Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/415

] spirit, but it was too strong for him; and though the puritans put it effectually down during the commonwealth, it came back in a flood with the lewd and ribald Charles II. Charles I. also introduced a more tasteful style of court pageants and festivities.

A Room in Shakespeare's House at Stratford.

Under James all the old fantastic masques and pageantries, in which heathen gods, goddesses, satyrs, giants, and the like prevailed. Charles gave to his pageantries a more classical character, and when the puritans came in they put them all down, along with Maypoles, and all the wakes, and church-ales, and the like, which James had encouraged by his "Book of Sports." The court festivals, so long as the monarchy remained, were marked by all the profusion, displays of jewellery, and of dresses of cloth of gold and embroidery, which prevailed in the Tudor times. The old-fashioned country life, in which the gentlemen hunted and hawked, and the ladies spent their leisure in giving bread to the poor and making condiments, preserves, and distilled waters, was rapidly deserted during the gay days of James and Charles, and the fortune-making of favourites.

A State Bed.

Merchants and shopkeepers were growing rich, though they still conducted their businesses in warehouses which would appear mean and miserable to our present city men, and in shops with open fronts, before which the master or one of his apprentices constantly paraded, crying, "What d'ye lack?" had their stately suburban houses, and vied with the nobles in their furniture and mode of living. The moral condition of the people of London at this period, according to all sorts of writers, was something inconceivably frightful. The apprentices, as we have seen, were a turbulent and excitable race, who had assumed a right to settle political matters, or to avenge any imagined attack on their privileges. At the cry of clubs, they seized their clubs and swords and rushed into the streets to ascertain what was amiss. They were easily led by their ringleaders against any body or any authority that was supposed to be invading popular rights. We have seen them surrounding the parliament house, demanding such measures as they pleased, and executing their notions of suitable chastisement of offenders by setting fire to Laud's house and breaking down the benches of the High Commission Court. They were equally ready to encounter and disperse the constabulary or the city guard, and to fight out their quarrels with the Templars, or others with whom they were at feud.

Rubens' Chair.