ers, weavers, and other handicraftsmen, who left "the new for the old God," ready martyrs against the gross papistical impostures, and many females theological, who turned away from the corporal presence, and whom no bishop could seduce to courtesy to a saint.

The new concession made to this people was indeed received with enthusiasm. All flocked to read, or to be read to. Never were the Scriptures so artlessly scrutinized; they furnished whole scenes for interludes, and were tagged with rhymes for ballads: even the grave judges, before they delivered their charges, prefaced them by a text. Each reader became an expounder, and new schismatics were busied with new heresies. The king had not calculated on this result; and when he found the nation abounded not with readers so much as with disputants-that controversies raged where uniformity was expected-Henry became so irritated at the universal distraction of opinion, that his first attempt to raise a public voice ended, as has been since often attempted, in its suppression. The permission to read the sacred volume was contracted by the most qualifying clauses. The noble and the gentry might read it" alone in their garden or orchard, or other retired places," but men and women in the lower ranks were absolutely forbidden to read it, or to have it read to them.*

The clashing polemics of the brother and the sister of Elizabeth did not advance the progress of civil society. The novelists, if we may so term these lovers of novelty, flushed with innovation, were raging with every rapid change, while the ancients, in spite and in despondence, sullenly clung to the old, which they held could never be the obsolete. The first movements of the great reform seemed only to have transferred the

* 34 Henry VIII.

late civil wars which had distracted the land, to the minds of the people in a civil war of opinions.

When Elizabeth ascended the throne, there was yet no recognised "public" in the commonwealth; the people were mere fractional and incoherent parts of society. This heroic queen, whose position and whose masculine character bear some affinity to those of the great Catharine of Russia, had to create "a people" subservient to the very design of advancing the regal authority in its ascendency. The policy of the maiden queen was that of her ancestors; but the same jealousy of the aristocracy turned her genius to a new source of influence, unknown to her progenitors, and which her successors afterward hardly recognised. In the awful mutations through which society had been passing, some had been silently favorable to the queen's views. The population had considerably risen since the reign of Henry the Seventh.* Property had changed hands, and taken new directions; and independent classes in society were rising fast.

The great barons formerly had kept open houses for all comers and goers; five hundred or a thousand "blue coats" in a single family crowded their castles or their mansions; these were "trencher slaves" and "swash

bucklers ; beside those numerous "retainers of great lords, who, neither menial nor of the household, yet yielded their services on special occasions, for the privilege of shielding their own insolence under the ostentatious silver "badge," or the family arms, which none might strike with impunity, and escape from the hostility of the whole noble family. In the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet our national bard has perpetuated the insolence of the wearers with all the reality of nature and correctness of custom. Such troops of

*Hallam's Constitution of England, i., 8, 4to.

idling partisans were only reflecting among themselves the feuds and the pride of their rival masters; shadows of the late civil wars which still lingered in the land.* The first blow at the independent grandeur of the nobles had been struck by the grandfather of the queen; the second was the consequence of the acts of her father. The new proprietors of the recently-acquired abbey-lands, and other monastic property, were not only courtiers, but their humbler dependants; many of them the commissioners who had undervalued all these manors and lordships, that they might get such "Robin Hood's penny-worths" more easily by the novelty of "begging" for them. These formed a new body of proprietors, who gradually constituted a new gentry, standing between the nobles and the commonality; and from the nature of their property they became landjobbers, letting and underletting, raising rents, enhancing the prices of commodities, enclosing the common lands, and swallowing up the small farms by large ones. There arose in consequence a great change in agricultural pursuits, no longer practised to acquire a miserable subsistence; the land was changed into a new mine of wealth; and among the wealthiest classes of English subjects were the graziers, who indeed became the founders of many families.t

The nobles found their revenues declining, as an excess of expenditure surprised them; this changeable state only raised their murmurs, for they seemed insensible to the cause. Their ancient opulence was secretly

* The remains of this feudal pomp and power were visible even at a later period in the succeeding reign, when we find the Earl of Nottingham, in his embassy to Spain, accompanied by a retinue of five hundred persons, and the Earl of Hertford, at Brussels, carried three hundred gentlemen.

"The graziers have assured me of their credit, and some of them may be trusted for a hundred thousand pounds.”—Sir J. Harrington's Prologue to "The Metamorphosis of Ajax."

consuming itself; their troops of domestics were thinned in numbers; and a thousand families disappeared who once seem to have sprung out of the soil, where whole generations had flourished through the wide domains of the lord. A great change had visibly occurred in the baronial halls. The octogenarians in Elizabeth's later days complained that the country was depopulating fast; and the chimneys of the great mansions which had smoked the year round, now scarcely announced " a merry Christmas."

A transition from one state of society to another will always be looked on suspiciously by those who may deem the result problematical; but it will be eagerly opposed by those who find the innovation unfavorable to themselves. The results of the new direction of landed property, incomprehensible to the nobles, were abhorrent to the feelings of the people. Among "the people," that is the populace, there still survived tender reminiscences of the warmth of the abbots' kitchens; and many a wayfaring guest could tell how erst by ringing at the monastic gate the wants of life had been alleviated. The monks too had been excellent landlords living amid their tenants; and while the husbandmen stood at easy rents, the public markets were regularly maintained by a constant demand. In the breaking up of the monasteries many thousands of persons had been dispersed; and it would seem that among that sturdy community of vagabonds which now rose over the land, some low Latin words in their "pedlar's French," as the canting language they devised is called, indicate their origin from the familiar dialect of the ejected poor scholars of the late monastic institutions.

The commotions which arose in all parts of the country during the brief reign of Edward the Sixth were instigated by the ancient owners of these lands, who

conceived that they had been disinherited by the spoliators; thus weakly they avenged their irrecoverable losses; nor did such leaders want for popular pretences among a discontented populace, who, as they imagined, were themselves sufferers in the common cause. We are informed, on the indubitable authority of the diary of the youthful Edward, that "the PEOPLE had conceived a wonderful hatred against GENTLEMEN whom they held as their enemies.' The king seems distinctly to distinguish the gentry from the nobility.

In the decline of the great households a result how. ever occurred, which tended greatly to improve the independent condition of "the people." The manual arts had been practised from generation to generation, the son succeeding the father in the wide domains of some noble; but when the great lords were contracting the scale of their establishments, and failed to furnish occupation to these dependants, the mechanics and artificers took refuge in the towns; there localized, they were taught to reap the fruits of their own daily industry; and as their labor became more highly appreciated, and the arts of commerce were more closely pursued, they considerably heightened the cost of those objects of necessity or pleasure which supplied the wants or the luxuries of the noble. In becoming citizens, they ceased to be mere domestics in the great households; a separate independence was raised between the lord and his mechanic; the humble class lost something in leaving the happy carelessness of life, for a condition more anxious and precarious; but the influence of the noble was no longer that of the lord paramount, but simply the influence of the customer over the tradesman; "an influence," as Hume shrewdly remarks, "which can never be dangerous to civil government."

We now distinctly perceive new classes in civil society rising out of the decline of the preponderating power