The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

amounted to 138,000 tons,

without reckoning vessels of less than fifty tons. (1857.)


105 Lyson's Environs of London. The baptisms at Chelsea, between

1680 and 1690, were only 42 a year.


106 Cowley, Discourse of Solitude.


107 The fullest and most trustworthy information about the state

of the buildings of London at this time is to be derived from the

maps and drawings in the British Museum and in the Pepysian

Library. The badness of the bricks in the old buildings of London

is particularly mentioned in the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo.

There is an account of the works at Saint Paul's in Ward's London

Spy. I am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balderdash; but I

have been forced to descend even lower, if possible, in search of

materials.


108 Evelyn's Diary, Sept. 20. 1672.


109 Roger North's Life of Sir Dudley North.


110 North's Examen. This amusing writer has preserved a specimen

of the sublime raptures in which the Pindar of the City indulged:

-


"The worshipful sir John Moor!


After age that name adore!


111 Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; Anglie Metropolis,

1690; Seymour's London, 1734.


112 North's Examen, 116; Wood, Ath. Ox. Shaftesbury; The Duke of

B.'s Litany.


113 Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo.


114 Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; Pennant's London;

Smith's Life of Nollekens.


115 Evelyn's Diary, Oct. 10, 1683, Jan. 19, 1685-6.


116 Stat. 1 Jac. II. c. 22; Evelyn's Diary, Dec, 7, 1684.


117 Old General Oglethorpe, who died in 1785, used to boast that

he had shot birds here in Anne's reign. See Pennant's London, and

the Gentleman's Magazine for July, 1785.


118 The pest field will be seen in maps of London as late as the

end of George the First's reign.


119 See a very curious plan of Covent Garden made about 1690,

and engraved for Smith's History of Westminster. See also

Hogarth's Morning, painted while some of the houses in the Piazza

were still occupied by people of fashion.


120 London Spy, Tom Brown's comical View of London and

Westminster; Turner's Propositions for the employing of the Poor,

1678; Daily Courant and Daily Journal of June 7, 1733; Case of

Michael v. Allestree, in 1676, 2 Levinz, p. 172. Michael had been

run over by two horses which Allestree was breaking in Lincoln's

Inn Fields. The declaration set forth that the defendant "porta

deux chivals ungovernable en un coach, et improvide, incante, et

absque debita consideratione ineptitudinis loci la eux drive pur

eux faire tractable et apt pur an coach, quels chivals, pur ceo

que, per leur ferocite, ne poientestre rule, curre sur le

plaintiff et le noie."


121 Stat. 12 Geo. I. c. 25; Commons' Journals, Feb. 25, March 2,

1725-6; London Gardener, 1712; Evening Post, March, 23, 1731. I

have not been able to find this number of the Evening Post; I

therefore quote it on the faith of Mr. Malcolm, who mentions it

in his History of London.


122 Lettres sur les Anglois, written early in the reign of

William the Third; Swift's City Shower; Gay's Trivia. Johnson

used to relate a curious conversation which ho had with his

mother about giving and taking the wall.


123 Oldham's Imitation of the 3d Satire of Juvenal, 1682;

Shadwell's Scourers, 1690. Many other authorities will readily

occur to all who are acquainted with the popular literature of

that and the succeeding generation. It may be suspected that some

of the Tityre Tus, like good Cavaliers, broke Milton's windows

shortly after the Restoration. I am confident that he was

thinking of those pests of London when he dictated the noble

lines:


"And in luxurious cities, when the noise


Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,


And injury and outrage, and when night


Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons


Of Belial, flown With innocence and wine."


124 Seymour's London.


125 Angliae Metropolis, 1690, Sect. 17, entitled, "Of the new

lights"; Seymour's London.


126 Stowe's Survey of London; Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia;

Ward's London Spy; Stat. 8 & 9 Gul. III. cap. 27.


127 See Sir Roger North's account of the way in which Wright was

made a judge, and Clarendon's account of the way in which Sir

George Savile was made a peer.


128 The sources from which I have drawn my information about the

state of the Court are too numerous to recapitulate. Among them

are the Despatches of Barillon, Van Citters, Ronquillo, and Adda,

the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo, the works of Roger North,

the Diares of Pepys, Evelyn, and Teonge, and the Memoirs of

Grammont and Reresby.


129 The chief peculiarity of this dialect was that, in a large

class of words, the O was pronounced like A. Thus Lord was

pronounced Lard. See Vanbrugh's Relapse. Lord Sunderland was a

great master of this court tune, as Roger North calls it; and

Titus Oates affected it in the hope of passing for a fine

gentleman. Examen, 77, 254.


130 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, printed in 1685.


131 Century of inventions, 1663, No. 68.


132 North's Life of Guildford, 136.


133 Thoresby's Diary Oct. 21,1680, Aug. 3, 1712.


134 Pepys's Diary, June 12 and 16,1668.


135 Ibid. Feb. 28, 1660.


136 Thoresby's Diary, May 17,1695.


137 Ibid. Dec. 27,1708.


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

1662; Cotton's Angler, 1676.


139 Correspondence of Henry Earl of Clarendon, Dec. 30, 1685,

Jan. 1, 1686.


140 Postlethwaite's Dictionary, Roads; History of Hawkhurst, in

the Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica.


141 Annals of Queen Anne, 1703, Appendix, No. 3.


142 15 Car. II. c. 1.


143 The evils of the old system are strikingly set forth in many

petitions which appear in the Commons' Journal of 172 5/6. How

fierce an opposition was offered to the new system may be learned

from the Gentleman's Magazine of 1749.


144 Postlethwaite's Dict., Roads.


145 Loidis and Elmete; Marshall's Rural Economy of England, In

1739 Roderic Random came from Scotland to Newcastle on a

packhorse.


146 Cotton's Epistle to J. Bradshaw.


147 Anthony a Wood's Life of himself.


148 Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684. See also the list of

stage coaches and waggons at the end of the book, entitled

Angliae Metropolis, 1690.


149 John Cresset's Reasons for suppressing Stage Coaches, 1672.

These reason. were afterwards inserted in a tract, entitled "The

Grand Concern of England explained, 1673." Cresset's attack on

stage coaches called forth some answers which I have consulted.


150 Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; North's Examen, 105;

Evelyn's Diary, Oct. 9,10, 1671.


151 See the London Gazette, May 14, 1677, August 4, 1687, Dec.

5, 1687. The last confession of Augustin King, who was the son of

an eminent divine, and had been educated at Cambridge but was

hanged at Colchester in March, 1688, is highly curious.


152 Aimwell. Pray sir, han't I seen your face at Will's

coffeehouse? Gibbet. Yes. sir, and at White's too.-Beaux'

Stratagem.


153 Gent's History of York. Another marauder of the same

description, named Biss, was hanged at Salisbury in 1695. In a

ballad which is in the Pepysian Library, he is represented as

defending himself thus before the Judge:


"What say you now, my honoured Lord


What harm was there in this?


Rich, wealthy misers were abhorred


By brave, freehearted Biss."


154 Pope's Memoirs of Duval, published immediately after the

execution. Oates's Eikwg basilikh, Part I.


155 See the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Harrison's

Historical Description of the Island of Great Britain, and

Pepys's account of his tour in the summer of 1668. The excellence

of the English inns is noticed in the Travels of the Grand Duke

Cosmo.


156 Stat. 12 Car. II. c. 36; Chamberlayne's State of England,

1684; Angliae Metropolis, 1690; London Gazette, June 22, 1685,

August 15, 1687.


157 Lond. Gaz., Sept. 14, 1685.


158 Smith's Current intelligence, March 30, and April 3, 1680.


159 Anglias Metropolis, 1690.


160 Commons' Journals, Sept. 4, 1660, March 1, 1688-9;

Chamberlayne, 1684; Davenant on the Public Revenue, Discourse IV.


161 I have left the text as it stood in 1848. In the year 1856

the gross receipt of the Post Office was more than 2,800,000£.;

and the net receipt was about 1,200,000£. The number of letters

conveyed by post was 478,000,000. (1857).


162 London Gazette, May 5, and 17, 1680.


163 There is a very curious, and, I should think, unique

collection of these papers in the British Museum.


164 For example, there is not a word in the Gazette about the

important parliamentary proceedings of November, 1685, or about

the trial and acquittal of the Seven Bishops.


165 Roger North's Life of Dr. John North. On the subject of

newsletters, see the Examen, 133.


166 I take this opportunity of expressing my warm gratitude to

the family of my dear and honoured friend sir James Mackintosh

for confiding to me the materials collected by him at a time when

he meditated a work similar to that which I have undertaken. I

have never seen, and I do not believe that there anywhere exists,

within the same compass, so noble a collection of extracts from

public and private archives The judgment with which sir James in

great masses of the rudest ore of history, selected what was

valuable, and rejected what was worthless, can be fully

appreciated only by one who has toiled after him in the same

mine.


167 Life of Thomas Gent. A complete list of all printing houses

in 1724 will be found in Nichols's Literary Anecdotae of the

eighteenth