metropolis, papers of every morning and every evening, but almost every large town has its weekly historian." One of the consequences of the complete subjection of literary men to the booksellers was the creation of magazines, which afforded a more certain and rapid remuneration than books, and gave many writers a scanty and precarious subsistence. The Gentleman's Magazine' appeared in 1731. It was speedily followed by its rival, the London Magazine:' and in 1750 there were eight periodicals of this kind. In the middle of the eighteenth century also, literary reviews began in England. In 1752 there were three-the Literary,' the Critical,' and the Monthly.' Under George II. an additional tax of 4. had been imposed on newspapers, and an additional duty of a shilling on advertisements; but the demand for this form of literature was so great that these impositions do not appear to have seriously checked The essay writers had made it their great object as much as possible to popularise and diffuse knowledge, and to bring down every question to a level with the capacities of the idlest reader; and without any great change in education, any display of extraordinary genius, or any real enthusiasm for knowledge, the circle of intelligence was slowly enlarged. The progress was probably even greater among women than among men. Swift, in one of his latest letters, noticed the great improvement which had taken place during his lifetime in the education and in the writing of ladies; and it is to this period that some of the best female correspondence in our literature belongs. The prevailing coarseness, however, of fashionable life and sentiment was but little mitigated. The writings of Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Coventry, and Smollett are sufficient to illustrate the great difference which in this respect separated the first half of the eighteenth century from our own day, and unlike Anne, the first two Hanoverian sovereigns did nothing to improve the prevailing tone. Each king lived 1 The Idler, No. 30. 2 See, on the History of Newspapers, Chalmers' Life of Ruddiman. Nichols' Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, vol. iv. Hunt's Fourth Estate. Andrews' Hist. of British Journalism. Madden's Hist. 551. Mrs. Delany's Correspondence, i. publicly with mistresses, and the immorality of their Courts was accompanied by nothing of that refinement or grace which has often cast a softening veil over much deeper and more general corruption. On this subject the vivid and undoubtedly authentic picture of the Court of George II. which is furnished by Lord Hervey enables us to speak with much confidence. Few figures in the history of the time are more worthy of study than that shrewd and coarse-minded Queen, who by such infinite adroitness, and by such amazing condescensions, succeeded in obtaining insensibly a complete command over the mind of her husband, and a powerful influence over the politics of England. Living herself a life of unsullied virtue, discharging under circumstances of peculiar difficulty the duties of a wife with the most exemplary patience and diligence, exercising her great influence in Church and State with singular wisdom, patriotism, and benevolence, she passed through life jesting on the vices of her husband and of his ministers with the coarseness of a trooper, receiving from her husband the earliest and fullest accounts of every new love affair in which he was engaged, and prepared to welcome each new mistress, provided only she could herself keep the first place in his judgment and in his confidence. The character of their relation remained unbroken to the end. No stranger death scene was ever painted than that of Caroline,' nor can we easily find a more striking illustration of the inconsistencies of human nature than that a woman so coarse and cynical in her judgments of others should have herself died a victim of an excessive and misplaced delicacy. The The Queen had always wished the King to marry again. She had often said so when he was present and when he was not present, and when she was in health, and gave it now, as her advice to him when she was dying; upon which his sobs began to rise, and his tears to fall with double vehemence. Whilst in the midst of this passion, wiping his eyes and sobbing between every word, with much ado he got out this answer: "Non, j'aurai des maîtresses." To which the Queen made no other reply than: "Ah, mon Dieu! cela n'empêche pas." I know this episode will hardly be credited, but it is literally true.' Lord Hervey's Memoirs, ii. 513-514. 2 She had for fourteen years suffered from a rupture which she could not bring herself to reveal except to her husband. When on her death-bed, and suffering extreme agony, she still concealed it from her doctors, and it was contrary to her ardent wish that the King, too late to save her, told them of her complaint. Lord Hervey, ii, 505–506. works of Richardson, which appeared between 1740 and 1753, and which at once attained an extraordinary popularity, probably contributed something to refine the tone of society, but the improvement was not very perceptible till the reign of George III. Sir Walter Scott, in a well-known anecdote, has illustrated very happily the change that had taken place. He tells us that a grand-aunt of his own assured him that the novels of Aphra Behn were as current upon the toilet table in her youth as the novels of Miss Edgeworth in her old age, and he has described very vividly the astonishment of his old relative when, curiosity leading her, after a long interval of years, to turn over the forgotten pages she had delighted in when young, she found that, sitting alone at the age of eighty, she was unable to read without shame a book, which sixty years before she had heard read out for amusement in large circles consisting of the best society in London.1 In one respect during the first half of the eighteenth century there was a marked deterioration. The passion for gambling, which had been very prevalent since the Restoration, appears to have attained its climax under the first two Georges. It had been very considerably stimulated by the madness of speculation which infected all classes during the South Sea mania. That desire to make rapid fortunes, that contempt for the slow and steady gains of industry which has in our own day so often produced the wildest combinations of recklessness and credulity, was never more apparent. Scheme after scheme of the most fantastic description rose, and glittered, and burst. Companies for Fishing up Wrecks on the Irish Coast,' for 'Insurance against Losses by Servants,' for 'Making Salt Water Fresh,' for Extracting Silver from Lead,' for 'Transmuting Quicksilver into Malleable and Fine Metal,' for 'Importing Jackasses from Spain,' for 'Trading in Human Hair,' for A Wheel for Perpetual Motion,' as well as many others, attracted crowds of eager subscribers. One projector announced a Company for an undertaking which shall in due time be revealed,' each subscriber to pay at once two guineas, and afterwards to receive a share of a hundred, with a disclosure of the object. In a Lockhart's Life of Scott, v. 136-137. single morning he received 2,000 guineas, with which he immediately decamped.' It was natural that this passion for speculation should have stimulated the taste for gambling in private life. It had long been inveterate among the upper classes, and it soon rose to an unprecedented height. The chief, or, at least, the most prominent, centre was White's chocolate-house. Swift tells us that Lord Oxford never passed it without bestowing on it a curse as the bane of the English nobility;' and it continued during the greater part of the century to be the scene of the wildest and most extravagant gambling. It was, however, only the most prominent among many similar establishments which sprang up around Charing Cross, Leicester Fields, and Golden Square. The Duke of Devonshire lost an estate at a game of basset. The fine intellect of Chesterfield was thoroughly enslaved by the vice. At Bath, which was then the centre of English fashion, it reigned supreme; and the physicians even recommended it to their patients as a form of distraction. In the green-rooms of the theatres, as Mrs. Bellamy assures us, thousands were often lost and won in a single night. Among fashionable ladies the passion was quite as strong as among men, and the professor of whist and quadrille became a regular attendant at their levees. Miss Pelham, the daughter of the prime minister, was one of the most notorious gamblers of her time, and Lady Cowper speaks in her 'Diary' of sittings at Court at which the lowest stake was 200 guineas. The public lotteries contributed very powerfully to diffuse the taste for gambling among all classes. They had begun in England in the seventeenth century; and though more than once forbidden, they enabled the Government to raise money with so little unpopularity that they were again resorted to. 'I cannot forbear telling you,' wrote Addison to an Irish friend in 1711, that last week I drew a prize of 1,000l. in the lottery.' 2 Fielding wrote a satire on the passion for lotteries prevalent in his time. The discovery of some gross frauds in their management contributed to throw them into discredit, and Pelham is said to have ex 1 Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. iii. 2 Addison to Jos. Dawson. (Dec. 6 18, 1711) Departmental Correspondence. Irish State Paper Office. pressed some disapproval of them, but they were not finally suppressed in England till 1823. Westminster Bridge, which was begun in 1736, was built chiefly from the produce of lotteries. Another instance of their employment is deserving of special remembrance, for it is connected with the origin of one of the most valuable of London institutions. In 1753 lotteries were established to purchase the Sloane collection and the Harleian manuscripts, which were combined with the Cottonian collection, and deposited in Montague House under the name of the British Museum.1 Concerning the amusements and social life of the upper classes I shall content myself with making a few somewhat miscellaneous observations. The subject is a very large one, and it would require volumes to exhaust it; but it is, I think, possible to select from the mass of details a few facts which are not without a real historic importance, as indicating the tendencies of taste, and thus throwing some light on the moral history of the nation. It was said that the Revolution brought four tastes into England, two of which were chiefly due to Mary, and two to her husband. To Mary was due a passion for coloured East Indian calicoes, which speedily spread through all classes of the community, and also a passion for rare and eccentric porcelain, which continued for some generations to be a favourite topic with the satirists. William, on his side, set the fashion of picture-collecting and gave a great impulse to gardening. This latter taste, which forms one of the healthiest elements in English country life, attained its height in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it took a form which was entirely new. In the reign of Charles II. the parks of Greenwich and St. James had been laid out by the great French gardener Le Nôtre, and the taste which he made general in Europe reigned in its most exaggerated form in England. It appeared to be a main object to compel nature to recede as far as possible, to repress every irregularity, to make the human hand apparent in every shrub, and to convert gardening into an anomalous form of sculpture. The trees were 'Macpherson, iii, 300. Beckmann's Hist. of Inventions, ii. pp. 423-429. The passion for gambling in England appears in all the correspondence and other light literature of the time. Defoe's Tour through Great Britain, i, 121-124. |