ed to import from France those exquisitely fine blades which are required for operations on the human frame. Most of the Hallamshire forges were collected in a market-town which had sprung up near the castle of the proprietor, and which, in the reign of James the First, had been a singularly miserable place, containing about two thousand inhabitants, of whom a third were half-starved and half-naked beggars. It seems certain from the parochial registers that the population did not amount to four thousand at the end of the reign of Charles the Second. The effects of a species of toil singularly unfavorable to the health and vigor of the human frame were at once discerned by every traveler. A large proportion of the people had distorted limbs. This is that Sheffield which now, with its dependencies, contains a hundred and twenty thousand souls, and which sends forth its admirable knives, razors, and lancets to the farthest ends of the world.*

Birmingham had not been thought of sufficient importance to send a member to Oliver's Parliament; yet the manufacturers of Birmingham were already a busy and thriving race. They boasted that their hardware was highly esteemed, not, indeed, as now, at Pekin and Lima, at Bokhara and Timbuctoo, but in London, and even as far off as Ireland. They had acquired a less honorable renown as coiners of bad money. In allusion to their spurious groats, the Tory party had fixed on demagogues who hypocritically affected zeal against popery the nickname of Birminghams; yet in 1685, the population, which is now little less than two hundred thousand, did not amount to four thousand. Birmingham buttons were just beginning to be known; of Birmingham guns nobody had yet heard; and the place whence, two generations later, the magnificent editions of Baskerville went forth to astonish all the librarians of Europe, did not contain a single regular shop where a Bible or an almanac could be bought. On market-days a bookseller named Michael Johnson, the father of the great Samuel Johnson, * Hunter's History of Hallamshire.

came over from Lichfield, and opened a stall during a few hours. This supply of literature was long found adequate to the demand.*

These four chief seats of our great manufactures deserve especial mention. It would be tedious to enumerate all the populous and opulent hives of industry which, a hundred and fifty years ago, were hamlets without a parish church, or desolate moors inhabited only by grouse and wild deer. Nor has the change been less signal in those outlets by which the products of the English looms and forges are poured forth over the four quarters of the world. At present Liverpool contains about three hundred thousand inhabitants. The shipping registered at her port amounts to between four and five hundred thousand tons. Into her custom-house has been repeatedly paid in one year a sum more than thrice as great as the whole income of the English crown in 1685. The receipts of her postoffice, even since the great reduction of the duty, exceed the sum which the postage of the whole kingdom yielded to the Duke of York. Her endless docks and warehouses are among the wonders of the world; yet even those docks and warehouses seem hardly to suffice for the gigantic trade of the Mersey, and already a rival city is growing fast on the opposite shore. In the days of Charles the Second Liverpool was described as a rising town which had recently made great advances, and which maintained a profitable intercourse with Ireland and with the sugar colonies. The customs had multiplied eightfold within sixteen years, and amounted to what was then considered the immense sum of fifteer thousand pounds annually; but the population can hardly have exceeded four thousand.

*

Dugdale's Warwickshire; Blome's Britannia, 1673; North's Examen, 321; Preface to Absalom and Achitophel; Hutton's History of Birmingham; Boswell's Life of Johnson. In 1690 the burials at Birmingham were 150, the baptisms 125. I think it probable that the annual mortality was one in twenty-five. In London it was considerably greater. A historian of Nottingham, half a century later, boasted of the extraordinary salubrity of his town, where the annual mortality was one in thirty.-See Dering's History of Nottingham.

The shipping was about fourteen hundred tons, less than the tonnage of a single modern Indiaman of the first class; and the whole number of seamen belonging to the port can not be estimated at more than two hundred.*

Such has been the progress of those towns where wealth is created and accumulated. Not less rapid has been the progress of towns of a very different kind; towns in which wealth, created and accumulated elsewhere, is expended for purposes of health and recreation. Some of the most remarkable of these towns have sprung into existence since the time of the Stuarts. Cheltenham is now a greater city than any which the kingdom contained in the seventeenth century, London alone excepted; but in the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth, Cheltenham was mentioned by local historians merely as a rural parish lying under the Cotswold Hills, and affording good ground both for tillage and pasture. Corn grew and cattle browsed over the space now covered by that gay succession of streets and villas.† Brighton was described as a place which had once been thriving, which had possessed many small fishing-barks, and which had, when at the height of prosperity, contained above two thousand inhabitants, but which was sinking fast into decay. The sea was gradually gaining on the buildings, which at length almost entirely disappeared. Ninety years ago the ruins of an old fort were to be seen lying among the pebbles and sea-weed on the beach, and ancient men could still point out the traces of foundations on a spot where a street of more than a hundred huts had been swallowed up by the waves. So desolate was the place after this calamity, that the vicarage was thought scarcely worth having. A few poor fishermen, however, still continued to dry their nets on those cliffs on which now a

* Blome's Britannia; Gregson's Antiquities of the County Palatine and Duchy of Lancaster, Part II.; Petition from Liverpool in the Privy Council Book, May 10, 1686. In 1690 the burials at Liverpool were 151, the baptisms 120. In 1844 the net receipt of the customs at Liverpool was £4,365,526 18. 8d. Atkyns's Gloucestershire

X

town more than twice as large and populous as the Bristol of the Stuarts presents, mile after mile, its gay and fantastic front to the sea.*

England, however, was not, in the seventeenth century, destitute of watering-places. The gentry of Derbyshire and of the neighboring counties repaired to Buxton, where they were crowded into low wooden sheds, and regaled with oat-cake, and with a viand which the hosts called mutton, but which the guests strongly suspected to be dog. Tunbridge Wells, lying within a day's journey of the capital, and in one of the richest and most highlycivilized parts of the kingdom, had much greater attractions. At present we see there a town which would, a hundred and sixty years ago, have ranked, in population, fourth or fifth among the towns of England. The brilliancy of the shops and the luxury of the private dwellings far surpass any thing that England could then show. When the court, soon after the Restoration, visited Tunbridge Wells, there was no town there; but, within a mile of the spring, rustic cottages, somewhat cleaner and neater than the ordinary cottages of that time, were scattered over the heath. Some of these cabins were movable, and were carried on sledges from one part of the common to another. To these huts men of fashion, wearied with the din and smoke of London, sometimes came in the summer to breathe fresh air, and to catch a glimpse of rural life. During the season a kind of fair was daily held near the fountain. The wives and daughters of the Kentish farmers came from the neighboring villages with cream, cherries, wheatears, and quails. To chaffer with them, to flirt with them, to praise their straw hats and tight heels, was a refreshing pastime to voluptuaries sick of the airs of actresses and maids of honor. Milliners, toymen, and jewelers came down from London, and opened a bazar under the trees. In one booth the politician might find his coffee and the London Gazette; in another • Magna Britannia; Grose's Antiquities.

Tour in Derbyshire, by Thomas Browne, son of Sir Thomas.

were gamblers playing deep at basset; and, on fine evenings, the fiddlers were in attendance, and there were morris-dances on the elastic turf of the bowling-green. In 1685 a subscription had just been raised among those who frequented the wells for building a church, which the Tories, who then domineered every where, insisted on dedicating to Saint Charles the Martyr.*

But at the head of the English watering places, without a rival, was Bath. The springs of that city had been renowned from the days of the Romans. It had been, during many centuries, the seat of a bishop. The sick repaired thither from every part of the realm. The king sometimes held his court there. Nevertheless, Bath was then a maze of only four or five hundred houses, crowded within an old wall in the vicinity of the Avon. Pictures of what were considered as the finest of those houses are still extant, and greatly resemble the lowest rag-shops and pot-houses of Radcliffe Highway. Even then, indeed, travelers complained of the narrowness and meanness of the streets. That beautiful city which charms even eyes familiar with the master-pieces of Bramante and Palladio, and which the genius of Anstey and of Smollett, of Frances Burney and of Jane Austen, has made classic ground, had not begun to exist. Milsom Street itself was an open field lying far beyond the walls, and hedge-rows intersected the space which is now covered by the Crescent and the Circus. As to the comforts and luxuries which were to be found in the interior of the houses of Bath by the fashionable visitors who resorted thither in search of health or amusement, we possess information more complete and minute than can generally be obtained on such subjects. A writer who published an account of that city about sixty years after the Revolution has accurately described the changes which had taken place within his own recollection. He assures us that in his

* Mémoires de Grammont; Hasted's History of Kent; Tunbridge Wells, a Comedy, 1678; Causton's Tunbridgialia, 1688; Metellus, a poem on Tun bridge Wells, 1693.