Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/623

] not only the country gentry but the literary class, that not many years ago a man was regarded as a man of no spirit or genius who did not drink hard and boast of it. The magazines of our own time kept up this insensate swagger, and the "Noctes" of Blackwood were a roystering echo of the more profane bacchanalian rout of the restoration.

As these gentry went little to town, their manners were proportionably rustic, and their circle of ideas confined, but from their confinement the more sturdy. Toryism of the most ultra type was rampant amongst them. Church and state, and the most hearty contempt of everything like dissent and of foreigners, were regarded as the only maxims for Englishmen; and the most absolute submission of the peasantry to the despotic squirearchy was exacted. In a justice room if a man was poor it was taken for granted that he was wrong. Justice Shallows and Dogberrys were not the originals of the pages of Shakespeare, but of the country bench of magistrates and its constabulary. Ideas travelled slowly, for books were few. A bible, a common prayer-book, and a "Gwillim's Heraldry" were the extent of many a gentleman's library. Newspapers were suppressed by the restrictions on the press during the latter part of Charles's reign; and the news-letters which supplied the country contained a very meagre amount of facts, but no disquisition.

A Dramatic Performance in the Inn Yard, copied from authentic sources.

There were few coaches, except in the districts immediately round London, or to the distance of twenty or thirty miles, and the roads were in general impassable in winter. On all but the main lines of highway pack-horses carried the necessary merchandise from place to place through deep narrow tracks, some of which remain to our time. It required four or five days to reach London by coach from Chester, York, or Bristol, and that attended by perils and discomforts that made travellers loth to encounter such a journey, and often to make their wills before starting. Macaulay has summed up the terrors of the road, as given by our diarists, in the following passage:—"On the best lines of communication the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the ways often such that it was hardly possible to distinguish them in the dusk from the uninclosed heath and fen on both sides. Ralph Thoresby, the antiquary, was in danger of losing his way on the great north road between Barnby Moor and Tuxford, and actually lost his way between Doncaster and York; Pepys and his wife, travelling in their own coach, lost their way between Newberry and Reading. In the course of the same tour they lost their way near Salisbury, and were in danger of having to pass the night on the plain. It was only in fine weather that the whole breadth of the road was available for wheeled vehicles. Often the mud lay deep on the right and the left, and only a narrow track of firm ground rose above the quagmire. At such times obstructions and quarrels were frequent, and the pass was frequently blocked up during a long time by carriers neither of whom would give way. It happened almost every day that coaches stuck fast, until a team of cattle could be procured from some neighbouring farm to tug them out of the slough. But in bad seasons the travellers had to encounter inconveniences still more serious. Thoresby, who was in the habit of travelling between Leeds and the capital, has recorded in his diary such a series of perils and disasters as might suffice for a journey to the Frozen Ocean, or to the desert of Sahara. On one occasion he learned that the