“In London, and within a mile, I ween,
There are of jails and prisons full eighteen,
And sixty whipping-posts, and stocks, and cages,”
writes Taylor, the Water Poet. Scolds were ducked, and many minor offences were rewarded by burning the hand, cropping the ears, and similar mutilations. Finally, felons refusing to plead were subjected to the peine forte et dure, notwithstanding the proud and oft-repeated boast that torture has always been unknown to the English law.
Surely it is needless for us to go farther than all this, unless it be to add the striking fact that, despite such brutal severity in punishment, crimes and outrages of every description remained alarmingly common throughout the whole of the period with which we have been concerned. Enough has been said to throw in some of the heavier shadows necessary to complete the slight sketch we have been trying to furnish of the social life and every-day manners of Shakspere’s time.
With this as our last word, then, we take leave of “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” and become once more denizens of our own century. And here it would be easy, of course, to fall into the cheap Macaulay-vein of moralizing; to strike a contrast between present and past, point out all the manifold and magnificent achievements of modern civilization, and end with rhetorical rhapsodies over our “wondrous, wondrous age.” It would be easy, I say, to do this; and I doubt not that it would be effective. But when in my study of the literature of any bygone generation I make myself at home for a time among dead things and long-forgotten people, I do not, I must confess, find myself in any mood for brass-band celebrations. The feeling left with me is a vaguer and sadder one. For, as I turn back into our own world, I remember that this past was once verily and actually the present; that these dead things, these long-forgotten people, were once intensely alive; that the tragedy and the comedy of existence went on then as it goes on to-day; and that in the breasts of men and women fashioned like ourselves beat human hearts, after all, very like our own. Hope and disappointment, joy and despair; the memory of yesterday, the expectation of the morrow; the hunger and thirst of the spirit; the lust of the eye; the pride of life; the “ancient sorrow of man,”—all that goes to make up the sum total of our little earthly lot,—was their portion, too, as it will presently be the portion of the countless generations by which we in our turn shall be replaced. And thus, musing, I think of the nameless young men and maidens of that dim, far-off age, who repeated the sweet old story of love, as their fathers and mothers had done before them, as their distant descendants do to-day, while there was confusion in high places, and storm and struggle about the land. I think of the tears that were shed as gentle hearts broke in anguish; of the brave deeds wrought; of the tales of the faith of sturdy manhood and the trust of womanly devotion, which will never be retold. I think of the lives that ran their placid course; of the children that came as years went by, bringing “hope with them and forward-looking thoughts”; of mothers weeping over empty cradles; of tiny graves, long since obliterated, where many a bright promise found “its earthly close.” I think of lives that were successful, and of lives that were failures; of prophecies unfulfilled; of splendid ambitions realized only to bring the inevitable disillusion; of sordid aims accomplished; of vile things said and done. The whole dead world seems to take form and flesh in my imagination; the men and women start from the pages of the book I have been reading—a mad world, my masters, and a strange one; but behold, a world singularly, almost grotesquely, like our own. And then my thought takes a sudden spin; and this age of ours seems to slip some three centuries back into the past, and becomes weird, and phantasmal, and unreal. And I find myself peering across the misty years into this throbbing world of multitudinous enterprise and activity from the standpoint of an era when you and I will be long since forgotten—when no one will know how we toiled and suffered and loved and died, when no one will care where we lie at rest. How curious to think of it all in this way! And with what tempered enthusiasms and sobered judgments must we needs go back to take up again the burden of life knowing that the deep, silent current of time is sweeping us slowly into the great darkness, and that hereafter the tale will be told of us as it has been told generation after generation since the world began: Lo, their glory endured but for a season, and the fashion of it has passed away forever!