ged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Dryden sat. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to him, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honor sufficient to turn the head of a young enthusiast. There were coffee-houses where the first medical men might be consulted. Doctor John Radcliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose to the largest practice in London, came daily, at the hour when the Exchange was full, from his house in Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the capital, to Garraway's, and was to be found surrounded by surgeons and apothecaries at a par ticular table. There were Puritan coffee-houses, where no oath was heard, and where lank-haired men discussed election and reprobation through their noses; Jew coffeehouses, where dark-eyed money-changers from Venice and from Amsterdam greeted each other; and Popish coffeehouses, where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their cups, another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the king.*

These gregarious habits had no small share in forming the character of the Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, a different being from the rustic Englishman. There was not then the intercourse which now exists between the two classes. Only very great men were in the habit of dividing the year between town and country. Few esquires came to the capital thrice in their lives. Nor was it yet the practice of all citizens in easy circumstances to breathe the fresh air of the fields and woods during

*Lettres sur les Anglois; Tom Brown's Tour; Ward's London Spy; The Character of a Coffee-house, 1673; Rules and Orders of the Coffee House, 1674; Coffee-houses vindicated, 1675; A Satyr against Coffee; North's Examen, 138; Life of Guildford, 152; Life of Sir Dudley North, 149; Life of Dr. Radcliffe, published by Curll in 1715. The liveliest description of Will's is in the City and Country Mouse. There is a remarkable passage about the influence of the coffee-house orators in Halstead's Succinct Genealogies, print ed in 1685.

some weeks of every summer. A cockney, in a rural village, was stared at as much as if he had intruded into a Kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he stared at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the water-spouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackneycoachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendor of the lord mayor's show. Money-droppers, sore from the cart's tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the most honest, friendly gentlemen that he had ever Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed themselves on him for countesses and maids of honor. If he asked his way to St. James's, his informants sent him to Mile End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of every thing that nobody else would buy, of second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee-house, he be came a mark for the insolent derision of fops and the grave waggery of templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he once more felt himself a great man; and he saw nothing above him except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the lord lieutenant.

seen.

The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place.

Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove national and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all the branches of the great human family. In the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of London were, for almost every practical purpose, further from Reading than they now are from Edinburgh, and further from Edinburgh than they now are from Vienna.

The subjects of Charles the Second were not, it is true, quite unacquainted with that principle which has, in our own time, produced an unprecedented revolution in human affairs; which has enabled navies to advance in the face of wind and tide, and battalions, attended by all their baggage and artillery, to traverse kingdoms at a pace equal to that of the fleetest race-horse. The Marquess of Worcester had recently observed the expansive power of moisture rarefied by heat. After many experiments, he had succeeded in constructing a rude steam-engine, which he called a fire water-work, and which he pronounced to be an admirable and most forcible instrument of propulsion.* But the marquess was suspected to be a madman, and known to be a papist. His inventions, therefore, found no favorable reception. His fire water-work might, perhaps, furnish matter for conversation at a meeting of the Royal Society, but was not applied to any practical purpose. There were no rail-ways, except a few made of timber, from the mouth of the Northumbrian coal pits to the banks of the Tyne. There was very little internal communication by water. A few attempts had been made to deepen and embank the natural streams, but with slender success. Hardly a single navigable canal had been even projected The English of that day were in the habit of talking with Century of Inventions, 1663, No. 68. North's Life of Guildford, 136

mingled admiration and despair of the immense trench by which Louis the Fourteenth had made a junction between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They little thought that their country would, in the course of a few generations, be intersected, at the cost of private adventurers, by artificial rivers making up more than four times the length of the Thames, the Severn, and the Trent together.

It was by the highways that both travelers and goods generally passed from place to place; and those highways appear to have been far worse than might have been expected from the degree of wealth and civilization which the nation had even then attained. On the best lines of communication the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the way often such as it was hardly possible to distinguish, in the dusk, from the uninclosed heath and fen which lay 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 it between Doncaster and York. Pepys and his wife, traveling in their own coach, lost their way between Newbury 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 path was sometimes blocked up during a long time by carriers, neither of whom would break the way. It happened, almost every day, that coaches stuck fast, until a team of cattle could be procured from some neighboring farm to tug them out of the slough. But in bad seasons the traveler had to encounter inconveniences still more serious. Thoresby, who was in the habit of traveling between Leeds and the capital, has recorded, in his Diary, such a series of perils *Thoresby's Diary, Oct. 21, 1680, Aug. 3, 1712. + Pepys's Diary, June 12 and 16, 1668.

Ibid., Feb. 28, 1660.

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 floods were out between Ware and London; that passengers had to swim for their lives; and that a higgler had perished in the attempt to cross. In consequence of these tidings, he turned out of the high road, and was conducted across some meadows, where it was necessary for him to ride to the saddle-skirts in water. In the course of another journey he narrowly es caped being swept away by an inundation of the Trent. He was afterward detained at Stamford four days on account of the state of the roads, and then ventured to proceed only because fourteen members of the House of Commons, who were going up in a body to Parliament, with guides and numerous attendants, took him into their company. On the roads of Derbyshire travelers were in constant fear for their necks, and were frequently compelled to alight and lead their beasts. The great route through Wales to Holyhead was in such a state that, in 1685, a viceroy, on his road to Ireland, was five hours in traveling fourteen miles, from Saint Asaph to Conway. Between Conway and Beaumaris he was forced to walk great part of the way, and his lady was carried in a litter. coach was, with great difficulty, and by the help of many hands, brought after him entire. In general, carriages were taken to pieces at Conway, and borne, on the shoulders of stout Welsh peasants, to the Menai Straits.§ In some parts of Kent and Sussex none but the strongest horses could, in winter, get through the bog, in which, at every step, they sank deep. The markets were often inaccessible during several months. It is said that the fruits of the earth were sometimes suffered to rot in one place, while in another place, distant only a few miles, the supply fell far short of the demand. The wheeled carriages

Thoresby's Diary, May 17, 1695.

His

+ Idem, Dec. 27, 1708. Tour in Derbyshire, by J. Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, 1662 Cotton's Angler, 1676.

Correspondence of Henry, earl of Clarendon, Dec. 30, 1685, Jan. 1, 1686