"About 4 P.M. I walked down to Whyly. We played at bragg the first part of the even. After ten we went to supper, on four broiled chicken, four boiled ducks, minced veal, cold roast goose, chicken pastry, and ham. Our company, Mr. and Mrs. Porter, Mr. and Mrs. Coates, Mrs. Atkins, Mrs. Hicks, Mr. Piper and wife, Joseph Fuller and wife, Tho. Fuller and wife, Dame Durrant, myself and wife, and Mr. French's family. After supper our behaviour was far from that of serious, harmless mirth; it was downright obstreperious, mixed with a great deal of folly and stupidity. Our diversion was dancing or jumping about, without a violin or any musick, singing of foolish healths, and drinking all the time as fast as it could be well poured down; and the parson of the parish was one among the mixed multitude. If conscience dictates right from wrong, as doubtless it sometimes does, mine is one that I may say is soon offended: for, I must say, I am always very uneasy at such behavior, thinking it not like the behaviour of the primitive Christians, which, I imagine, was most in conformity to our Saviour's gospel.
"Thursday, Feb, 25th. This morning, about six o'clock, just as my wife was got to bed, we was awaked by Mrs. Porter, who pretended she wanted some cream of tartar; but as soon as my wife got out of bed, she vowed she should come down. She found Mr. Porter (the clergyman), Mr. Fuller, and his wife, with a lighted candle, and part of a bottle of port wine and a glass. The next thing was to have me down stairs, which being apprised of, I fastened my door. Up stairs they came, and threatened to break it open; so I ordered the boys to open it, when they poured into my room; and as modesty forbid me to get out of bed, so I refrained; but their immodesty permitted them to draw me out of bed, as the phrase is, topsy-turvey; but, however, at the intercession of Mr. Porter, they permitted me to put on * * * my wife's petticoats; and in this manner they made me dance, without shoes and stockings, until they had emptied a bottle of wine, and also a bottle of my beer. * * * About three o'clock in the afternoon, they found their way to their respective homes, beginning to be a little serious, and, in my opinion, ashamed of their stupid enterprise and drunken perambulation. Now let any one call in reason to his assistance, and reflect seriously on what I have before recited, and they will join me in thinking that the precepts delivered from the pulpit on Sunday, though delivered with the greatest ardour, must lose a great deal of there efficacy by such examples."
Such were the amusements and such the moral reflections of a country tradesman in the middle of the last century, Fielding, Smollett, and the other novelists described the same kind of life: the same succession of brawls, drunken sprees, cock-fights, boxing matches, and bull-baitings. It would be difficult to imagine a state of society more ripe for a revival. Mr. Thomas Turner had moral and religious aspirations, but these could not be satisfied by the clergyman of his parish or the curate of Laughton, the companions of his debauches but not the sharers of his remorse. When the clergy were sincere and moral, they were still too cold and commonplace to seriously influence their flocks. The sermons of the time were at best, moral essays, teaching little, as Mr. Lecky says, "that might not have been taught by disciples of Socrates and Confucius." They might encourage honesty and temperance where those virtues already existed, but they had no spell to arouse religious feelings, nor to reclaim the vicious. How great, then, must have been the effect of the impassioned eloquence of a Whitefield, which could draw tears from thousands of hardened colliers, upon such a society as that of Mr. Turner and his friends, accustomed only to the discourses of their boon companion, the Rev. Mr. Porter. The prevailing licence and the prevailing moral consciousness were elements especially adapted to the work of the religious revivalist. The effect of the sermons of Berridge is thus described by an eye-witness[186]:
I heard many cry out, especially children, whose agonies were amazing. One of the eldest, a girl of ten or twelve years old, was full in my view, in violent contortions of body, and weeping aloud, I think incessantly, during the whole service. * * * While poor sinners felt the sentence of death in their souls, what sounds of distress did I hear! Some shrieking, some roaring aloud. The most general was a loud breathing, like that of people half strangled and gasping for life. And indeed, almost all the cries were like those of human creatures dying in bitter anguish. Great numbers wept without any noise; others fell down as dead; some sinking in silence; some with extreme noise and violent agitation. I stood on the pew seat, as did a young man in an opposite pew—an able-bodied, fresh, healthy countryman. But in a moment, when he seemed to think of nothing less, down he dropped with a violence inconceivable. The adjoining pews seemed shook with his fall. I heard afterward the stamping of his feet, ready to break the boards as he lay in strong convulsions at the bottom of the pew. * * * Among the children who felt the arrows of the Almighty I saw a sturdy boy about eight years old, who roared above his fellows, and seemed, in his agony, in struggle with the strength of a grown man. His face was red as scarlet; and almost all on whom God laid his hand turned either red or almost black. * * * A stranger, well dressed, who stood facing me, fell backward to the wall; then forward on his knees, wringing his hands and roaring like a bull. His face at first turned quite red, then almost black. He rose and ran against the wall till Mr. Keeling and another held him. He screamed out "Oh! what shall I do? what shall I do? Oh, for one drop of the blood of Christ!"
These were violent remedies, but they were applied to a powerful disease. If the revivalists did harm by the religious terrorism which they excited, they yet had a powerful and wide-spread influence for good. They awakened religious feelings among the people, and diffused a new earnestness among the clergy. A spirit of philanthropy was born with their teachings which has gone on growing until it now extends a protecting arm even to brutes. The societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and to animals are part of a great philanthropic movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century, which has carried into practical, every-day life the spirit of Christianity, and has given to the words mercy and charity, the signification of real and existing virtues. Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth century. To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty. If he opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form or other. It is not only in such novels as those of Fielding and Smollett, which are intended to describe the lower classes of society, and in which blackened eyes and broken heads are relished forms of wit, that the modern reader is offended by the continual infliction of pain. Goldsmith gives Squire Thornhill perfect impunity from the law and from public opinion in his crimes. Mackenzie does not think of visiting any legal retribution on his "Man of the World." Godwin wrote "Caleb Williams" to show with what impunity man preyed on man, how powerless the tenant and the dependent woman lay before the violence or the intrigue of the rich. And it is not only that a crime should be committed with perfect security which would now receive a severe sentence at the hands of an ordinary judge and jury which surprises the reader of to-day, but that scenes which would now shock any person of common humanity or taste, were, in the last century, especially intended to amuse. In Miss Burney's "Evelina," Captain Mirvan continually insults and maltreats Mme. Duval, the grandmother of the heroine, in a manner which would not only be inconceivable in a gentleman tolerated in society, but in a blackguard, not entirely bereft of feelings of decency or good-nature. While she is a guest in his own house, he torments her with false accounts of the sufferings of a friend; sends her on a futile errand to relieve those sufferings in a carriage of his own, and then, disguised as a highwayman, he assaults her with the collusion of his servants, tears her clothes, and leaves her half dead with terror, tied with ropes, at the bottom of a ditch. When Mme. Duval relates her ill-treatment to her granddaughter, Evelina could only find occasion to say: "Though this narrative almost compelled me to laugh, yet I was really irritated with the captain, for carrying his love of tormenting—sport, he calls it to such harshness and unjustifiable extremes." And Miss Burney expected, no doubt with reason, that her reader would be amused by all this.
In the same work a nobleman and a fashionable commoner are described as settling a bet by a race between two decrepit women over eighty years of age. "When the signal was given for them to set off, the poor creatures, feeble and frightened, ran against each other: and neither of them being able to support the shock, they both fell on the ground. * * * Again they set off, and hobbled along, nearly even with each other, for some time, yet frequently, to the inexpressible diversion of the company, they stumbled and tottered. * * * Not long after, a foot of one of the poor women slipped, and with great force she came again to the ground. * * * Mr. Coverley went himself to help her, and insisted that the other should stop. A debate ensued, but the poor creature was too much hurt to move, and declared her utter inability to make another attempt. Mr. Coverley was quite brutal; he swore at her with unmanly rage, and seemed scarce able to refrain even from striking her." It would be impossible perhaps to find a party of the upper ranks gathered at a country house at the present time, composed of persons who could have endured, without remonstrance, such treatment of a pair of superannuated horses; yet Miss Burney describes the efforts and sufferings of these old women as affording inexpressible diversion to the ladies and gentlemen who figure in her novel, and she evidently expects the reader to be equally entertained. "Evelina" was written by a young woman who saw the best society, who was maid of honor to Queen Charlotte, who was universally admired for her delicacy and her talents, and whose novels are among the most refined of the time.
The higher ranks were much less influenced by the religious revival than the lower. Although certainly not less in need of reformation, they were far less inclined to welcome it. The fashionable indifference to religion was an obstacle which Wesley found much more difficult to overcome than the brutal ignorance of the inmates of Newgate. After listening to a sermon by Whitefield, Bolingbroke complimented the preacher by saying that he had "done great justice to the divine attributes." The Duchess of Buckingham's remarks on the preaching of the Methodists, in a letter to Lady Huntingdon, are an amusing commentary on the times. "I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers. Their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect toward their superiors, in perpetually endeavoring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good-breeding."[187] High rank and good-breeding, however, in the society of which the Duchess of Buckingham was so proud, were not considered inconsistent with habitual drunkenness, indecency, and profanity. The vices which "the common wretches that crawl the earth" practised in addition to these, her Grace would have had difficulty in mentioning.
Still, in the latter half of the eighteenth century is to be traced a continual improvement, which is reflected in contemporary fiction. As a remarkable example of the change which took place may be mentioned the instance of the Earl of March. "As Duke of Queensberry, at nearer ninety than eighty years of age, he was still rolling in wealth, still wallowing in sin, and regarded by his countrymen as one whom it was hardly decent to name, because he did not choose, out of respect for the public opinion of 1808, to discontinue a mode of existence which in 1768 was almost a thing of course" among the higher ranks.[188]
[184] Wilson's "Memoirs of Daniel Defoe."
[185] For the diary of Thomas Turner, see "Glimpses of our Ancestors," by Charles Fleet, pp. 31-52.
[186] For these manifestations, see Wesley's "Journal," and Lecky's "History of England in the Eighteenth Century," vol. II, chap. ix.
[187] Lecky, "Hist. of England in the 18th Century," vol. ii, chap. 9.
[188] See Trevelyan's "Early History of Charles James Fox," Harper's ed., p. 75.