Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/122

116 and in November of the same year another case appears from Ireland where the alleged age is 135.

Nothing occurs to us as more forcibly illustrated by the magazine literature of last century than the great change that has taken place in public taste and ideas of public propriety. There are occasional articles, both in prose and verse, in all of these journals which, were they published now, would be thought shocking; indeed, no periodical would dare to print them. This, of course, does not necessarily imply that the morality of that age was so much worse than our own. It is an evidence rather of coarseness of manners than of greater actual criminality. Swift's indecencies, some of the worst of which are here reproduced at length, were bad enough, certainly, even in the grosser atmosphere of the time, but any similar production now would imply a much lower standard both of taste and morality. Another form in which this comparative indelicacy of manners and sentiment manifests itself is the insertion of medical cases such as now only appear in strictly professional publications. In many of those the most painful and loathsome details are given with the utmost minuteness and at great length. It may be considered as a palliation, however, that these early magazines, as has been already mentioned, besides their more general and legitimate functions, included in their scope both the professional journal and the newspaper of the present day. Some of the names given to various diseases are odd-looking, There is "asthma and tissick," "head-mould-shot," "horse-shoehead," and "water in the head," "white ives," "chin-cough" for whooping-cough, and scrofula is known only by its old designation king's evil, or more frequently and laconically "evil." An impressive commentary on the comparative immunity of later times from the ravages of small-pox is also furnished by these tables. "Out of 30,811 deaths in the London bill of mortality for 1740 not less than 2,725 — about one in eleven — are caused by this scourge, the most fatal disease on the list with three exceptions — convulsions, whatever that meant, consumption, and fevers of all kinds collectively. Other years show corresponding results. Vaccination, it will be remembered, was not general until the beginning of the century. The population of London in 1740 was probably about six hundred and thirty thousand. Macaulay gives nearly five hundred and thirty thousand in 1685, and in 1801 (first census) it was 876,594.

Under the head of "Casualties" in the same bill of mortality (1740) — and it is not very exceptional — there are some dismal details. Thirteen persons were executed in the metropolis, and this appears to be about the average annual number. At the same rate there would be now, according to population, about sixty or seventy executions in London every year. Fifteen are registered as "starved," seventy-eight (infants) were "overlaid," ninety-seven died from excessive drinking, fifty-five were found dead, and the same number committed suicide. The total London "casualties" for the year number four hundred and sixty-two, a frightfully large proportion, considering the population, of deaths resulting from other than natural causes.

This period, as we gather from the monthly lists of new books, was an age of pamphlets and small trumpery publications. A large proportion of them were mere ephemera — threepenny and sixpenny tracts. Nor is this superfluity of petty literary effort difficult to account for. The attempts at verse, or the moral or political essays which in another century might be accepted by an editor, appeared in the form of cheap separate brochures and lived their little hour, or, mayhap, never lived at all. The bulk of them were doubtless poor and worthless, many we know were highly scurrilous, and some were probably even worse, if we may form an opinion from their very equivocal titles. A dreary catalogue of trifles it is, relieved at long intervals by some work which has come down to posterity. Here is one possessing more interest in 1875 than it did in 1732: "Acis and Galatea, an English Pastoral Opera, in three acts, set to music by Mr. Handel;" or in another department, "The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman." Of the latter there seems to have been several imitations, or "apes," as the phrase then was. Another notable entry about 1755 is as follows: "Some Account of a Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel Johnson, A.M., in two vols, folio, 580 sheets."

We find, in 1760, that in response to a petition of the magistrates of Crail, a small town in Fife, the General Assemply appointed a collection in all the churches in Scotland in aid of the funds for repairing the harbor of that ancient burgh. The "dissidence of dissent," it is needless to say, was then unknown. In the same 