their one or two country-houses, could then count their dozen or score of "bonnet lairds." The very monuments of the village church, above all its registers, are eloquent witnesses to the extent of the disaster, for a disaster it assuredly is. The evidence indeed is overwhelming, not only as to the strange way in which the number of the country gentry has crumbled and mouldered away, but that it was at the latter end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries that the change took place. The causes are no doubt complex. In part they were economical. The Civil War was responsible for much. Apart from its direct losses, the slighted"

houses, the destroyed woods, the bare farms, hundreds of squires had to face the fact, when the shouting was over for the return of his most Sacred Majesty, that their estates were saddled with legacies of the struggle in the shape of debts, the payment of which was hopeless, or which at best would cripple the family fortunes for a generation. What with the free gifts and loans to the king, and the exactions of the Parliament, many an honest gentleman, who had fought hard for the one and been correspondingly fined by the other, found himself in the position of Colonel Kirkby of Kirkby Ireleth, who so encumbered his estate that neither he nor his descendants ever succeeded in clearing it of debt;" or like Sir John Danvers of Danby, found himself forced to sell his estate to his own tenants. And it must be remembered that with a land tax of four shillings in the pound on the gross value, and mortgage-interest at seven or eight per cent, he who went borrowing in Restoration days had a fair chance of fulfilling the old adage. Redress from the king was hopeless.

The low prices of coru from 1666 to 1671 must have been the last straw to many an ancient house, already tottering on the verge of disaster. They did talk much," noted Pepys on New Year's Day 1667, "of the present cheapness of corn, even to a miracle; so as their farmers can pay no rent but do fling up their lands." Many estates went staggering on under the load of debt until the end of the century. The list of Private Acts for the sale of lands-one hundred and twenty four in the thirty-one years of Charles the Second, two hun. dred and ten in the twelve years of William and Mary, two hundred and fifty-one in the short reign of Anne-is an instructive commentary. Well might Evelyn remark in 1795 that there were never so many private bills passed for

the sale of estates, showing the wonderful prodigality and decay of families." Social causes hastened the downfall. A drinkingbout was looked upon as the fitting close to a day's pleasure, and drunkenness as the most venal of peccadilloes. One of Mr. Spectator's correspondents in his 474th number found himself compelled to protest against the forced tippling at these gatherings. Nor was drinking the only form of extravagance. Sir Jeffrey Notch, the gentleman of an ancient family "that came to a great estate some years before he had discretion, and run it out in hounds, horses, and cockfighting," was not without his imitators among the smaller squires. There had come over country life a new scale and a new extravagance, which was viewed with undisguised dislike by such old-fashioned cavaliers as Squire, Blundell. The habit of visits to London or a watering place grew rapidly in the closing years of the seventeenth century. By 1710 the London season and the town-house were an accomplished fact, and Hanover and Grosvenor Squares, New Bond Street, the upper part of Piccadilly, and a host of adjoining streets, had sprung into being within seventy years of the death of Charles the Second for the housing of the gentry during the

season.

It may be doubted whether any of the great agrarian changes of the eighteenth century was a more serious disaster to rural society. No doubt the "bonnet laird" in his habits and ideas resembled, as Macaulay puts it, the village miller or ale-house keeper of our own day. Probably, as Cobbett says, he was a bigoted Tory, an obstinate opponent of all improvement, and a hard master. But his function in rural society was not a trivial one. He was a link, and a link the need of which we are sorely feeling to day, between the great proprietor and his tenants, attached to the one by the ties of tradition and status, to. the other by community of interest. Uncourtly, rough, almost brutal as he was, his influence was a factor to be considered, and must have made the rule of one man impossible in rural society. He made for rural independence, even if that independence were only of a stolid and limited character. With all his faults and shortcomings, his destruction blotted an important feature out of country life.—Macmillan's Magazine,

THE VALUE OF A HOBBY.-Mr. G. F. Watts, the Royal Academician, has given £1000 to

the Home Industries and Arts Association, in order to assist the work of helping artisans to cultivate hobbies. At least he says explicitly that his desire is not to promote a training-school, but to help men to provide occupations and interests for their leisure hours. That is an unusually wise, as well as kindly, gift, and one which we hope will be largely imitated. Nothing, we believe, conduces so directly to the happiness of life as a distinct and permanent interest in some subject other than that forced on us by circumstances or by professional needs. A hobby is more than a recreation for the mind, it is a protection. It relieves the man who has it from ennui, from the oppressive sense of the sameness of life, and from that tendency to judge everything from a single standpoint, which is the curse of the efficient and the industrious. hardly matters what it is, a definite kind of reading, or an art, or an outdoor occupation, the result is always the same, a kind of content with life which the man without a hobby lacks.

It

Music is, perhaps, the best of all; for that is inexhaustible, can be taken up in frag. ments of time, and when pursued by those who can appreciate it, gives a delight which has the charm of perpetual variety. Those who love music, yet work hard at other things, never tire of their "taste," and never, if they can gratify it, find life either tedious or insupportable. They find in it not only pleasure, but occupation; and it is in the conjunction of the two that for the weary true relief consists. So do those who can sketch in sketching, especially if they can do it well enough not to be haunted, as musicians are much haunted, by a sense of defeat in reaching for an ideal. After sketching, we think we may reckon the pursuit of natural history, which, though it tends to the study of small departments of knowledge, is practically inexhaustible, and rouses, besides thought and the pleasure of collecting, the passion of curiosity. Reading we should place fourth among hobbies. It is the resource of the cultured, but it has drawbacks, especially in this, that it tends to become an occupation only, pleas ure being impaired by fits of imperfect attention. Your omnivorous reader, who reads to pass the time, is apt to read without thinking, or criticising, or remembering, and for all the genuine pleasure he gets, might almost as well be asleep. His reading is, in fact, a mental opiate. The hobby we should place next is gardening, for that also is an occupation, infinitely varied, which cannot end, or

to those who enjoy it grow wearisome, and which, of course, in yielding health yields an advantage not belonging either to reading or to music. After these five we should place all the mechanical occupations, like turning, carpentering, bookbinding, working in metal or stone, or indeed any one of the occupations in which thought is required, but not too much thought, the mind and the hand together tending, when experience is complete, to work almost automatically. And, last of all, because it is so fruitless, we should place the writer's own hobby of deck-pacing, which is a much commoner and a more entrancing one than is commonly believed. It is indeed, to some men, what sauntering was to Charles II. -a Sultana queen whose charm blinds them to its inherent viciousness. From all these the educated, as we see every day, gain a relief which is as good for them as sleep, and the uneducated would gain, as Mr. Watts with his poet-insight clearly perceives, even more, they having less of the relief from within which comes of many ideas. There is not an artisan in the country who, if he had one of these hobbies, would not be a more contented man, less given to acridity of thought, and less disposed to believe in the wrong of inequality of condition. A man can only be happy in his position, be it what it may; and we have known overworked artisans who, as fiddlers, carvers, inventors in machinery, and antiquarians, have even when gravely pressed by external circumstances, been tranquilly content, while a colleague who is a naturalist, meets every day men who, though totally uneducated, are as naturalists and collectors consciously and, so to speak, actively happy men. All such men benefit at first exceedingly by a little instruction, and are usually eager to obtain it, and we can conceive no philanthropy more useful, or better calculated to sweeten the social system, than that which secures it for them. They will not, when they are started, become Hugh Millers in any noteworthy number; for that type arises, like genius, and is not made, but they will become happier men, with a sense that the universe has for them some

would scarcely have felt even hunger as a reason for discontent. He never, while the stars pursued their courses, could lose the sense of being thoroughly interested, of looking on at an exciting drama to which there could be no end. The man with a hobby like this-and it is not necessary that it should be so noble a one-is never dull, never idle, never tempted to feed upon his own inside, but lives the only life in which pleasure is perpetually recurrent-the interested life, the life in which unpleasant incident is no more noticed than the soldier was by Archimedes. Really to care about any one thing outside the daily work, be it what it may, so only it be not exhaustible, is to possess, at all events, the second secret of content.

The only imperfection in Mr. Watts's idea, which we are, we fear, explaining very weakly, is the imperfection which, so far as we know, attaches to every philanthropic project; it is not universally applicable. An immense number of men are incapable of hobbies. They can do their work in the world, and do it often well, but they can find interest in nothing else. Nothing outside their work attracts them, nothing rouses even their curiosity. Frequently they are not dull witted, and they are often so grievously haunted by the wish to exert themselves, that leisure is to them positive pain; but they cannot for all that take up any hobby whatever, cannot read, cannot garden, cannot betake themselves to any mechanical occupation, cannot even pace the deck with anything like selfforgetfulness. They are eaten up when off work with a chagrin, gentle or bitter, according to temperament, which either poisons their lives or drives them to remedies, drink being the worst, which in their reaction only intensify the next fit of spleen. It is sup. posed that this condition, which we see every day in the old who have worked hard, is peculiar to them, and is a result of retiring from active life, but that is wholly inaccurate. The old, it is true, often suffer from leisure, like retired Indian officers-of all the educated classes, those who are most liable to chagrin —but the malady is not confined to them. It often besets the young. There is not a family in the country without a member whose inability, when at leisure, "to find anything to do," is the despair of his relatives, while it rouses the occupied to constant, and sometimes ill natured, vaticinations as to his future destiny. It is not the love of idleness

which hampers such a man, or the passion for amusement, or any desire for the unattainable; it is an inability to care for any pursuit whatever not forced on him by circumstances. These men often know this themselves, and lament it; but they never, or very rarely, cure it. We have known in our lives many men, young men, too, to whom the daily cessation from work was little better than a misery, who would gladly have remained always at work, and who welcomed any task, however disagreeable, if only it were peremptory, as a positive relief. They cannot read, they do not care for the arts, they have no outdoor pursuits; in short, leisure is to them an insupportable burden. Their usual explanation, when cross-questioned, is that they cannot bring themselves to work without results," but that only pushes the question back a step further; for why cannot they, when their own comrades and friends and acquaintances find happiness in so working? "They are lazy," say the friends they weary; but the reproof is nine times out of ten only partially deserved. We have known genuinely hard workers, men of implacable industry, who were tormented by this inability to employ leisure, or to feel any interest in any occupation whatsoever except their business. They are perfectly honest when they say they have no hobbies, and are often, in saying it, miserably conscious of defect. The origin of the evil in them is, we presume, a certain want of the capacity of attention; for when that is not wanting, mental interest, the power of being absorbed, almost invariably springs up. The cause of that want is as obscure as the cause of any other natural predisposition, but that it exists we are certain, as we are that the only artificial cure is a resolute determination to attend. The man who is resolved to know anything not positively forbidden-as music, for instance, often is-by physical conditions, can almost always in the end give himself a hobby which will at all events terminate the unspeakable pain of having too much leisure. We fancy the poor cannot feel that, because often they are fatigued by the day's work; but just look at them on Sunday or any holiday, when the weather forbids the attempt to throw off the burden of consciousness by mere change of scene; just hear them talk as they lounge, and you will understand the unhappiness which Mr. Watts, who probably never felt it himself for five minutes, is

making his well-planned effort to cure.Spectator.

ATAVISM.-Even when we come to the most recent discoveries in the arts, a little erudi. tion soon shows us how much we are only repeating ourselves. The moment a new discovery comes out, it meets with so much opposition from the mere hatred of novelty that it is speedily buried, only to be born again at a later period and again to perish, until at length the fortunate moment arrives for its application. We see this in the case of hypnotism and of spiritualism, which came in at a flood, then fell under academic scorn, and are only taken seriously in England and America. It is curious to examine the list of inventions which we deem novelties, but which are in reality very old. The ancients knew of the lightning conductor, or, at all events, the method of attracting the light ning. The Celtic soldiers in a storm used to lie down on the ground, first lighting a torch and planting their naked swords in the ground by their side with the points upward. The lightning often struck the point of the sword and passed away into the water without injuring the warrior.

The Romans, also, seem to have known the lightning-rod, though they let their knowledge slip again into oblivion. On the top of the highest tower of the Castle of Duino, on the Adriatic, there was set, from time immemorial, a long rod of iron. In the stormy weather of summer it served to predict the approach of the tempest. A soldier was always stationed by it when the sea showed any threatening of a storm. From time to time he put the point of his long javelin close to the rod. Whenever a spark passed between the two pieces of iron he rang a bell to warn the fishermen. Gerbert (Hugh Capet), in the tenth century, invented a plan for diverting lightning from the fields by planting in it long sticks tipped with very sharp lance heads.

In 1662 France was already in possession of omnibuses. The Romans sank Artesian wells even in the Sahara. The plains of the Lebanon and of Palmyra were artificially irrigated; traces of the wells and canals are still to be found. In 1685 Papin published in the Journal des Savants an account of an experiment made by one of his friends, named Wilde, who caused flowers to grow instantane

ously. The secret lay in the preparation of the ground, but it was not revealed.

Massage is a very ancient practice, and was known to the Romans. Paracelsus, in his Opera Medica," speaks of homoeopathy, and says that like is cured by like, and not contrary by contrary. "Nature herself," he says, "shows this, and like things seek and desire each other." Polybius also speaks of healing by similarity; and Avicenna of the use of infinitesimal doses of poison, of arsenic, for example, in omnibus quæ sunt necessaria de incarnatione et resolutione sanguinis et prohibitione nocumenti." Mireppus also used arsenic in infinitesimal doses as a remedy for intermittent fever. In China Cannabis Indica was used as a sedative two hundred and twenty years before our era. The Arabs used aloes and camphor as we do. The speculum, the probe, the forceps, were known in the year 500; indeed, specimens of them have been found in the ruins of Pompeii, and are preserved in the National Museum at Naples. Galande, in 1665, gives a theory of psychic centres, pointing out the anterior portion of the brain as the seat of imagination, the centre of reason, and the back of memory. Aristotle noticed that sea-water could be made drinkable by boiling it and collecting the steam.

The Greeks had a pilema, a woollen or linen cuirass, so closely woven as to be impenetrable by the sharpest of darts. We have not found out the secret of it. The Romans had better mills than ours for pounding olives. The Chinese had invented iron houses as early as 1200. Glass houses were found among the Picts in Scotland, and the Celts in Gaul, and many centuries earlier in Siam, The systems of irrigation which made Lombardy and England so. fertile were in existence in the time of Virgil. Grass-cloth was used many centuries ago by the Chinese.

All this is explained by the fact that man naturally detests what is new, and tries his best to escape it, yielding only to absolute necessity and overpowering proof, or to an acquired usage. That is why the tide of progress so often ebbs; for a too rapid advance inevitably provokes reaction and the persecution of its promoters; and many inventors, like Solomon de Cau's and Columbus, witnessed from their prisons the application or extension of the very discoveries which caused their misfortunes and their posthumous renown.-Contemporary Review.

THE Church in this paper is taken to mean that organization of Christians of which the bishops and clergy are the ministers-"the Church of England as by law established."

This organization aims to affect all dealings between man and man-to make the king on his throne rule as God's servant and the people render obedience to the laws, to make masters give good wages and men give honest work, to exalt truth above interest and love above selfishness. Its aim is to establish righteousness, to spiritualize life, and to turn the kingdom of England into the kingdom of God.

The Church to this end provides (1) means of worship; (2) a body of teachers; and (3) various charitable agencies. The question is how worship, teachers, and charity may be made tell on present problems, or, in other words, how the Church may seize its opportunity.

Many problems press for solution, The two nations of the rich and of the poor-of which Disraeli wrote-have developed their characteristics. The rich in the manifold progress of the century have found new ways of spend ing their wealth. They enlarge their minds by travel, they beautify their homes by art, they get farther and farther away from the dust and noise of industry, they know more, live lives of NEW SERIES.-VOL. LXII., No. 5.

greater refinement and have more pleasures than their fathers. Their higher education seems to justify their privileges.

The poor-using the term to cover the large class who are not rich-have on their side so increased in power as to justify further claims. They, by means of Trades' Unions, have raised wages to an existence level; they, by the help of School Boards, have realized that something higher than existence is within man's reach. They have votes, they are flattered by politicians, and they are more intolerant than their fathers of any limit on the use of their power.

Rich and poor, therefore, resent one another. The rich, conscious of no wrong, conscious of having obeyed the rules of the game as approved by economists and teachers, conscious even of going beyond the rules in giving away some of their legitimate gains to hospitals and charities, conscious of greater knowledge, of more refined tastes, and of a more liberal policy, resent the claims of the poor. They have traded fairly, they live decently, they spend their gains honorably, and sometimes tastefully. Why should they be summoned as culprits by people apparently ignorant and narrow-minded, as Lady Burdett Coutts was summoned, to give more wages, or to pay increased taxes,

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