Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/622

508 Bedford Square and the British Museum stood the magnificent mansions of Bedford House and Montague House. But most of the sites of the splendid squares and streets of our now West End were open country, or the rubbish-heaps of the neighbourhood. Club-life was now beginning. There were numbers of political clubs; the most famous of which was the King's Head, or Green Ribbon Club, from the members wearing a green ribbon in their hats, to distinguish them from their opponents; there was the club of Shaftesbury and the whig party, which was engaged in the design of excluding the duke of York from the succession, and which raised all the Titus Oates' plots to accomplish their object. It met at the King's Head Tavern opposite to the Temple Gate. But coffee-houses, now become general, were in reality clubs; and every class and party had its coffee-house, where its members met. There was the literary coffee-house, called Will's, situate between Covent Garden and Bow Street, where Dryden was the great man, and where literary lords, literary lawyers, dramatists, players, and wits of all sorts met to settle the merits of literature and the stage. There were lawyers' coffee-houses, citizens' coffee-houses, doctors' coffee-houses, the chief of them Garraway's; Jesuits' coffee-houses, puritans' coffee-houses, and popish coffee-houses, where every man found his fellows, and partisans met and learned the news; and in these haunts the spirit of party and of religious antagonism was carried to its fiercest height. The chief place of public lounging was the New Exchange in the city, and Spring Gardens, Hyde Park, and the Mulberry Garden, which were continually occurring in the comedies of the day as the places of assignation, as well as the fashionable masquerades.

But whilst such were the most marked features of life in London at this day, we are not to suppose that there was not a large amount of the population who retained a love of virtue, purity, and domestic life. The religious were a numerous class; and the stern morality of the nonconformists beheld with pity and indignation the dissipated flutterings of the corrupt world around them. Besides these there was a numerous population of sober citizens, who, though they did not go with the puritans in religion, were disgusted with the French manners, maxims, houses, and cookery, and stood by their native modes and ideas with sturdy John Bullism. The musical taste of the age tended to draw them together to more rational enjoyments than debauchery and the tainted stage, and the increasing use of coffee and tea gave to musical and social parties a more homelike and refined character.

The popular sports and amusements still, however, maintained their usual character. All the old cruel sports of bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and cock-fights, which the puritans had suppressed, came back with royalty. Horse-racing was in vogue; and gambling was such a fever amongst the wealthy, that many great estates were squandered at cards, and the duke of St. Albans, when more than eighty years of age, and quite blind, used to sit at the gaming-table from day to day, with a man beside him to tell him the cards. Billiards, chess, backgammon, and cribbage were in great request; and bowls, ninepins, boat-racing, yacht-racing, running at the ring, were sports both with the people and the gentry. Ladies joined in playing at bowls; skating was introduced by the courtiers, who had spent much time in Holland. Swimming and foot-races were fashionable; and we have seen that colonel Blood had planned to shoot Charles once when he went to swim in the Thames near Chelsea, and that the duke of Monmouth in his popular tour ran races against all comers, first without boots, and then beat them running in his boots whilst the others ran without.

Charles prided himself on his pedestrian feats. The common people were as much delighted as their ancestors with all the exhibitions of Bartholomew Fair and Smithfield, of fire-eaters, jugglers, rope-dancers, dancing dogs and monkeys, Punch, feats of strength, and travelling theatres, where some Scripture story was represented, as is yet the case in France.

In the country, life continued to move on at its usual rate. Land had not reached more than a fourth of its present value, and education was an immense way further behind, so that a large amount of the aristocracy, including nearly the whole of the squirearchy, continued to live on their estates, and rarely made a visit to London. The ravages which the civil wars had made in all parts of the country had left traces on many a rental which were yet far from being obliterated; and the contempt into which the clerical office had fallen since the reformation, and absorption of the church lands, left one outlet for the sons of the squirearchy at this time little available. The landed gentry, therefore, for the most part continued to occupy a position of great local importance, but, with few exceptions, did not mingle much with the great world of London, or aspire to lead in social or political rivalry on the national arena. The squire was great on the bench and at the quarter sessions; he was often colonel of the militia, and knew his importance in the country; but beyond that he was little heard of except when civil strife called him out to defend the altar and the throne. But within his own little world he was all in all, proud of his power, and prouder of his pedigree; but if the squire Westerns of Fielding's time are faithfully portrayed, how much more rustic, toryfied, and confined in the range of their ideas and experience must they have been nearly two hundred years ago! Few of them had the ambition to distinguish themselves by literary attainments—such accomplishments they left to the Drydens and Danbys of the metropolis. Many heirs of estates, therefore, at this era never went to a university, or, if they did, made but a brief abode there, and returned little better for the sojourn, depending on their property to give them all the éclât they aspired to. To enjoy the sports of the field, attend the county race meeting and county ball, to live surrounded by huntsmen and gamekeepers, to keep a coarse but exuberant table, and to terminate the day's sport by a drunken carouse, included the pursuits and habits of three-fourths of this class. The excess of drunkenness was something that would astonish these teetotal days. The rude and boisterous merriment of sporting squires amid the fumes of tobacco were deemed the quintessence of true life. The height of hospitality was to lay your guest under the table; whilst in the servants' hall the coachman or groom was made quite as fuddled, and master and man were often only sobered by an overturn into a ditch or a wayside pool. These drinking notions came down even to our time, and so much infected