to live in them would be felt a very great calamity by those who have been brought up in the well furnished houses of the present time. 3. The towns had of old few of the comforts and the conveniences which are now thought indispensable. In the centre, there was usually one broad street, but all the other thoroughfares were narrow lanes, through many of which a common cart could not pass. They were not straight, or on any regular plan, and the houses projected so much that the passengers could not see many yards before them, but had to wind their way among the buildings. The streets were not paved, and as underground drains were not used, all the filth of the houses was thrown into them. Accordingly, in going through a large town, and seeing everything orderly and peaceful, no idea can be formed of the different condition of such places when they were not above a fourth of their present size. At the period when London, now inhabited by nearly three millions of people, did not contain above half a million, it was in a much more disorderly and dangerous state. Mr Macaulay thus describes it: :- "When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking about London became serious indeed. The garret windows were opened, and pails were emptied, with little regard to those who were passing below. Falls, bruises, and broken bones were of constant occurrence. For, till the last year of the reign of Charles the Second, most of the streets were left in profound darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity: yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceable citizens as another class of ruffians. It was a favourite amusement of dissolute young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking windows, upsetting sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude caresses to pretty women. Several dynasties of these tyrants had, since the Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns and Tityre Tus had given place to the Hectors, and the Hectors had been recently succeeded by the Scourers. At a later period arose the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet more dreaded name of Mohawk. The machinery for keeping the peace was utterly contemptible. There was an act of common council which provided that more than a thousand watchmen should be constantly on the alert in the city, from sunset to sunrise, and that every inhabitant should take his turn of duty. But this act was negligently executed. Few of those who were summoned left their homes; and those few generally found it more agreeable to tipple in alehouses than to pace the streets." Of course there are many crimes still committed in so largo a place as London, but they appear more numerous than they used to be, only because they are more frequently detected. From the offences that were formerly committed openly and audaciously, we may judge how many were perpetrated in secret. People were alive not many years ago who could remember, what seems now almost incredible, that a mounted highwayman would stop the coach of a nobleman in one of the principal streets, hold a pistol to his head, rob him, and get clear off. A newspaper of the reign of George II. complains that the business of the hackney-coachmen was suffering greatly from the increase of street robberies, "so that people, especially in an evening, choose rather to walk than ride in a coach, on account that they are in a readier posture to defend themselves, or to call out for help if attacked." In our days, when any one disappears, and a murder is supposed to have been committed, all the officers of justice are at work, and the whole country is in a state of excitement. But so late as George the Third's reign, it was known that many people annually disappeared in London, in parts of the town where no police or officers of justice dared attempt to searchi for their bodies or apprehend the murderers. 4. It cannot, indeed, be easily conceived how difficult it then was to find any place or person in a town. Not only were the streets narrower and more winding, but they had no names on them, the houses were not numbered, and the names of their occupants were not fixed on the doors, as is now done. Since their places of business could not be found by means of numbers, tradesmen made their signs as conspicuous as possible. Thus, when a person advertised his wares to customers, instead of saying that his shop bore such a number, he had to give a long description like this: "At the sign of the Blue Dragon and the Golden Crown, beside the Red Lion Inn, at the broad part of the Strand, nearly opposite to Exeter Change." Each tradesman strove to make his sign more conspicuous than his neighbour's. A writer in the beginning of George the Third's reign complained that the sign-irons of a shop would sometimes weigh four or five hundred pounds. They not only impeded the narrow passages, but sometimes gave way, tearing the front of the house with them, and crushing several people to death. It was not until the year 1764 that even in the city of London these things began to be remedied, and it was thought a great improvement that the names of the streets were written up on the corners. Soon afterwards it was observed, that some of the nobility and gentry, carrying out this system, put their names on brass plates on their doors. Then the houses were numbered, and the large dangerous signs became unnecessary. Scarcely thirty years have elapsed since the brilliant lighting of the streets by gas became general in large towns. On the front railings of some houses not very old a projection like the mouth of a trumpet may occasionally be noticed: this was the extinguisher for putting out the torch or link which a servant carried when any member of the family went abroad at night. In the year 1709, the first glass globe for a street lamp was exhibited opposite the door of St James's Coffeeroom in London, where the inventor attended to give explanations to the people who flocked to look at the phenomenon. It was nearly a century afterwards that, in a like manner, crowds attended to see the Soho manufactory of Birmingham illuminated with gas. In 1807, Pall Mall was lighted up with it, and numbers used to travel to London for the sake of beholding so wonderful a sight: now there is probably not a town, however small, without it. Though the capital of the empire has greatly increased in population, it has not advanced so rapidly as other towns. The secondary cities, such as Paisley, Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, now containing populations ranging from fifty thousand to nearly five hundred thousand, were mere villages in the time of the Stewarts, and even at the accession of George III. had populations averaging not more than from ten to twenty thousand. 5. But while the face of the country has been changed by the building of cities, it has been no less altered by the progress of agriculture. Mr Macaulay says of the reign of Charles the Second," The arable and pasture lands were not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of that age to amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom. The remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of the seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through nothing but heath, swamp, and warren. In the drawings of English landscapes made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo, scarce a hedgerow is to be seen, and numerous tracts, now rich with cultivation, appear as bare as Salisbury Plain. At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a region of five and twenty miles in circumference, which contained only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields. Deer, as free as in an American forest, wandered there by thousands. It is to be remarked, that wild animals of large size were then far more numerous than at present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to ravage the cultivated land with their tusks, had been slaughtered by the exasperated rustics during the license of the civil war. The last wolf that has roamed our island had been slain in Scotland a short time before the close of the reign of Charles the Second. But many breeds, now extinct or rare, both of quadrupeds and birds, were still common....The red deer were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire as they now are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne, on her way to Portsmouth, saw a herd of no less than five hundred. The wild bull with his white mane was still to be found wandering in a few of the southern forests. The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the side of every hill where the copsewood grew thick. The wild cats were frequently heard by night wailing round the lodges of the rangers of Whittlebury and Needwood. The yellow-breasted martin was still pursued in Cranbourne Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of the sable. Fen eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the extremities of the wings, preyed on fish along the coast of Norfolk. On all the downs, from the British Channel to Yorkshire, huge bustards strayed in troops of fifty or sixty, and were often hunted with greyhounds. The marshes of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire were covered during some months of every year by immense clouds of cranes. Some of these races the progress of cultivation has extirpated. Of others the numbers are so much diminished that men crowd to gaze at a specimen as at a Bengal tiger, or a Polar bear.” The most wonderful changes which have of late been made on the surface of the country have been for the purposes of conveyance from place to place. All the more fruitful districts of England and Scotland have in the course of about thirty years been made a complete network of railways. The old stage-coach at ten miles an hour is now rarely seen unless in remote places; but that, too, was a wonder in its day, and the old could tell the young how people had spoken to them about travelling in the waggon at three or four miles an hour between places where there was lately a coach at ten miles an hour, and there is now the railway train at thirty miles an hour or more. In 1734, it was announced as a bold novelty that a coach would run between London and Edinburgh in nine days; and, in 1763, there was but one in the month between the two capitals. At the same time a coach ran sometimes between Edinburgh and Glasgow twice a week, but it seems occasionally to have been interrupted by want of encouragement. The turnpike roads on which the vehicles of fifty years ago ran, and which now intersect the whole kingdom, were looked on as wonders, and very justly when compared with most of the roads a century ago, which were only fit for travellers on horseback. The coaches of the gentry could only be used in those very civilized parts of the country where there were good roads. The first which was seen in Inverness-shire arrived there about the year 1725, and the inhabitants were so astonished that they bowed very humbly to the coachman, believing him to be some great monarch or foreign chief. The 13,000 miles of railway in actual operation represent a capital of nearly £482,000,000, yielding a gross annual revenue of about £38,000,000. During the year 1865 the number of passengers on all the lines was 252,000,000. 6. Steam, besides giving us the railway trains, has largely increased the means of rapid communication on the water. Charles Lamb, who died in 1834, has recorded his recollections of the hoy or small vessel which conveyed passengers between London and Margate, a distance of sixty-five miles. It might be accomplished in one day; but sometimes two or three were spent on the voyage. It was in 1812 that the first steam ships sailed between Glasgow and Helensburgh, and now every shore and arm of the sea where there is any commerce, or where tourists go to admire scenery, is periodically visited by a steam vessel. In this manner the innermost solitudes of the Highlands have been made easily accessible. A steam vessel goes to America in ten days, and at the beginning of the century the smacks between London |