'Wednesday your two sisters, Molly Cambridge, and I, went to the Pantheon. It is undoubtedly the finest and most complete thing ever seen in England. Such mixture of company never assembled before under the same roof. Lord Mansfield, Mrs. Baddeley, Lord Chief Baron Parker, Mrs. Abbingdon, Sir James Porter, Madlle. Heinell, Lords Hyde and Camden, with many other serious men, and most of the gay ladies in town, and ladies of the best rank and character—and, by appearance, some very low people. Louisa is thought very like Mrs. Baddeley [one of the gay ladies]; and Gertrude and I had our doubts whether our characters might not suffer by walking with her [i.e., Louisa]; but had they offered to turn her out, we depended upon Mr. Hanger's protection. [George Hanger, of the Guards, was one of the great beaux of his day.] None of the fashion dance country-dances or minuets in the great room, though there were a number of minuets and a large set of dancers. I saw Miss Wilks dance a minuet; some young ladies danced cotillons in the cotillon gallery.... The spectacle at first strikes one greatly, but then it becomes stupid.'
The domain of personal incident crops up richly and interestingly throughout these volumes, and comes freshly and truthfully upon us in the correspondence of the hour. Whether we read of Lady ——, who ran away with her footman John, and sent back her fine clothes, 'because she would no longer have any need for them;' or of the deep gambling and other queer affairs of Charles Fox in his dissipated youth; or of the sayings and doings of the notorious Wilkes, who so shocked society, or of his duel, in which he bore himself so honourably, the epistolary narrative is full of naïveté and interest. The second marriage of Lord Coventry (whose first wife was the elder of the beautiful Miss Gunnings) must have been what is now called 'good fun.' The marriage party was all assembled in stately magnificence; but his Grace of Canterbury was from home, and the licence did not arrive! But the party was equal to the emergency—'so it was agreed that they should eat the dinner, rather than it should be spoiled. So to dinner they went [at the early hour then in fashion], and sat all the afternoon, dressed in their white and silver, expecting every moment the express from Lambeth, but nothing came. The same reason held good for eating a supper as for eating the dinner; and in short they supped and sat till after two, and then, by mutual consent, dismissed the parson, and all retired.' Two hours afterwards (4 a.m.) the express with the licence arrived, and the ceremony went off with due éclat in the forenoon. We may remark that it is comforting to find in these letters of the day a guarantee for the genuineness of many of the excellent bonmots and repartees which have taken their place in our anecdotical literature in connection with the more or less famous men of that period, and which sparkle pleasantly across the pages of these volumes.
But quitting the domain of purely personal incident, let us glance at some passages in the letters which throw curious light upon the England of our forefathers in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Here is a picture of Cambridgeshire which looks strange now, and which indeed startled the writer thereof, Mrs. Harris, when she and her husband went on a visit to their friend the Dean of Sarum's parsonage in that locality. She says that the country is the most disagreeable she ever saw; and talking of the Fens, says that the herds of cattle which feed on them in the summer months are up to their bellies in water even in the dry season:—
'The natives dry the cowdung for firing in the winter; so 'tis kept in heaps about the fields, as is also the dung of their yards; so when you walk, the stink is inconceivable. Mr. Harris took a ride to survey these fens, and he says nothing can be so detestable. He talked with the natives, who told him that during the winter the water was constantly above the ancles in their houses.'
'The Dean's parsonage is surrounded with fens, and you are teased beyond expression by the gnats. When we got here, the Dean's butler came to your father with a pair of leather stockings [the dress of that day was breeches and silk stockings] to draw on so as to protect his legs, which in hot weather [it was the month of June] is dreadful. Besides this, the beds have a machine covered with a silk net, which lets down after you are in bed, and covers you all over. Without this, there could be no sleeping; for, notwithstanding these precautions, we were most miserably stung.'
Were anyone to light upon this passage in an isolated form nowadays, he would conclude without hesitation that it was an extract from some Indian diary—the use of the word 'natives' completing the resemblance. Here we have the Indian plague of mosquitoes existing in full severity in England, and also the use of mosquito-nets around the beds at night, exactly as in India. Nay, there is still another point of resemblance—namely, in the use which the Cambridgeshire 'natives' made of the cow-dung: drying and using it as fuel, as is the common practice of the natives of our Eastern Empire.
In the letters which relate to the events of the Rebellion of 1745, and the march of the rebels into the heart of England, we have ample proof alike of the general ignorance of places now well known to every one, and of a want of the means of information in regard even to the great events taking place in other parts of the kingdom, which read strangely in these times when every morning we can know from the newspapers the very way the wind is blowing in every quarter of our island. The Highland army marches to and fro in its daring enterprise, although several separate armies (Wade's, Ligonier's, the Duke of Cumberland's, &c.) are on foot to meet or catch them: indeed, as we read in these letters, 'more troops are in England than ever was known before,' yet notwithstanding, the hardy light-moving Highlanders get through them all into the heart of England, and quite as easily back again. We cannot help thinking that the English generals had not much stomach for their work. They were astonished and something more by the sudden and total rout of Sir John Cope's army, and by the daring and marvellous rapidity of the rebels' march; and it must be allowed that even in their retreat, the Highlanders gave a good account of any force that tried to bar their passage. As the noble editor incidentally observes, General Wade (who was posted in the north of England to stop the southward march of the rebels) only became famous after the rebellion was over; and his marching and counter-marching to catch the rebels was of a very helpless character indeed.
Smuggling, as well as rebellion, profited greatly by the roadless character of England in those days. Mr. and Mrs. Harris, on returning home one night from Heron Court, then the property of their friend Mr. Hooper, had great difficulty in getting over Ringwood Heath, an adjoining waste land, about five miles in length—'the vile heath,' as Mrs. Harris calls it—even with 'the assistance of two servants riding before.' Heron Court now belongs to the Malmesbury family; and the editor, in a foot-note, states that until the beginning of the present century there were no roads but smugglers' tracks across those heaths. They were a favourite place for contraband transit from the south coast; and he mentions that all classes aided in carrying on this traffic. 'The farmers lent their teams and labourers, and the gentry openly connived at the practice, and dealt with the smugglers. The cargoes, chiefly of brandy, were easily concealed in the furze bushes, that extended from Ringwood to Poole, and in the New Forest for thirty miles.' We suspect that the impossibility of carrying on such operations nowadays has had much more to do with their cessation than the improvement in the morality of the age. Look at the customary frauds in making returns to the income-tax, and then say whether the middle-classes are a whit more honest in fiscal matters now than they used to be when smuggling was rife.
How vastly London has changed and grown since the last century need not be said, and the contrast between then and now, meets one almost in every page of these lively letters. There was no Rotten-row, or the fashionable rides in the Park, which make so gay a sight now in the summer afternoons; and the whole district north of the Park knew nothing of the noble streets and terraces which now occupy the space. Mrs. Harris speaks with delight, almost rapture, of the sweet rural beauty of a 'ride to Paddington of a July morning.' But with all our knowledge of the change which has come over the British metropolis since that time, it is startling to find that some nameless Dick Turpin or Claude Duval could ply his trade with impunity even within the courtly precincts of St. James's. In February, 1773, Mrs. Harris writes that 'a most audacious fellow robbed Sir Francis Holburne and his sisters in their coach, in St. James's Square, coming from the Opera. He was on horseback, and held a pistol close to the breast of one of the Miss Holburnes for a considerable time. She had left her purse at home—which he would not believe. He has since robbed a coach in Park Lane.' In these letters, too, there is the earliest mention which we have met with of the tiny member of the finny tribe which now confers a greater popular renown upon Greenwich than even its world-famous Observatory or its magnificent Hospital, and which for a generation has caused that place to be the honoured scene of the annual Ministerial banquet at which our rulers meet together to congratulate one another upon the approaching close of the Parliamentary session,—the famous 'whitebait dinner,' which within the last two years has fallen into abeyance, perhaps never to be revived. Mr. Harris, the founder of the family and father of the first Earl Malmesbury, was then (1763) a Lord of the Admiralty; and Mrs. Harris describes a 'most agreeable expedition on the Thames,' which she had with a party in the 'Admiralty barge.' After seeing Woolwich and all its military wonders, the lady says:—
'We got back to Greenwich to dine. We had the smallest fish I ever saw, called whitebait: they are only to be eat at Greenwich, and are held in high estimation by the epicures; they are not so large as the smallest of minnows, but are really very good eating. We dined in a charming place in the open air, which commanded a fine view of the Thames; but were obliged to leave it at six o'clock, as the tide was so cruel as not to stay for us—and they never venture to shoot the bridge [old London bridge] with the Admiralty barge at low water. We had a beastly walk through the Borough after we landed.'