public papers that "he had engaged twelve well-known strong men, otherwise prize-fighters, and a number of well-armed fellows, and stationed them at intervals along the more solitary part of the road, for the better protection of the ladies and gentlemen frequenting his place of entertainment."

The progress of natural science in the eighteenth century is curiously illustrated in Westminster Abbey by the series of monuments to men of eminence in scientific research. Dean Stanley points out that "in the middle of the eighteenth century there were two important places vacant in the Nave, on either side of the entrance to the Choir. That on the south side was occupied by the monument designed by Kent to the memory of the first Earl Stanhope, and of his second son, and recording the characters of the second and third Earls of the same name, who are buried at Chevening. Collectively, if not singly, they played a conspicuous enough part in their day to justify so honourable a place in the Abbey. Whilst the artist was designing the memorials to these high-spirited statesmen, he was employed in erecting two other monuments in the Abbey, to those whose names outshine every other, however illustrious by rank or heroic action."1 One was a cenotaph to Shakespeare, whilst the other covers the earthly remains of Isaac Newton, whose body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, whence it had been brought from Kensington, where Newton died. It was attended by the members of the Royal Society, and "buried at public cost on the spot in front of the Choir, a place so conspicuous that it had been refused to various noblemen who had applied for it." The inscription is grand in its simplicity - "Hic depositum quod mortuis fuit Isaaci Newtoni." Then follows a description of Newton's discoveries-" Naturæ, antiquitatis, Sancta Scripturæ sedulus, sagax, fidus interpres, Dei O. M. Majestatem philosophiâ asseruit; Evangelii simplicitatem moribus expressit. Tibi gratulentur mortales, tale tantumque exstitisse humani generis decus." To the left of Newton sleeps his nephew and successor in the Mint, John Conduitt; and on his right, his friend Martin Ffolkes, his deputy at the Royal Society and a famous numismatist, has a monument. His body, however, is interred at Hillingdon in Norfolk. Close by rest the celebrated physicians, Chamberlain, 1 Dean Stanley, Memorials of Westminster Abbey.

Arbuthnot, and Woodward. Dr. Chamberlain was an historical character, who brought into the world the royal progeny of the Stuart Dynasty from James 1. to Anne. He was, moreover, the friend of Atterbury, who wrote his epitaph. John Woodward, who is buried in the Nave, was, besides being an eminent medical man, the "Father of British Geology." Dr. Freind has merely a cenotaph, his body being interred at Hitchin in Hertfordshire. Richard Meade, another eminent medical man of the Caroline age, is buried in the Temple, but he has a cenotaph in the Nave of the Abbey. Passing the busts of Netewell and Pringle we find, in St. Andrew's Chapel, those of Dr. Baillie, an eminent physician, and brother of Joanna, the poetess, and of Sir Humphry Davy, the greatest chemist of the epoch, who died at Geneva in 1829. John Hunter's relics were translated from St. Martin's-in-the-Fields to the Abbey in 1859, thanks to the generous enterprise of Mr. Frank Buckland, who spent sixteen days in the catacombs of the former church searching for them. Sir Robert Moray, the first President of the Royal Society, was buried at the expense of Charles 11. in the South Transept, near Davenant. Not far off is Cromwell's eccentric secretary, Sir Samuel Maitland, who invented the speaking trumpet, the calculating machine, and possibly even the steam engine. Those fathers of British watchmaking, Tampion and Graham, in the same grave, rest in the centre of the Nave, with a slab above them commemorating "their curious. inventions and accurate performances." In the South Transept is buried Stephen Halls, who was famous in his day as a vegetable physiologist. Unhappily, the bones of the greatest scientist of the eighteenth century, James Watt, the "Improver of the Steam Engine," are beneath the ugliest and heaviest monument in the church, a hideous and colossal mass of marble, which actually made the pavement of the Abbey crack and yawn under its enormous bulk, so that the workmen engaged in erecting it "could see rows upon rows of gilded coffins in the vaults beneath," amongst which they would have been precipitated and have met their deaths in the very ante-chamber of death, but for the precaution of planking the area. We must not forget the monuments of Rennell the geographer, Telford, the bridge builder, and Robert Stephenson. The latter, to quote Dean

Stanley again, "had expressed a wish that his body should be laid to rest near that of Telford, and thus the son of the Killingworth engineman sleeps by the side of the son of the Eskdale shepherd. Over their united graves the light falls through the stained-glass window erected in memory of their brothers in science, Locke and Brunel." The list of scientists buried in the Abbey becomes longer as we approach modern times, when it culminates in the great name of Charles Darwin.

There is a quaint idea current in Abbey circles that, on a certain night of the year, the illustrious dead leave their coffins to meet in a sort of spiritual conversazione, held by moonlight in the Nave, Transepts, and Choir of our grandest tombhouse. It does not require much imagination to conjure up a picture of the scene, in which Elizabeth might be seen chatting in a friendly way with Mary Stuart and Mary Tudor, and wondering, perchance, by what right a Dickens, a Thackeray, a Macaulay, a Watt, or a Darwin, have entered these royal and erstwhile exclusive vaults, in which the ashes of the Kings of England, and of the kings of letters, art, and science, now mingle in the brotherhood of all-levelling Death!

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CHAPTER XIV

A GLOOMY OUTLOOK

EVER was London Society so brilliant, so dissipated, or so picturesque as in the last half of the eighteenth century. The spread of education amongst women of the upper class enabled our great dames to associate with men of culture on terms of quasi-equality. With few exceptions, however, they did not make much pretence to learning, but were frankly worldly; to please and to be pleased being the outward signs of the inward graces of good breeding. George III. was an honest, clean-minded man, but very dull, and Queen Charlotte had no natural gifts to enable her to assume the part of patroness of arts, letters, and science. She was by no means stupid, but a great stickler for stiff and formal etiquette; poor Fanny Burney discovered her Majesty to be exceedingly pretentious and selfish. The fashionable world, therefore, went to Court to see and be seen, but never to amuse itself,-not even at a State Ball,-and revolved round the royal circle rather than mingled with it. None the less, Society was brilliant, being strictly limited to about four or five hundred persons of "extreme quality," who, however, admitted to their intimacy men and women of letters, and a few of the more eminent painters and members of the theatrical profession. The salon, in the French acceptation of that term, was, however, never really acclimatised in London. We preferred conversazioni at which hundreds assembled to cackle politics, the fine arts, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses, and, above all, to detail scandal, to exclusive circles of wits and blue stockings. Mrs. Delany, Mrs. Thrale Piozzi, Mrs. Bulteel, Mrs. Pendarves, Lady Craven, Mrs. Trimmer, Mrs. Barbauld, and a few others, en

deavoured to import the salon à la Francaise to London, but met with scant success. "Whenever half-a-dozen Englishmen and women of celebrity meet together in full dress they become shy and silent," says a contemporary. "It is otherwise in France, where they immediately start an interesting conversation, mingled with gaiety and sound wit." It was, therefore, at routs and masquerades, gossiping visits and card parties, that our eighteenth-century beaux and belles shone their brightest; and surely never were there so many gay social butterflies and gaudy moths fluttering in the same sphere as at this period. Thoughtless and heartless, they crowded, in their gorgeous gowns and brocaded coats and satin vests, their dominoes and their masks, to Mrs. Cornelys's masquerades, to the balls of the Duchesses of Devonshire, Portland, Marlborough, and Rutland, and to the "routs" of Lady Pomfret, Lady Townshend, Lady Wentworth, the Countess of Ely, Lady Craven, Lady Malmesbury, Lady Spencer, Mrs. Hunter, Mrs. Delany, Mrs. Sheridan, and of the scores of other hostesses, whose features have become quite familiar to us in late years thanks to the matchless art of Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney, Opie, Beachy, and Lawrence, who painted, for a few hundreds, portraits which now fetch as many thousands when "put up" at auction at Christie's. It was a selfish, vicious, extravagant society, which even the reports of the terrors of the French Revolution failed to alarm into a more serious frame of mind.

From 1775 to 1800 costume was, if not exactly beautiful, at least extremely rich, quaint, and elegant. The memoirs, and, above all, the magazines of the period, are as full of descriptions of the costly toilettes of the great ladies, as ever are the newspapers and fashion weeklies of our own time. The reading of these reports is instructive as well as amusing. At a time when half London was starving, the great ladies were paying three and even five guineas a yard for taffety, brocade, and velvet; and gentlemen, £50 and £60 for an embroidered coat and vest. The fair Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire, once wore a gown of "gold tissue on tissue sprinkled with gold spangles and edged with gold fringe intermingled with little chains of real pearls." Her over-skirt of white sarcenet, looped up with garlands of pink roses and flounces of Valenciennes lace, was stretched