smuggling gin and The amusements of exactly of that order

During that and the preceding years, twelve thousand persons had been convicted, within the Bills of Mortality, for selling it without licence. all classes of people were calculated to create a cruel disposition, and thus to encourage crime; bear-baiting, bullbaiting, prize-fighting, cock-fighting: on a Shrove Tuesday it was dangerous to pass down any public street. This was the day selected for the barbarity of tying a harmless cock to a stake, there to be battered to death by throwing a stick at it from a certain distance. The grim humour of the people took this form of expressing the national hatred to the French, from the Latin name for the cock, Gallus. It was in truth a barbarous pun.

With abundant wealth and means of happiness, the people fell far short of what we should consider comfort now. Life and liberty were cheap, and a prevalent Deism or Atheism was united to a wild licentiousness of manners, bru- · talising all classes of society. For the most part, the Church of England had so shamefully forgotten or neglected her duty-this is admitted now by all her most ardent ministers— while the Noncomformists had sunk generally into so cold an indifferentism in devotion, and so hard and sceptical a frame in theology, that

every interest in the land was surrendered to profligacy and recklessness, and, in thoughtful minds, to despair. Society in general was spiritually dead. The literature of England, with two or three famous exceptions, suffered a temporary eclipse. Such as it was, it was perverted from all high purposes, and was utterly alien to all purity and moral dignity. A good idea of the moral tone of the times might be obtained by running the eye over a few volumes of the old plays of this period, many of them even written by ladies; it is amazing to us now to think not only that they could be tolerated, but even applauded. The gaols were filled with culprits; but this did not prevent the heaths, moors, and forests from swarming with highwaymen, and the cities with burglars. In the remote regions of England, such as Cornwall in the west, Yorkshire and Northumberland in the north, and especially in the midland Staffordshire, the manners were wild and sav'age, passing all conception and description. We have to conceive of a state of society divested of all the educational, philanthropic, and benevolent activities of modern times. There were no Sunday-schools, and few day-schools; here and there, some fortunate neighbourhood possessed a grammar-school from some old foundation. Or, perhaps some solitary chapel,

retreating into a bye-lane in the metropolitan city, or the country town, or, more probably, far away from any town, stood at some confluence of roads, a monument of old intolerance; but, as we said, religious life was in fact dead, or lying in a trance.

As to the religious teachers of those times, we know of no period in our history concerning which it might so appropriately be said, in the words of the prophet, "The pastors" are "become brutish, and have not sought the Lord." In the life of a singular man, but not a good one, Thomas Lord Lyttleton, in a letter dated 1775, we have a most graphic portrait of a country clergyman, a friend of Lyttleton, who went by the designation of "Parson Adams." We suppose him to be no bad representative of the average parson of that day-coarse, profane, jocular, irreligious. On a Saturday evening he told Lyttleton, his host, that he should send his flocks to grass on the approaching Sabbath. "The next morning," says Lyttleton, "we hinted to him that the company did not wish to restrain him from attending the Divine service of the parish; but he declared that it would be adding contempt to neglect if, when he had absented himself from his own church he should go to any other. This curious etiquette he strictly observed; and we passed a Sabbath contrary, I fear, both to law and to gospel."

If we desire to obtain some knowledge of what the Church of England was, as represented by her clergy when George III. was king, we should go to her own records; and for the later years of his reign, notably to the life of that learned, active, and amiable man, Dr. Blomfield, Bishop of London, whose memory was a wonderful repository of anecdotes, not tending to elevate the clergy of those times in popular estimation. Intoxication was a vice very characteristic of the cloth: on one occasion the bishop reproved one of his Chester clergy for drunkenness: he replied, "But, my lord, I never was drunk on duty." "On duty!" exclaimed the bishop; “and pray, sir, when is a clergyman not on duty?" "True," said the other; "my lord, I never thought of that." The bishop went into a poor man's cottage in one of the valleys in the Lake district, and asked whether his clergyman ever visited him. The poor man replied that he did very frequently. The bishop was delighted, and expressed his gratification at this pastoral oversight; and this led to the discovery that there were a good many foxes on the hills behind the house, which gave the occasion for the frequency of calls which could scarcely be considered pastoral. The chaplain and son-inlaw of Bishop North examined candidates for

orders in a tent on a cricket-field, he being engaged as one of the players; the chaplain of Bishop Douglas examined whilst shaving; Bishop Watson never resided in his diocese during an episcopate of thirty-four years.

And those who preached seem rarely to have been of a very edifying order of preachers; Bishop Blomfield used to relate how, in his boyhood, when at Bury St. Edmund's, the Marquis of Bristol had given a number of scarlet cloaks to some poor old women; they all appeared at church on the following Sunday, resplendent in their new and bright array, and the clergyman made the donation of the marquis the subject of his discourse, announcing his text with a graceful wave of his hand towards the poor old bodies who were sitting there all together: "Even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these!" This worthy seems to have been very capable of such things: on another occasion a dole of potatoes was distributed by the local authorities in Bury, and this also was improved in a sermon. "He had himself," the bishop says, "a very corpulent frame, and pompous manner, and a habit of rolling from side to side while he delivered himself of his breathing thoughts and burning words; on the occasion of the potato dole, he chose for his singularly appropriate