But leaving the male, look for a moment at the female sex. A fashionable lady in the days of Queen Anne was thought to be learned enough if she could barely read and write. If she could finish a letter without notorious bad spelling, she might pass for a wit. She plunged into all the amusements of the day with an intensity proportioned to her lack of moral and intellectual resources. A whirl of daily varieties was necessary to occupy the emptiness of her mind. She dashed over the town, upon a round of visiting, in a carriage with four laced and powdered footmen behind it. When she was obliged to stay at home, she regaled herself with frequent libations of tea, sometimes qualified with brandy. When her female friends dropped in, the scandal of the day commenced, and reputations were torn to tatters. When she held her levees, the dashing rake and notorious profligate had free access, and the lewd jest scarcely raised the fan to a single check. It was unfashionable to be religious; and if a lady of ton went to church, it was to see company and to deal courtesies from her pew. She patronised French milliners, French hairdressers, and Italian Opera singers. She loved tall footmen and turbaned negro footboys. She doated upon monkeys, paroquets, and lap-dogs; was a perfect critic in old China and Indian trinkets; and could not exist without a raffle or a sale.
The manners of high life being thus frivolous and depraved, no wonder that servants were neither wiser nor better than their employers. Complaints were universal of the arrogance, dishonesty, laziness, and luxury of valets and footmen; whilst charges against pert, mercenary, intriguing Abigails were equally loud and numerous. Their cleverness, to a great extent, consisted in obtaining the largest wages for the smallest services.
Such a condition of the national character was a fruitful soil for superstition and credulity. Almost every old mansion was still ghost-haunted, and almost every parish was tormented by a witch. Fortune-telling was a common and thriving occupation; and quack-doctors were, if possible, still more numerous than astrologers.
The country gentlemen cultivated their paternal acres, watched with almost Druidical reverence the safety of their ancient oaks, and were members of the worshipful quorum. On Sundays, they repaired to the village church, through a lane of uncovered and bowing peasantry; ascended “the squire’s pew,” the chief seat in the synagogue, and edified their tenantry by the loudness of their responses. At Christmas, a multitude of fattened hogs were slaughtered and distributed among the neighbours; while a string of black puddings and a pack of cards were sent to every poor family in the parish. A large portion of these rustic squires were fox-hunters, and appear, for the most part, to have been as unintellectual as the horses they galloped, or the animals they chased; for their proudest exploit was to clear a six-barred gate, and their highest ambition to secure a dead fox’s brush for the adornment of their hunting caps.
Their wives were quiet, domestic drudges, with scarcely enough of education to keep their book of household expenses, or to spell correctly the receipt of a new home-made wine, or of an improved syllabub. No longer thinking it the great business of life to embroider cushions and coverlets, they commonly settled down into the character of a Lady Bountiful, and occupied themselves in supplying the poor of their villages with money, the industrious with work, the idle with counsel, the vicious with rebuke, and the sick with medicines and with cordials. In this last department, many of them became so presumptuous that no ailment was too hard for them, from a toothache to a pestilence, from the stroke of a cudgel to that of a thunderbolt.
Their sons were taught a little Latin and less Greek, beaten into them, either at one of the public establishments or by the thwackem of a domestic schoolroom. When they had been whipped through the parts of speech, interjections and all, and driven through a few fragmentary portions of the classics, they were then qualified to shine equally in the senate or at the masquerade. The grand finish to such an education was the tour of Europe; and forth went the boy accordingly, in leading strings, to gaze at streets, mountains, rivers, and trees; and to pick up, in his rambles, the fashions, frivolities, and vices of the countries through which he passed.
Their peasantry still presented much the same rude simplicity which had characterised the poorer classes for the last hundred years. Rural education had undergone little, if any, improvement; and the monotonous toils of daily life were enlivened, chiefly, by wakes and fairs, thronged with puppet-shows, pedlars stalls, raffling-tables, and drinking-booths.
Such is a bird’s-eye view of the general state of English society at the commencement of the eighteenth century.[LY]
[The facts in this chapter have been gathered principally from Knight’s Pictorial History, Macaulay’s History, Burnet’s History of His Own Times, Lathbury’s History of Convocation, the Tatler, the Spectator, &c.]