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a halfpenny. French and German wines were eightpence the gallon, Spanish and Portuguese wines a shilling. This was the highest price at which the best wines might be sold; and if there was any fault in quality or quantity, the dealers forfeited four times the amount. Rent, another important consideration, cannot be fixed so accurately, for Parliament did not interfere with it. Here, however, we are not without very tolerable information. "My father," says Latimer," was a yeoman, and had no land of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able and did find the king a harness with himself and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king's majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles, each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did off the said farm." If "three or four pounds at the uttermost was the rent of a farm yielding such results, the rent of labourer's cottages is not likely to have been considerable.

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I am below the truth, therefore, with this scale of prices, in assuming the penny in terms of a labourer's necessities to have been equal in the reign of Henry VIII. to the present shilling: for a penny, at the time of which I write, the labourer could buy more bread, beef, and winehe could do more towards find lodging for himself and his family than the labourer of the nineteenth century can for a shilling. I do not see that this admits of question. Turning then to the table of wages, it will be easy to ascertain his position. By the 3rd of the 6th of Henry VIII., it was enacted that master carpenters, masons, bricklayers, tilers, plumbers, glaziers, joiners, and other employers of such skilled workmen, should give to each of their journeymen, if no meat or drink was allowed, sixpence a day for half the year, fivepence a day for the other half;

or fivepence halfpenny for the yearly average. The common labourers were to receive fourpence a day for half the year, for the remaining half, threepence. In the harvest months they were allowed to work by the piece, and might earn considerably more; so that, in fact and this was the rate at which their wages were usually estimated-the daylabourer received, on an average, fourpence a day for the whole year. Nor was he in danger, except by his own fault or by unusual accident, of being thrown out of employ; for he was engaged by contract for not less than a year, and could not be dismissed before his term had expired, unless some gross misconduct could be proved against him before two magistrates. Allowing a deduction of one day in the week for a saint's day, or a holiday, he received, therefore, steadily and regularly, if well conducted, an equivalent of twenty shillings a week-twenty shillings a week and a holiday; and this is far from being a full account of his advantages. In most parishes, if not in all, there were large ranges of common and unenclosed forest-land, which furnished his fuel to him gratis-where his pigs might range, and ducks and geese; where, if he could afford a cow, he was in no danger of being unable to feed it; and so important was this privilege considered, that when the commons began to be largely enclosed, Parliament insisted that the working-man should not be without some piece of ground on which he could employ his own and his family's industry. By the 7th of the 31st of Elizabeth, it was ordered that no cottage should be built for residence without four acres of land, at lowest, being attached to it, for sole use of the occupants of such cottage.-Froude's History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth.

THE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE.

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle,
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs ;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love,

Thy silver dishes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat,
Shall on an ivory table be,
Prepared each day for thee and me.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning;
If these delights thy mind may move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

C. Marlowe.

ON BEGGARS.

The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation-your only Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses-is uplift with manyhanded sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags-staves, dogs, and crutches the whole mendicant fraternity, with all their baggage, are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution.

From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets and turning of alleys, the parting genius of beggary is "with sighing sent."

I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusade or bellum ad exterminationem proclaimed against a species. Much good might be sucked from these beggars.

They were the oldest and honourablest form of pauperism. Their appeals were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenious mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudging in the assessment.

There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man than to go in livery.

The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses; and when Dionysius from being king turned schoolmaster, do we feel anything towards him but contempt? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferule for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same compassionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an obolum? Would the moral have been more graceful, more pathetic?

The Blind Beggar in the legend-the father of pretty Bessie-whose story doggrel rhymes and alehouse signs cannot so degrade and attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine through its disguisements— this noble earl of Cornwall (as indeed he was), and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated on the flowering green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags and his beggarywould the child and parent have cut a better figure doing the honours of a counter, or expatiating their fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering shop-board?

In tale or history your beggar is ever the first antipode to your king. The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them), when they would

most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop till they have brought down their own hero in good earnest to rags and the wallet. The depths of the descent illustrates the height he falls from. There is no medium which can be presented to the imagination without offence. There is no breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer mere nature;" and Cresseid, fallen from a prince's love, must extend her pale arms, pale with other whiteness than of beauty, supplicating lazar alms with bell and clap-dish.

The Lucian wits knew this very well; and, with a converse policy, when they would express scorn of greatness without the pity, they show us an Alexander in the shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting up foul linen.

How would it sound in song that a great monarch had bestowed his affections upon the daughter of a baker? Yet do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the "true ballad" where King Cophetua woos the beggar maid?

Poor

Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with contempt. No one properly contemns a beggar. Poverty is a comparative thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its "neighbour grice.' Its poor rents and comings-in are soon summed up and told. ~ Its pretences to property are almost pitiful. Its pitiful attempts to save excite a smile. Every scornful companion can weigh his trifle-bigger purse against it. man reproaches poor man in the streets with impolitic mention of his condition, his own being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally comparative insults a beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of property. He confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neighbour seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No man sues him. No man goes to

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