application of the term 'lion' to any conspicuous spectacle or personage, which has long since become universal. A much larger proportion of amusements than at present were carried on in the open air. Besides the popular gatherings of May fair, Bartholomew fair, and Southwark fair, there were the public gardens of Vauxhall and of Ranelagh, which occupy so prominent a place in the pictures of fashionable life by Fielding, Walpole, Goldsmith, Lady W. Montagu, and Miss Burney, and also the less famous entertainments of Marylebone Gardens, and of Cuper's Gardens on the Lambeth side of the Thames. Vauxhall dated from the middle of the seventeenth century, but Ranelagh Gardens, which occupied part of the present site of the gardens of Chelsea Hospital, were only opened in 1742. Coffee-houses, though apparently less conspicuous centres of news, politics, and fashion than they had been under Anne, were still very numerous. At the present day every traveller is struck with the almost complete absence in London of this element of Continental life, but in the early years of the eighteenth century coffee-houses were probably more prominent in London than in any other city in Europe. A writer who described the metropolis in 1708, not much more than fifty years after the first coffeehouse had been established in England, estimated the number of these institutions at nearly 3,000.1

The fashionable hours were becoming steadily later. Colley Cibber, in describing the popularity of Kynaston, a favourite actor of female parts under Charles II., mentions that ladies of quality were accustomed to take him with them in their coaches to Hyde Park in his theatrical habit after the play, which they could then do, as the play began at four o'clock. The landmarks of our fathers,' wrote Steele in 1710, are removed, and planted further up in the day . . . in my own memory the dinner hour has crept by degrees from twelve o'clock to three. Where it will fix nobody knows.'3 In the reign of George II. the most fashionable dinner hour appears to have been four. The habits of all classes were becoming less simple. Defoe

1 Hatton's New View of London, i. p. 30. Many particulars relating to these coffee-houses will be found in Timbs's Club Life in London.

...

2 Cibber's Apology, ch. 5.

3 Tatler, No. 263. In the country the old hours seem to have gone on. Pope, in his Epistle to Mrs. Blount, on

noticed that within the memory of men still living the apprentices of shopkeepers and warehousemen habitually served the families of their masters at table, and discharged other menial functions which in the reign of George I. they would have indignantly spurned.' The merchants who had hitherto lived in the city near their counting-houses, began, early in the eighteenth century, to migrate to other quarters, though they at first seldom went further than Hatton Garden.2 Domestic service was extremely disorganised. Almost all the complaints on this subject, which in our own day we hear upon every side and which are often cited as conclusive proofs of the degeneracy of the English people, were quite as loud and as emphatic a hundred and fifty years ago as at present. It was said that while no servants in Europe were so highly paid or so well fed as the English, none were so insolent, exacting, or nomadic, that the tie of affection between master and servant was completely broken, that on the smallest provocation or at the hope of the smallest increase of wages, or still more of vales, the servant threw up his place, and that no other single cause contributed so largely to the discomfort of families. Servants had their clubs, and their societies for maintaining each other when out of place, and they copied only too faithfully the follies and the vices of their masters. There were bitter complaints of how they wore their masters' clothes and assumed their masters' names, how there were in liveries beaux, fops, and coxcombs, in as high perfection as among people that kept equipages,' how near the entrance of the law-courts and the Parliament, a host of servants kept up such riotous clamour and licentious confusion' that one would think there were no such thing as rule or distinction among us.' In the theatres especially they were a constant source of disturbance. It was

the custom of the upper classes to send their footmen before them to keep their places during the first acts of the play, and they afterwards usually retired to the upper gallery, to which they claimed the right of free admission. Their constant disorder led to their expulsion from Drury Lane theatre in 1737, which they resented by a furious riot. The presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales was unable to allay the storm, and order was not restored till twenty-five or twenty-six persons had been seriously injured.'

This state of things was the natural consequence of luxurious and ostentatious habits, acting upon a national character by no means peculiarly adapted to domestic service. There were, however, also several special causes at work, which made the condition of domestic service a great national evil. The most conspicuous were the custom of placing servants on board wages, which was very prevalent in the beginning of the century, and which encouraged them to frequent clubs and taverns; the constant attendance of servants upon their mistresses in the great scenes of fashionable dissipation; the law which communicated to the servants of peers and Members of Parliament the immunity from arrest for debt enjoyed by their masters; and, above all, the system of vales, which made servants in a great degree independent of their masters. This system had been carried in England to an extent unparalleled in Europe; and the great prominence given to it in the literature of the early half of the eighteenth century shows how widespread and demoralising it had become. When dining with his nearest relation a gentleman was expected to pay the servants who attended him, and no one of small fortune could accept many invitations from a great nobleman, on account of the large sums which had to be distributed among the numerous domestics.

vants [of London] they have great wages, are well kept and clothed, but are notwithstanding the plague of almost every house in town. They form themselves into societies, or rather confederacies, contributing to the maintenance of each other when out of place, and if any of them cannot manage the family where they are entertained as they please, immediately they give notice they will

be gone. There is no speaking to them; they are above correction.... It is become a common saying, “If my servant ben't a thief, if he be but honest, I can bear with other things," and, indeed, it is very rare to meet in London with an honest servant.'Pinkerton's Travels, ii. 95.

Lawrence's Life of Fielding, pp. 63-64. Mrs. Delany's Life and Correspondence, i. 398–399.

No feature of English life seemed more revolting or astonishing to foreigners than an English entertainment where the guests, often under the eyes of the host, passed from the drawing-room through a double row of footmen, each one of them expecting and receiving his fee. It was said that a foreign minister, dining on a great occasion with a nobleman of the highest rank, usually expended in this way as much as ten guineas, that a sum of two or three guineas was a common expenditure in great houses, and that a poor clergyman, invited to dine with his bishop, not unfrequently spent in vales to the servants, at a single dinner, more than would have fed his family for a week. Dr. King tells a story of a poor nobleman who in Queen Anne's time was an intimate friend of the Duke of Ormond, and who regularly received a guinea with every invitation, for distribution among the servants of his host. The effect of this system in weakening the authority of masters, and in demoralising servants, was universally recognised, and soon after the middle of the century a great movement arose to abolish it, the servants being compensated by a higher rate of wages. The movement began among the gentry of Scotland. The grand jury of Northumberland and the grand jury of Wiltshire followed the example, pledging themselves to discourage the system of vales, but many years still elapsed before it was finally eradicated.'

Of the sanitary condition of the city it is extremely difficult to speak with confidence. There is reason to believe that cleanliness and good ventilation had greatly increased,2 and in at least one respect a marked improvement of the national health had recently taken place. The plague of London was not a single

1 Eight Letters to his Grace the Duke of on the Custom of Vailsgiving in England [by Hanway, the Persian traveller] (London, 1760). King's Anecdotes of his Own Time, pp. 51-52. Reresby's Memoirs, p. 377. Angeloni's Letters on the English, ii. pp. 38-42. World, No. 60. Connoisseur, No. 70. Dodsley's High Life below Stairs. Roberts's Social Hist. of the Southern Counties, pp. 32-34.

2 Many of its streets have been widened, made straight, raised, paved with easy descents to carry off the water; besides wells in most public

yards, and pipes for conveying plenty of fresh water to keep them clean and sweet; many late stately edifices, large clean courts, lofty rooms, large sashlights, &c., and many excellent conveniences both by land and water, for supplying the city with fresh provisions at moderate prices... must contribute not a little to make the city more healthy.'-Short's Comparative Hist. of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England and Abroad (1767), p. 20. See, too, Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii.

321.

or isolated outburst. It had been chronic in London during the whole of the seventeenth century, and though greatly diminished had not been extirpated by the fire. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it completely disappeared, and it was noticed that from this time the deaths from colic and dysentery decreased with an extraordinary rapidity. In each successive decennial period in the first half of the eighteenth century the annual average of deaths from this source was much less than in the preceding one, and the average in the last decennial period is said to have been little more than a tenth of what it had been in the first one. The statistics, however, both of disease and of population, were so fluctuating and so uncertain that it is rash to base much upon them. It appears, however, evident that the mortality of the towns as compared with the country, and the mortality of infants as compared with adults, were considerably greater than at present, and also that the population of London in the second quarter of the century, if it did not, as was often said, absolutely decrease, at least advanced much less rapidly than in the first quarter. The great spread of gin-drinking was followed both by a serious diminution in the number of births, and by a great increase in the number of deaths, and was, no doubt, regarded, with justice, as the chief enemy of the public health.3 Medical science had been some

Heberden's Observations on the Increase and Decrease of Different Diseases (1801). This eminent authority, having given many statistics on the subject, concludes: The cause of so great an alteration in the health of the people of England (for it is not confined to the metropolis) I have no hesitation in attributing to the improvements which have gradually taken place, not only in London but in all the great towns, and in the manner of living throughout the kingdom; particularly in respect to cleanliness and ventilation' (p. 35).

2 See the article on Vital Statistics, in McCulloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire, and Short's Comparative History. According to Short,

the cities and great towns in the kingdom may be deemed as so many slaughterhouses of the people of the nation' (p. 22).

Dr. Short says the passion for spirituous liquors began to diffuse its pernicious effects in 1724, at the very time when the city began to be more fruitful and healthy than it had been since the Restoration. How powerfully this poison wrought let us now see. From 1704 to 1724 were born 336,514, buried 474,125. Let us allow fourteen years for this dire bane to spread, operate, and become epidemic; then from 1738 to 1758 were born 296,831, buried 486,171. Here we have two shocking effects of this bewitching liquor. First, here is a greater barrenness, a decrease or want of 40,000 of ordinary births which the last vicennary produced, instead of an increase, as we had in other vicennaries. Secondly, an increase of 12,000 buryings, though there was so great a defect of births.'-Short's Comparative History, p. 21.