The lines of demarcation between the peerage and the unt.i.tled cla.s.ses were partially obliterated. How clear and rigid those lines had been it is difficult for us to conceive. In _Humphrey Clinker_ the n.o.bleman refuses to fight a duel with the squire on the ground of their social inequality. Mr. Wilberforce declined a peerage because it would exclude his sons from intimacy with private gentlemen, clergymen, and mercantile families. I have stated in a previous chapter that Lord Bathurst, who was born in 1791, told me that at his private school he and the other sons of peers sate together on a privileged bench apart from the rest of the boys. A typical aristocrat was the first Marquis of Abercorn. He died in 1818, but he is still revered in Ulster under the name of "The Owld Marquis." This admirable n.o.bleman always went out shooting in his Blue Ribbon, and required his housemaids to wear white kid gloves when they made his bed. Before he married his first cousin, Miss Cecil Hamilton, he induced the Crown to confer on her the t.i.tular rank of an Earl's daughter, that he might not marry beneath his position; and when he discovered that she contemplated eloping, he sent a message begging her to take the family coach, as it ought never to be said that Lady Abercorn left her husband's roof in a hack chaise. By such endearing traits do the truly great live in the hearts of posterity.

In the earlier part of this century Dr. Arnold inveighed with characteristic vigour against "the insolencies of our aristocracy, the scandalous exemption of the peers from all ignominious punishments short of death, and the insolent practice of allowing peers to vote in criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath."

But generally the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a childlike cheerfulness. The high function of government was the birthright of the few. The people, according to episcopal showing, had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. The ingenious author of _Russell's Modern Europe_ states in his preface to that immortal work that his object in adopting the form of a Series of Letters from a n.o.bleman to his Son is "to give more Weight to the Moral and Political Maxims, and to ent.i.tle the author to offer, without seeming to dictate to the World, such reflections on Life and Manners as are supposed more immediately to belong to the higher orders in Society." Nor were the privileges of rank held to pertain merely to temporal concerns. When Selina Countess of Huntingdon asked the d.u.c.h.ess of Buckingham to accompany her to a sermon of Whitefield's, the d.u.c.h.ess replied: "I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding."

The exclusive and almost feudal character of the English peerage was destroyed, finally and of set purpose, by Pitt when he declared that every man who had an estate of ten thousand a year had a right to be a peer. In Lord Beaconsfield's words, "He created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill."

This democratization of the peerage was accompanied by great modifications of pomp and stateliness in the daily life of the peers. In the eighteenth century the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Atholl were always served at their own table before their guests, in recognition of their royal rank as Sovereigns of the Isle of Man; and the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Argyll observed the same courteous usage for no better reason than because they liked it. The "Household Book" of Alnwick Castle records the amplitude and complexity of the domestic hierarchy which ministered to the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Northumberland; and at Arundel and Belvoir, and Trentham and Wentworth, the magnates of the peerage lived in a state little less than regal. Seneschals and gentlemen-ushers, ladies-in-waiting and pages-of-the-presence adorned n.o.ble as well as royal households. The private chaplain of a great Whig duke, within the recollection of people whom I have known, used to preface his sermon with a prayer for the n.o.bility, and "especially for the n.o.ble duke to whom I am indebted for my scarf"--the badge of chaplaincy--accompanying the words by a profound bow toward his Grace's pew. The last "running footman" pertained to "Old Q."--the notorious Duke of Queensberry, who died in 1810. Horace Walpole describes how, when a guest playing cards at Woburn Abbey dropped a silver piece on the floor, and said, "Oh, never mind; let the Groom of the Chambers have it," the d.u.c.h.ess replied, "Let the carpet-sweeper have it; the Groom of the Chambers never takes anything but gold."

These grotesque splendours of domestic living went out with the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson, who died in 1784, had already noted their decline. There was a general approach towards external equalization of ranks, and that approach was accompanied by a general diffusion of material enjoyment. The luxury of the period was prodigal rather than refined. There lies before me as I write a tavern bill for a dinner for seven persons in the year 1751. I reproduce the items verbally and literally, and certainly the bill of fare is worth studying as a record of gastronomical exertion on a heroic scale:--

Bread and Beer. Potage de Tortue. Calipash. Calipees. Un Pate de Jambon de Bayone. Potage Julien Verd. Two Turbots to remove the Soops. Haunch of Venison. Palaits de Mouton. Selle de Mouton.

Salade. Saucisses au Ecrevisses. Boudin Blanc a le Reine. Pet.i.ts Pates a l'Espaniol. Coteletts a la Cardinal. Selle d'Agneau glace aux Cocombres. Saumon a la Chambord. Fillets de Saules Royales. Une bisque de Lait de Maquereaux. Un Lambert aux Innocents. Des Perdrix Sauce Vin de Champaign. Poulets a le Russiene. Ris de Veau en Arlequin. Quee d'Agneau a la Montaban. Dix Cailles. Un Lapreau. Un Phesant. Dix Ortolans. Une Tourte de Cerises. Artichaux a le Provensalle. Choufleurs au flour. Cretes de Cocq en Bonets. Amorte de Jesuits. Salade. Chicken. Ice Cream and Fruits. Fruit of various sorts, forced. Fruit from Market. b.u.t.ter and Cheese. Clare.

Champaign. Burgundy. Hock. White Wine. Madeira. Sack. Cape. Cyprus.

Neuilly. Usquebaugh. Spa and Bristol Waters. Oranges and Lemons.

Coffee and Tea. Lemonade.

The total charge for this dinner for seven amounted to 81, 11s. 6d., and a footnote informs the curious reader that there was also "a turtle sent as a Present to the Company, and dressed in a very high _Gout_ after the West Indian Manner." Old cookery-books, such as the misquoted work of Mrs. Gla.s.se, Dr. Kitchener's _Cook's Oracle_, and the anonymous but admirable _Culina_, all concur in their testimony to the enormous amount of animal food which went to make an ordinary meal, and the amazing variety of irreconcilable ingredients which were combined in a single dish. Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch of English literature was curiously minute, thus describes--no doubt from authentic sources--a family dinner at the end of the eighteenth century:--

"The ample tureen of _potage royal_ had a boned duck swimming in its centre. At the other end of the table scowled in death the grim countenance of a huge roast pike, flanked on one side by a leg of mutton _a la daube_, and on the other by the tempting delicacies of Bombarded Veal. To these succeeded that masterpiece of the culinary art a grand Battalia Pie, in which the bodies of chickens, pigeons, and rabbits were embalmed in spices, c.o.c.ks' combs, and savoury b.a.l.l.s, and well bedewed with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a Lear. A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish of oyster-loaves and a pomepetone of larks."

As the old order yielded place to the new, this enormous profusion of rich food became by degrees less fashionable, though its terrible traditions endured, through the days of Soyer and Francatelli, almost to our own time. But gradually refinement began to supersede profusion.

Simultaneously all forms of luxury spread from the aristocracy to the plutocracy; while the middle and lower cla.s.ses attained a degree of solid comfort which would a few years before have been impossible. Under Pitt's administration wealth increased rapidly. Great fortunes were ama.s.sed through the improvement of agricultural methods and the application of machinery to manufacture. The Indian Nabobs, as they were called, became a recognized and powerful element in society, and their habits of "Asiatic luxury" are represented by Chatham, Burke, Voltaire, and Home Tooke as producing a marked effect upon the social life of the time. Lord Robert Seymour notes in his diary for 1788 that a fashionable lady gave 100 a year to the cook who superintended her suppers; that at a sale of bric-a-brac 230 guineas were paid for a mirror; and that, at a ball given by the Knights of the Bath at the Pantheon, the decorations cost upwards of 3000. The general consumption of French and Portuguese wines in place of beer, which had till recently been the beverage even of the affluent, was regarded by grave writers as a most alarming sign of the times, and the cause of a great increase of drunkenness among the upper cla.s.ses. The habits and manners prevalent in London spread into the country. As the distinction between the n.o.bility, who, roughly speaking, had been the frequenters of the capital, and the minor gentry, who had lived almost entirely on their own estates, gradually disappeared, the distinction between town and country life sensibly diminished.

The enormous increase in the facilities for travelling and for the interchange of information contributed to the same result; and grave men lamented the growing fondness of the provincial ladies for the card-table, the theatre, the a.s.sembly, the masquerade, and--singular social juxtaposition--the Circulating Library. The process of social a.s.similation, while it spread from town to country and from n.o.bility to gentry, reached down from the gentry to the merchants, and from the merchants to the tradesmen. The merchant had his villa three or four miles away from his place of business, and lived at Clapham or Dulwich in a degree and kind of luxury which had a few years before been the monopoly of the aristocracy. The tradesman no longer inhabited the rooms over his shop, but a house in Bloomsbury or Soho. Where, fifty years before, one fire in the kitchen served the whole family, and one dish of meat appeared on the table, now a footman waited at the banquet of imported luxuries, and small beer and punch had made way for Burgundy and Madeira.

But the subject expands before us, and it is time to close. Now I propose to inquire how far this Social Equalization was accompanied by Social Amelioration.

VIII.

SOCIAL AMELIORATION.

At this point it is necessary to look back a little, and to clear our minds of the delusion that an age of splendour is necessarily an age of refinement. We have seen something of the regal state and prodigal luxury which surrounded the English aristocracy in the middle of the eighteenth century. Yet at no period of our national history--unless, perhaps, during the orgies of the Restoration were aristocratic morals at so low an ebb. Edmund Burke, in a pa.s.sage which is as ethically questionable as it is rhetorically beautiful, taught that vice loses half its evil when it loses all its grossness. But in the English society of his time grossness was as conspicuous as vice itself, and it infected not only the region of morals, but also that of manners.

Sir Walter Scott has described how, in his youth, refined gentlewomen read aloud to their families the most startling pa.s.sages of the most outrageous authors. I have been told by one who heard it from an eye-witness that a great Whig d.u.c.h.ess, who figures brilliantly in the social and political memoirs of the eighteenth century, turning to the footman who was waiting on her at dinner, exclaimed, "I wish to G--- that you wouldn't keep rubbing your great greasy belly against the back of my chair." Men and women of the highest fashion swore like troopers; the Princes of the Blood, who carried down into the middle of the nineteenth century the courtly habits of their youth, setting the example. Mr. Gladstone told me the following anecdote, which he had from the Lord Pembroke of the period, who was present at the scene.

In the early days of the first Reformed Parliament the Whig Government were contemplating a reform of the law of Church Rates. Success was certain in the House of Commons, but the Tory peers, headed by the Duke of c.u.mberland, determined to defeat the Bill in the House of Lords. A meeting of the party was held, when it appeared that, in the balanced state of parties, the Tory peers could not effect their purpose unless they could rally the bishops to their aid. The question was, What would the Archbishop of Canterbury do? He was Dr. Howley, the mildest and most apostolic of men, and the most averse from strife and contention. It was impossible to be certain of his action, and the Duke of c.u.mberland posted off to Lambeth to ascertain it. Returning in hot haste to the caucus, he burst into the room, exclaiming, "It's all right, my lords; the Archbishop says he will be d----d to h.e.l.l if he doesn't throw the Bill out." The Duke of Wellington's "Twopenny d----n" has become proverbial; and Sydney Smith neatly rebuked a similar propensity in Lord Melbourne by saying, "Let us a.s.sume everybody and everything to be d--- d, and come to the point." The Miss Berrys, who had been the correspondents of Horace Walpole, and who carried down to the 'fifties the most refined traditions of social life in the previous century, habitually "d----d" the tea-kettle if it burned their fingers, and called their male friends by their surnames--"Come, Milnes, will you have a cup of tea?" "Now, Macaulay, we have had enough of that subject."

So much, then, for the refinement of the upper cla.s.ses. Did the Social Equalization of which we have spoken bring with it anything in the way of Social Amelioration? A philosophical orator of my time at the Oxford Union, now a valued member of the House of Lords, once said in a debate on national intemperance that he had made a careful study of the subject, and, with much show of scientific a.n.a.lysis, he thus announced the result of his researches: "The causes of national intemperance are three: first, the adulteration of liquor; second, the love of drink; and third, the desire for more." Knowing my incapacity to rival this masterpiece of exact thinking, I have not thought it necessary in these chapters to enlarge on the national habit of excessive drinking in the late years of the eighteenth century. The grossness and the universality of the vice are too well known to need elaborating. All oral tradition, all contemporary literature, all satiric art, tell the same horrid tale; and the number of bottles which a single toper would consume at a sitting not only, in Burke's phrase, "outraged economy," but "staggered credibility." Even as late as 1831, Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards Bishop, wrote thus in his diary:--"A good Audit Dinner: 23 people drank 11 bottles of wine, 28 quarts of beer, 2-1/2 of spirits, and 12 bowls of punch; and would have drunk twice as much if not restrained. _None, we hope, drunk!_" Mr. Gladstone told me that once, when he was a young man, he was dining at a house where the princ.i.p.al guest was a Bishop. When the decanters had made a sufficient number of circuits, the host said, "Shall we have any more wine, my Lord?" "Thank you--not till we have disposed of what is before us," was the bland episcopal reply.

But still, in the matter of drinking, the turn of the century witnessed some social amelioration among the upper cla.s.ses. There was a change, if not in quant.i.ty, at least in quality. Where port and Madeira had been the Staple drinks, corrected by libations of brandy, less potent beverages became fashionable. The late Mr. Thomson Hankey, formerly M.P. for Peterborough, told me that he remembered his father coming home from the city one day and saying to his mother, "My dear, I have ordered a dozen bottles of a new white wine. It is called sherry, and I am told the Prince Regent drinks nothing else." The fifteenth Lord Derby told me that the cellar-books at Knowsley and St. James's Square had been carefully kept for a hundred years, and that--contrary to what every one would have supposed--the number of bottles drunk in a year had not diminished. The alteration was in the alcoholic strength of the wines consumed. Burgundy, port, and Madeira had made way for light claret, champagne, and hock. That, even under these changed conditions of potency, the actual number of bottles consumed showed no diminution, was accounted for by the fact that at b.a.l.l.s and evening parties a great deal more champagne was drunk than formerly, and that luncheon in a large house had now become practically an earlier dinner.

The growth of these subsidiary meals was a curious feature of the nineteenth century. We exclaim with horror at such preposterous bills of fare as that which I quoted in my last chapter, but it should be remembered, in justice to our fathers, that dinner was the only substantial meal of the day. Holland House was always regarded as the very temple of luxury, and Macaulay tells us that the viands at a breakfast-party there were tea and coffee, eggs, rolls, and b.u.t.ter. The fashion, which began in the nineteenth century, of going to the Highlands for shooting, popularized in England certain northern habits of feeding, and a morning meal at which game and cold meat appeared was known in England as a "Scotch breakfast." Apparently it had made some way by 1840, for the _Ingoldsby Legends_ published in that year thus describe the morning meal of the ill-fated Sir Thomas:--

"It seems he had taken A light breakfast--bacon, An egg, with a little broiled haddock; at most A round and a half of some hot b.u.t.tered toast; With a slice of cold sirloin from yesterday's roast."

Luncheon, or "nuncheon" as some very ancient friends of mine always called it, was the merest mouthful. Men went out shooting with a sandwich in their pocket; the ladies who sat at home had some cold chicken and wine and water brought into the drawing-room on a tray. Miss Austen in her novels always dismisses the midday meal under the cursory appellation of "cold meat." The celebrated Dr. Kitchener, the sympathetic author of the _Cook's Oracle_, writing in 1825, says: "Your luncheon may consist of a bit of roasted poultry, a basin of beef tea, or eggs poached, or boiled in the sh.e.l.l; fish plainly dressed, or a sandwich; stale bread; and half a pint of good homebrewed beer, or toast-and-water, with about one-fourth or one-third part of its measure of wine." And this prescription would no doubt have worn an aspect of liberal concession to the demands of the patient's appet.i.te. It is difficult, by any effort of a morbid imagination, to realize a time when there was no five-o'clock tea; and yet that most sacred of our national inst.i.tutions was only invented by the d.u.c.h.ess of Bedford who died in 1857, and whose name should surely be enrolled in the Positivist Kalendar as a benefactress of the human race. No wonder that by seven o'clock our fathers, and even our mothers, were ready to tackle a dinner of solid properties; and even to supplement it with the amazing supper (which Dr. Kitchener prescribes for "those who dine very late") of "gruel, or a little bread and cheese, or pounded cheese, and a gla.s.s of beer."

This is a long digression from the subject of excessive drinking, with which, however, it is not remotely connected; and, both in respect of drunkenness and of gluttony, the habits of English society in the years which immediately succeeded the French Revolution showed a marked amelioration. To a company of enthusiastic Wordsworthians who were deploring their master's confession that he got drunk at Cambridge, I heard Mr. Shorthouse, the accomplished author of _John Inglesant_, soothingly remark that in all probability "Wordsworth's standard of intoxication was miserably low."[9] Simultaneously with the restriction of excess there was seen a corresponding increase in refinement of taste and manners. Some of the more brutal forms of so-called sport, such as bull-baiting and c.o.c.k-fighting, became less fashionable. The more civilized forms, such as fox-hunting and racing, increased in favour.

Aesthetic culture was more generally diffused. The stage was at the height of its glory. Music was a favourite form of public recreation.

Great prices were given for works of art. The study of physical science, or "natural philosophy" as it was called, became popular. Public Libraries and local "book societies" sprang up, and there was a wide demand for encyclopaedias and similar vehicles for the diffusion of general knowledge. The love of natural beauty was beginning to move the hearts of men, and it found expression at once in an entirely new school of landscape painting, and in a more romantic and natural form of poetry.

But against these marked instances of social amelioration must be set some darker traits of national life. The public conscience had not yet revolted against violence and brutality. The prize-ring, patronized by Royalty, was at its zenith. Humanitarians and philanthropists were as yet an obscure and ridiculed sect. The slave trade, though menaced, was still undisturbed. Under a system scarcely distinguishable from slavery, pauper children were bound over to the owners of factories and subjected to the utmost rigour of enforced labour. The treatment of the insane was darkened by incredible barbarities. As late as 1828 Lord Shaftesbury found that the lunatics in Bedlam were chained to their straw beds, and left from Sat.u.r.day to Monday without attendance, and with only bread and water within their reach, while the keepers were enjoying themselves.

Discipline in the services, in poorhouses, and in schools was of the most brutal type. Our prisons were unreformed. Our penal code was inconceivably sanguinary and savage. In 1770 there were one hundred and sixty capital offences on the Statute-book, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century the number had greatly increased. To steal five shillings' worth of goods from a shop was punishable by death. A girl of twenty-two was hanged for receiving a piece of woollen stuff from the man who had stolen it.

In 1789 a woman was burnt at the stake for coining. People still living have seen the skeletons of pirates and highwaymen hanging in chains. I have heard that the children of the Bluecoat School at Hertford were always taken to see the executions there; and as late as 1820 the dead bodies of the Cato Street conspirators were decapitated in front of Newgate, and the Westminster boys had a special holiday to enable them to see the sight, which was thus described by an eye-witness, the late Lord de Ros: "The executioner and his a.s.sistant cut down one of the corpses from the gallows, and placed it in the coffin, but with the head hanging over on the block. The man with the knife instantly severed the head from the body, and the executioner, receiving it in his hands, held it up, saying in a loud voice, 'This is the head of a traitor.' He then dropped it into the coffin, which being removed, another was brought forward, and they proceeded to cut down the next body and to go through the same ghastly operation. It was observed that the mob, which was very large, gazed in silence at the hanging of the conspirators, and showed not the least sympathy; but when each head as cut off and held up, a loud and deep groan of horror burst from all sides, which was not soon forgotten by those who heard it."

Duelling was the recognized mode of settling all personal disputes, and no attempt was made to enforce the law which, theoretically, treated the killing of a man in a duel as wilful murder; but, on the other hand, debt was punished with what often was imprisonment for life. A woman died in the County Jail at Exeter after forty-five years' incarceration for a debt of 19. Crime was rampant. Daring burglaries, accompanied by every circ.u.mstance of violence, took place nightly. Highwaymen infested the suburban roads, and not seldom plied their calling in the capital itself. The iron post at the end of the narrow footway between the gardens of Devonshire House and Lansdowne House is said by tradition to have been placed there after a Knight of the Road had eluded the officers of justice by galloping down the stone steps and along the flagged path. Sir Hamilton Seymour (1797-1880) was in his father's carriage when it was "stopped" by a highwayman in Upper Brook Street.

Young gentlemen of broken fortunes, and tradesmen whose business had grown slack, swelled the ranks of these desperadoes. It was even said that an Irish prelate--Dr. Twysden, Bishop of Raphoe--whose incurable love of adventure had drawn him to "the road," received the penalty of his uncanonical diversion in the shape of a bullet from a traveller whom he had stopped on Hounslow Heath. The Lord Mayor was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green. Stars and "Georges" were snipped off amba.s.sadors and peers as they entered St. James's Palace.

It is superfluous to multiply ill.u.s.trations. Enough has been said to show that the circ.u.mscription of aristocratic privilege and the diffusion of material luxury did not precipitate the millennium. Social Equalization was not synonymous with Social Amelioration. Some improvement, indeed, in the tone and habit of society occurred at the turn of the century; but it was little more than a beginning. I proceed to trace its development, and to indicate its source.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] I have since been told that this happy saying was borrowed from Sir Francis Doyle.

IX.

THE EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE.

Mr. Lecky justly remarks that "it is difficult to measure the change which must have pa.s.sed over the public mind since the days when the lunatics in Bedlam were constantly spoken of as one of the sights of London; when the maintenance of the African slave-trade was a foremost object of English commercial policy; when men and even women were publicly whipped through the streets when skulls lined the top of Temple Bar and rotting corpses hung on gibbets along the Edgware Road; when persons exposed in the pillory not unfrequently died through the ill-usage of the mob; and when the procession every six weeks of condemned criminals to Tyburn was one of the great festivals of London."

Difficult, indeed, it is to measure so great a change, and it is not wholly easy to ascertain with precision its various and concurrent causes, and to attribute to each its proper potency. But we shall certainly not be wrong if, among those causes, we a.s.sign a prominent place to the Evangelical revival of religion. It would be a mistake to claim for the Evangelical movement the whole credit of our social reform and philanthropic work. Even in the darkest times of spiritual torpor and general profligacy England could show a creditable amount of practical benevolence. The public charities of London were large and excellent. The first Foundling Hospital was established in 1739; the first Magdalen Hospital in 1769. In 1795 it was estimated that the annual expenditure on charity-schools, asylums, hospitals, and similar inst.i.tutions in London was 750,000.

Mr. Lecky, whose study of these social phenomena is exhaustive, imagines that the habit of unostentatious charity, which seems indigenous to England, was powerfully stimulated by the philosophy of Shaftesbury and Voltaire, by Rousseau's sentiment and Fielding's fiction. This theory may have something to say for itself, and indeed it is antecedently plausible; but I can hardly believe that purely literary influences counted for so very much in the sphere of practice. I doubt if any considerable number of Englishmen were effectively swayed by that humanitarian philosophy of France which in the actions of its maturity so awfully belied the promise of its youth. We are, I think, on surer ground when, admitting a national bias towards material benevolence, and not denying some stimulus from literature and philosophy, we a.s.sign the main credit of our social regeneration to the Evangelical revival.

The life of John Wesley, practically coterminous with the eighteenth century, witnessed both the lowest point of our moral degradation and also the earliest promise of our moral restoration. He cannot, indeed, be reckoned the founder of the Evangelical school; that t.i.tle belongs rather to George Whitefield. But his influence, combined with that of his brother Charles, acting on such men as Newton and Cecil and Venn and Scott of Aston Sandford; on Selina Lady Huntingdon and Mrs. Hannah More; on Howard and Clarkson and William Wilberforce; made a deep mark on the Established Church, gave new and permanent life to English Nonconformity, and sensibly affected the character and aspect of secular society.

Wesley himself had received the governing impulse of his life from Law's _Serious Call_ and _Christian Perfection_, and he had been a member of one of those religious societies (or guilds, as they would now be called) with which the piety of Bishop Beveridge and Dr. Horneck had enriched the Church of England. These societies were, of course, distinctly Anglican in origin and character, and were stamped with the High Church theology. They const.i.tuted, so to say, a church within the Church, and, though they raised the level of personal piety among their members to a very high point, they did not widely affect the general tone and character of national religion. The Evangelical leaders, relying on less exclusively ecclesiastical methods, diffused their influence over a much wider area, and, under the impulse of their teaching, drunkenness, indecency, and profanity were sensibly abated.

The reaction from the rampant wickedness of the eighteenth century drove men into strict and even puritanical courses.

Lord Robert Seymour wrote on the 20th of March, 1788: "Tho' Good Friday, Mrs. Sawbridge has an a.s.sembly this evening; tells her invited Friends they really are only to play for a Watch which she has had some time on her Hands and wishes to dispose of."

"'Really, I declare 'pon my honor it's true' (said Ly. Bridget Talmash to the Dutchess of Bolton) 'that a great many People now go to Chapel. I saw a vaste number of Carriages at Portman Chapel last Sunday.' The Dut.

told her she always went to Chapel on Sunday, and in the country read Prayers in the Hall to her Family."

But where the Evangelical influence reached, it brought a marked abstention from such forms of recreation as dancing, card-playing, and the drama. Sunday was observed with a Judaical rigour. A more frequent attendance on public worship was accompanied by the revival of family prayers and grace before meat. Manuals of private devotion were multiplied. Religious literature of all kinds was published in great quant.i.ty. A higher standard of morals was generally professed. Marriage was gradually restored in public estimation to its proper place, not merely as a civil bond or social festival, but as a chief solemnity of the Christian religion.

There was no more significant sign of the times than this alteration. In the eighteenth century some of the gravest of our social offences had cl.u.s.tered round the inst.i.tution of marriage, which was almost as much dishonoured in the observance as in the breach. In the first half of that century the irregular and clandestine weddings, celebrated without banns or licence in the Fleet Prison, had been one of the crying scandals of the middle and lower cla.s.ses; and in the second half, the nocturnal flittings to Gretna Green of young couples who could afford such a Pilgrimage of Pa.s.sion lowered the whole conception of marriage.

It was through the elopement of Miss Child--heiress of the opulent banker at Temple Bar--from her father's house in Berkeley Square (now Lord Rosebery's) that the ownership of the great banking business pa.s.sed eventually to the present Lord Jersey; and the annals of almost every aristocratic family contain the record of similar escapades.

The Evangelical movement, not content with permeating England, sought to expand itself all over the Empire. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had been essentially Anglican inst.i.tutions; and similar societies, but less ecclesiastical in character, now sprang up in great numbers. The London Missionary Society was founded in 1795, the Church Missionary Society in 1799, the Religious Tract Society in the same year, and the British and Foreign Bible Society three years later. All these were distinctly creations of the Evangelical movement, as were also the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and for the Better Observance of the Lord's Day. Religious education found in the Evangelical party its most active friends. The Sunday School Society was founded in 1785. Two years later it was educating two hundred thousand children. Its most earnest champions were Rowland Hill and Mrs. Hannah More; but it is worthy of note that this excellent lady, justly honoured as a pioneer of elementary education, confined her curriculum to the Bible and the Catechism, and "such coa.r.s.e works as may fit the children for servants.

_I allow of no writing for the poor_."