enthetical and incoherent; Boythorn never opens his lips without being intensely and boisterously energetic; and Major Bagstock always describes himself as "tough old Joe;" "Joe is rough and tough, sir! blunt, sir, blunt is Joe." It would be in the last degree absurd for a future writer to take these characters. as types of English society in the middle of the nineteenth century; and, to a certain extent, the same kind of allowance must be made for the characters in the novels of the last century. For it is impossible to believe that the portrait of Squire Western represented in all its brutal details the country gentleman of England; that Parson Adams and Parson Trulliber give us a just idea of the clergy, or that the Roxana of Defoe, the Mrs. Waters and Lady Bellaston of Fielding, the Miss Grizzle Pickle and Miss Tabitha Bramble of Smollett, the Mrs. Harriet Freke of Miss Edgeworth, and the Mrs. Bennett of Jane Austen, are true types of the modesty, education, refinement, and intelligence, of Englishwomen of the time. I say that this allowance should be made only to "a certain extent," for I believe that the characters drawn by the old novelists are, with a few exceptions, intended to be less imaginary than the creations of fiction in our own day, and have a substratum of reality which is wanting in many of the amusing characters of Dick

ens. But, at all events, we may use the novels as evidence of a state of society and manners on two grounds, which are independent of the question whether particular characters truthfully represent a class. First, we may be sure that in the general tone of conversation and description, and the unconscious introduction of little incidents of every-day life, the writers hold the mirror up to Nature and reflect the image they themselves received from the world around. them. And next the degree of popularity which their works enjoyed is evidence that their coarseness did not disgust nor their licentiousness repel the public taste. Such scenes as they described, and such language as they put into the mouths of their heroes, would now make a book unsalable-whereas, then, Clarissa Harlowe' was thought to teach lessons of virtue, and young ladies were not ashamed to avow their familiarity with Tom Jones.' We are not therefore to conclude that they were rakes and ready to throw themselves into the arms of the first adventurer they met; but we must infer that their delicacy was less susceptible and their modesty less sensitive than now. In Lockhart's 'Life of Scott'* there is an instructive anecdote told by Sir Walter, which remarkably illus trates this change in the public taste. A grand-aunt *Vol. v. pp. 136, 137.

"So,"

of his, Mrs. Keith of Ravelstone, when a very old lady, once asked him whether he had ever seen Mrs. Behn's novels. Sir Walter confessed that he had. She then asked him whether he could get her a sight of them, and, "with some hesitation," he said he believed he could, but he did not think that she would like either the manners or language. "Nevertheless," said the good old lady, "I remember their being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wished to look at them again." says Sir Walter, "I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with 'private and confidential' on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterward she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words: Take back your bonny Mrs Behn, and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I find it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,' she said, 'a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upward, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which sixty years ago I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London ?""

CHAPTER II.

DRESS.-MASQUERADES.-DRUMS.-"PRETTY FELLOWS" AND "MACCARONIES."-CLUBS.—RANELAGH AND VAUXHALL.-LONDON.DANGERS OF THE STREETS.-STATE OF THE ROADS.-HIGHWAYMEN.

LET us now go a little more into detail, and consider some of the aspects of the social life and habits of our great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers.

And first as to the dress of the ladies. At the beginning of the last century the fashionable headdress was the commode, or fontage, by which the hair was piled up on wires to a prodigious height. Then there came a sudden fall, so that women who were more than seven feet high were reduced to five. In a letter in the 'Spectator,' from a barrister of the Middle Temple who "rode" the Western Circuit, he says that one of the most fashionable women he met with in all the circuit was the landlady at Staines, and her commode was not half a foot high, and her petticoat "within some yards of a modish circumference." The writer of a letter in the 'London Magazine' of

August, 1768, says: "I went the other morning to. make a visit to an elderly aunt of mine, when I found her pulling off her cap and tendering her head to the ingenious Mr. Gilchrist, who has lately obliged the public with a most excellent essay on hair. He asked her how long it was since her head had been opened or repaired. She answered, not above nine weeks. To which he replied, that it was as long as a head could well go in summer, and that therefore it was proper to deliver it now; for he confessed that it began to be a little hazardé." And to show how the follies of fashion repeat themselves, I may mention that the satirists of the last century used to mourn over the nakedness of the birds which had been robbed of their plumage to deck the heads of the ladies.

When Lydia Medford, in Humphry Clinker,' dresses for an assembly, she says: "I was not six hours in the hands of the hair-dresser, who stuffed my head with as much black wool as would have made a quilted petticoat, and after all it was the smallest head in the assembly except my aunt's." In Miss Burney's 'Evelina' the heroine says: "I have just had my hair dressed. You cannot think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on *Quoted in 'Wright's Caricature History of the Georges.'