In allusion to their spurious groats, some Tory wit had fixed on demagogues, who hypocritically affected zeal against Popery, the nickname of Birminghams. Yet in 1685 the population, which is now little less than two hundred thousand, did not amount to four thousand. Birmingham buttons were just beginning to be known; of Birmingham guns nobody had yet heard; and the place whence, two generations later, the magnificent editions of Baskerville went forth to astonish all the librarians of Europe, did not contain a single regular shop where a Bible or an almanac could be bought. On market-days, a book-seller, named Michael Johnson, the father of the great Samuel Johnson, came over from Lichfield, and opened a stall during a few hours. This supply of literature was long found equal to the demand.

These four chief seats of our great manufactures deserve especial mention. It would be tedious to enumerate all the populous and opulent hives of industry which, a hundred and fifty years ago, were hamlets without parish churches, or desolate moors, inhabited only by grouse and wild deer. Nor has the change been less signal in those outlets by which the products of the English looms and forges are poured forth over the whole world. At present Liverpool contains more than three hundred thousand inhabitants. The shipping registered at her port amounts to between four and five hundred thousand tons. Into her custom - house has been repeatedly paid in one year a sum more than thrice as great as the whole income of the English crown in 1685. The receipts of her post-office, even since the great reduction of the duty, exceed the sum which the postage of the whole kingdom yielded to the Duke of York. IIer endless docks, quays, and warehouses are among the wonders of the world. Yet even those docks and quays and warehouses seem hardly to suffice for the gi gantic trade of the Mersey; and already a rival city is growing fast on the opposite shore. In the days of Charles the Second, Liverpool was described as a rising town which had recently made great advances, and which maintained a profitable intercourse with Ireland and with the sugar colonies. The customs had multiplied eightfold within sixteen years, and

amounted to what was then considered as the immense sum of fifteen thousand pounds annually. But the population can hardly have exceeded four thousand: the shipping was about fourteen hundred tons, less than the tonnage of a single modern Indiaman of the first class; and the whole number of seamen belonging to the port can not be estimated at more than two hundred.

Such has been the progress of those towns where wealth is created and accumulated. Not less rapid has been the progress of towns of a very different kind, towns in which wealth, created and accumulated elsewhere, is expended for purposes of health and recreation. Some of the most remarkable of these gay places have sprung into existence since the time of the Stuarts. Cheltenham is now a greater city than any which the kingdom contained in the seventeenth century, London alone excepted. But in the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth, Cheltenham was mentioned by local historians merely as a rural parish lying under the Cotswold Hills, and affording good ground both for tillage and pasture. Corn grew and cattle browsed over the space now covered by that long succession of streets and villas. Brighton was described as a place which had once been thriving, which had possessed many small fishing-barks, and which had, when at the height of prosperity, contained above two thousand inhabitants, but which was sinking fast into decay. The sea was gradually gaining on the buildings, which at length almost entirely disappeared. Ninety years ago the ruins of an old fort were to be seen lying among the pebbles and sea-weed on the beach; and ancient men could still point out the traces of foundations on a spot where a street of more than a hundred huts had been swallowed up by the waves. So desolate was the place after this calamity, that the vicarage was thought scarcely worth having. A few poor fishermen, however, still continued to dry their nets on those cliffs, on which now a town, more than twice as large and populous as the Bristol of the Stuarts, presents, mile after mile, its gay and fantastic front to the sea.

England, however, was not, in the seventeenth century, des

titute of watering-places. The gentry of Derbyshire and of the neighboring counties repaired to Buxton, where they were lodged in low rooms under bare rafters, and regaled with oatcake and with a viand which the hosts called mutton, but which the guests suspected to be dog. A single good house stood near the spring. Tunbridge Wells, lying within a day's journey of the capital, and in one of the richest and most highly civilized parts of the kingdom, had much greater attractions. At present we see there a town which would, a hundred and sixty years ago, have ranked, in population, fourth or fifth among the towns of England. The brilliancy of the shops and the luxury of the private dwellings far surpass any thing that England could then show. When the court, soon after the Restoration, visited Tunbridge Wells, there was no town; but, within a mile of the spring, rustic cottages, somewhat cleaner and neater than the ordinary cottages of that time, were scattered over the heath. Some of these cabins. were movable, and were carried on sledges from one part of the common to another. To these huts men of fashion, wearied with the din and smoke of London, sometimes came in the summer to breathe fresh air, and to catch a glimpse of rural life. During the season a kind of fair was daily held near the fountain. The wives and daughters of the Kentish farmers came from the neighboring villages, with cream, cherries, wheat-ears, and quails. To chaffer with them, to flirt with them, to praise their straw hats and tight heels, was a refreshing pastime to voluptuaries sick of the airs of actresses and maids of honor. Milliners, toymen, and jewelers came down from London, and opened a bazaar under the trees. In one booth the politician might find his coffee and the London Gazette; in another were gamblers playing deep at basset; and, on fine evenings, the fiddles were in attendance, and there were morris-dances on the elastic turf of the bowling-green. In 1685 a subscription had just been raised among those who frequented the Wells for building a church, which the Tories, who then domineered everywhere, insisted on dedicating to St. Charles the Martyr.

But at the head of the English watering-places, without a

rival, was Bath. The springs of that city had been renowned from the days of the Romans. It had been, during many centuries, the seat of a bishop. The sick repaired thither from every part of the realm. The king sometimes held his court there. Nevertheless, Bath was then a maze of only four or five hundred houses, crowded within an old wall in the vicinity of the Avon. Pictures of what were considered as the finest of those houses are still extant, and greatly resemble the lowest rag-shops and pot-houses of Ratcliffe Highway. Travelers, indeed, complained loudly of the narrowness and meanness of the streets. That beautiful city which charms even eyes familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and Palladio, and which the genius of Anstey and of Smollett, of Francis Burney and of Jane Austen, has made classic ground, had not begun to exist.(') Milsom Street itself was an open field lying far beyond the walls; and hedge-rows intersected the space which is now covered by the Crescent and the Circus. The poor patients to whom the waters had been recommended lay on straw in a place which, to use the language of a contemporary physician, was a covert rather than a lodging. As to the comforts and luxuries which were to be found in the interior of the houses of Bath by the fashionable visitors who resorted thither in search of health or amusement, we possess information more complete and minute than can generally be obtained on such subjects. A writer who published an account of that city about sixty years after the Revolution has accurately described the changes which had taken place within his own recollection. He assures us that, in his younger days, the gentlemen who visited the springs slept in rooms hardly as good as the garrets which

(') Bramante, born in 1444, designed St. Peter's at Rome. The most famous buildings of Palladio adorn his native Vicenza. He lived in the sixteenth century. His work on Architecture is still held in estimation. "The New Bath Guide," "Humphry Clinker," and, in some sense, “Evelina,” are adapted to the taste of a past generation; but it is almost impossible to convince one's self that the life-like picture of Bath society in "Northanger Abbey," fresh as nature and exquisite in art, could have been drawn for the delectation of our great-grandmothers.

he lived to see occupied by footmen. The floors of the dining-rooms were uncarpeted, and were colored brown with a wash made of soot and small-beer, in order to hide the dirt. Not a wainscot was painted. Not a hearth or a chimney-piece was of marble. A slab of common freestone and fire-irons, which had cost from three to four shillings, were thought sufficient for any fire-place. The best apartments were hung with coarse woolen stuff, and were furnished with rush-bottom chairs. Readers who take an interest in the progress of civ ilization and of the useful arts will be grateful to the humble topographer who has recorded these facts, and will perhaps wish that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose of letting us know how the parlors and bed-chambers of our ancestors looked.

CIVILIZATION, AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE MASS OF THE PEOPLE.

[History of England, Chapter III.]

In one respect, it must be admitted that the progress of civilization has diminished the physical comforts of a portion of the poorest class. It has already been mentioned that, before the Revolution, many thousands of square miles, now inclosed and cultivated, were marsh, forest, and heath. Of this wild land much was, by law, common, and much of what was not common by law was worth so little that the proprietors suffered it to be common in fact. In such a tract, squatters and trespassers were tolerated to an extent now unknown. The peasant who dwelt there could, at little or no charge, procure occasionally some palatable addition to his hard fare, and provide himself with fuel for the winter. He kept a flock of geese on what is now an orchard rich with appleblossoms. He snared wild fowl on the fen which has long since been drained and divided into corn-fields and turnip