a new era in road-making—and what were called flying coaches were put on the amended ways, which conveyed passengers at a better rate.

During the Commonwealth, travellers met equally provoking impediments in passing through towns, if they dared to travel on Sundays. There was a fine for such a breach of the Sabbath; and Elwood describes his ludicrous dilemma when riding to a Friends' Meeting on Sunday, on a borrowed horse, with a borrowed hat and great-coat; for his father had locked up his own horse, hat, and coat to keep him from the conventicle. Being stopped and brought before a magistrate, he was ordered to pay the fine; but he replied that he had no money. "You have a good horse, however," observed the magistrate. "That is borrowed," said Elwood. "Well, you have a good great-coat." "That is borrowed, too," added Elwood. "Nay, then, we must have your hat, it is a good one." "That also is borrowed," continued the young Quaker. At which the magistrate, declaring that he never saw such a traveller in his life, who had nothing but what was borrowed, ordered him to be detained till the morrow, and then sent back again.

In the times we are now reviewing the tables were turned, and the Royalist churchmen and squirearchy were employing their country leisure in breaking up the conventicles of all sorts of Dissenters, pulling down the meeting-houses of the obstinate Quakers, and sending them to prison by shoals. Sir Christopher Wren, by order of the king, tried his hand at pulling down Quakers' meeting-houses, before he built St. Paul's. The spirit of political and ecclesiastical party violence raged through the country, and formed a strange contrast, in the cruelties and oppression practised on the truly religious portion of the community, to the profligacy of the gentry and, above all, of the Court. What rendered this condition of things more gloomy was the low position which the country clergy then occupied. The property of the Church having fallen into the hands of the aristocracy, the generality of country livings were poor, and depended chiefly on the small tithes and a miserable glebe of a few acres. Whilst some few men of distinguished abilities, like Burnet, Tillotson, Barrow, and Stillingfleet, rose to distinction and occupied the few wealthy dignities and livings, the parish clergymen were too commonly men of low origin and little education. Men of family disdained the office, and the chaplain of a great house was looked on as little better than a servant; he married the cook or the housekeeper, and became the hanger-on of some country hall, joining in the rude riot and the ruder jests of his patron. Even so late as Fielding's time, the relative position of the squire and the parson were those of Western and parson Adams.