"

before the men, "who, when they had done, sent to tell the women.' "Several of the best gentlemen, and members for the county," he says, "drunk nothing but beer." On this subject Mr. Roberts has collected some curious particulars. Towards the close of the last century ale or "strong beer," as it is still called in the western counties, a liquor quite different from London ale, was brought up in decanters marked with an oat, and drunk out of long glasses, after dinner, as wine is now. At some hunt dinners it was the fashion to drink thirteen toasts in strong beer, after which each man drank what he liked. There was a particularly strong beer called Dorset beer-" a foolish drink," as one gentleman calls it, in 1725, who had taken rather too much of it overnight, and felt stupid in consequence all the next day. It may have been this beer of which Edmund Smith drank to such excess that he died from the effects of it, in 1710.

Country life then seems on the whole to have been more sociable than it is now, though manners were much more coarse. But there was one taste which sprang up in the eighteenth century against which no such charge can be brought; that is the taste for landscape-gardening introduced by Kent and Bridgman, and patronised by Pope and Addison. This taste, however, did not spread beyond the higher aristocracy; and among the country gentlemen of modest fortunes ornamental gardening seems to have been very little practised. At the present day, when we come across one of these "ghostly halls of grey renown," now turned into farmhouses, which are so common in many parts of England, it is rare to find any traces of a flower-garden still remaining. We see the old fish-ponds, or the hollows where the fish-ponds

were.

We see large kitchen-gardens and orchards, and enclosures which were once deer-parks, but few or no traces of extensive pleasure-grounds.

What kind of life went on within these old halls when the men returned from hunting and shooting cannot be understood by taking any one account of country life which has been left to us by any single author. Sir Roger de Coverley, Squire Western, Squire Allworthy, Sir Charles Grandison, Sir Hildebrand Osbaldeston, Sir Everard Waverley, the foxhunters of Cowper and Thomson, no doubt possess elements of truth. That a country dinner party, and the long evening which followed it, was sometimes such as Thomson has described in his Autumn, may readily be believed; and, making large allowance for poetical exaggeration, we might accept the picture as a representative one of rural manners in general in the year 1750. The dinner is of the wellknown kind-sirloins, pasties, puddings; the drink is ale, and the talk is of the day's sport. After dinner comes an interval of punch and strong beer, followed by whist or backgammon, during which some men smoke their pipes, while others have a romp with the young ladies. These frivolous diversions over, the business of the evening begins

The dry divan

Close in firm circle, and set ardent in

For serious drinking,

till all succumb to its effects but one man, and he the parson of the parish. In all this of course there is vast exaggeration; but no doubt Thomson may have seen something not very unlike it among the Warwickshire and Worcestershire squires when visiting his noble patrons. And if for romping we read dancing, and deduct a certain amount of inebriety, we have a picture before us which is probably not far from the truth. It is remarkable that in this well-known scene, exaggerated as it may be, we have direct evidence in refutation of another social theory on the subject of the Eighteenth Century, which Mr. Lecky has adopted with perhaps too little consideration. Here we find the vicar dining with the squire on perfectly equal terms, and seeing all his flock under the table. This is not the position of a humble and despised dependant, who leaves table with the cheese, and marries his patron's mistress. Mr. Lecky would say, perhaps, that he was speaking only of one class of the clergy, namely, domestic chaplains and the poorer class of curates. But he does not describe them as exceptions. The fact is, there were the same distinctions between the clergy in the eighteenth century as there are in the nineteenth. There were the sons of poor parents sent to college perhaps because they showed some turn for reading, but without either the interest or the ability to help them to a fellowship or a living, and who scrambled through life as best they could on very humble means, subject to all the mortifications of genteel poverty, and to all the indignities which an age less delicate than our own was sure to heap upon it. But there were, also, as there are now, the younger sons of the gentry, who succeeded to the family livings, the holders of college livings and chancellors' livings, all of whom mingled on equal terms with the country society, and took part in both its business and its pleasures. The town clergy, it is allowed, were men of learning and refinement, and generally respected by all parties; so that, after all, the unfavourable picture drawn of the whole body will apply only to a small class.

Whether we take the clergyman of real life, such as Johnson's friend, Dr. Taylor; the clergyman of satire, such as Thomson's "doctor of tremendous paunch," and Cowper's "plump convivial parson;" or the clergyman of fiction, such as Mr. Irwin and Mr. Gilfil, we see equally that the country rector or vicar of the eighteenth century was, mutatis mutand's, much what he was in the earlier part of the nineteenth. And the same social distinction which existed then between the two classes of the clergy does even now exist, in a less marked but not a less real form. Mr. Trollope knows this, and has described it too in The Claverings with perfect truth. The difference between Mr. Saul and Mr. Clavering is but the reflection of a real social difference, of which a perfect illustration may be found in the Life of Jones of Nayland. Mr. Froude's picture of the country vicar in the first quarter of the present century may be appealed to in confirmation of these remarks, since he was substantially the same man as his father and grandfather. "He

farmed his own glebe. He was a magistrate, and attended quarter sessions and petty sessions; and in remote districts, where there were no resident gentry of consequence, was the most effective guardian of the public peace. He affected neither austerity nor singularity. He rode, shot, hunted, and ate like other people; occasionally, when there was no one else to take the work upon him, he kept the hounds. In dress and babit he was simply a superior small country gentleman, very far from immaculate; but, taken altogether, a wholesome and solid member of practical English life."

It is a mistake, therefore, to suppose that the country clergy of the eighteenth century were socially inferior to the country clergy of the nineteenth. The reverse is nearer to the truth. They were eminently "unclerical" in their habits. Sometimes they were sensual and slothful. The few among them who had any taste for reading were scholars rather than divines, and preferred Euripides to Chrysostom. But they held their own in society, and were just as much gentlemen as they are now; while I confess I am disposed to think, with Mr. Froude, that they had more influence with their parishioners than the present race of clergymen, zealous and ascetic as they may be.

If, finally, we turn to the farmers and the peasantry of the middle of the last century, we shall have no difficulty in pronouncing its social condition superior to our own. The farmers lived in a homelier and more frugal manner, but they lived in comfort, and were strangers to social discontent. Game was not then preserved as it is now; and Gilbert White thought him a very unreasonable sportsman who killed twenty brace of partridges in a day. Shooting, probably, was seldom or never let over the tenant's head. His landlord was generally resident, and the farm descended in the same families for generations. Witness the old song:

The farm which I hold on your honour's estate

Is the same which my grandfather tilled.

There was no grumbling at the game laws in those days, for nobody was injured by them. There was no demand for tenant right, for the farmers were contented with their own position, and it never occurred to them to ask for any share of the proprietorship. Nor was there any dissatisfaction with the tenure of land in general, as the possession of it was more generally diffused, and it was less coveted than it is now, either as a commercial investment or an ἄγαλμα πλοῦτου. Towards the close of the century, however, a change began. The nabob came into existence. The duke and the marquis were not to be outshone by him; and the process of buying out the smaller gentry began in earnest. Society in general became more ostentatious, and the change, according to Cowper, found its way into farmhouses. But the change was very gradual. And thirty years ago, the old type of farmer still survived in sufficient numbers for middle-aged men to have formed a pretty accurate conception of what he was a hundred years ago.

On the condition of the peasantry it is unnecessary to dilate at much length. The enclosure of the wastes and commons did not begin on any large scale till the last quarter of the century. And we have only to compare the rate of wages with the price of provisions in the reign of George the Second, to see that the ordinary day-labourer was better off than he was at any time between the close of the American War and the great rise in wages which has taken place within the last few years. In his habits he was honest, industrious, and temperate. He had elbow-room in his native village, a roomy cottage, a good garden, and the common for his pigs and geese. The village public-house was comparatively unknown. The church was well attended; and as group after group of men approached the church-porch on Sunday they would be seen to stoop down to untie the strings of their knee-breeches that they might kneel down properly in church. As the century drew to a close, however, the circumstances of the peasant changed. And if we look at Crabbe's account of him we shall see the approach of those conditions which in another generation caused him to become a bye-word.

Such was the eighteenth century as I love to depict it to myself: a century not overburdened with delicacy or scrupulousness of any kind; but bluff, hale, and hearty, a century of great moral and mental tranquillity, of some coarseness and animalism, and of unruffled religious belief among the great masses of the people; a century in which the landmarks were not removed, and abuses were allowed to spread in picturesque luxuriance over all our most venerable institutions; a century, nevertheless, of great men and great deeds, in which England rose to a predominant place among the nations of the world, and fitted herself to perform the great part which Providence had in store for her as the saviour of the liberties of Europe.

T. E. KEBBEL.

559

The Undefinable in Art.

ALL of us, probably, have learnt to distinguish between the type of man who loves clear intellectual light before everything, and who derives pleasure from objects and ideas only so far as he defines and understands them, and the other type of man who delights to abandon himself to an unthinking emotional state, and to steep his mind, so to speak, in a stream of vague feeling. This contrast meets us in various regions of life. For example: social intercourse is to some simply an opportunity of exchanging clear ideas, and sharing in sentiments which repose on definite convictions. For another class, converse with others owes its value to the opportunity it affords for indulging in vague emotions. Such persons love society only so far as it provides them with the contagion of half-expressed feeling, the delicious thrills of sympathetic emotion, and the exhilarating expansion of soaring with a kindred spirit into the dim regions of poetic fancy. The same contrast presents itself in relation to nature. There is on one side the curious enquiring and scientific attitude of mind, and on the other side the dreamily contemplative and the emotional attitude. To the first, nature is a mine of facts and truths; to the other, a wellspring of vague emotional consciousness.

The lover of art might be supposed to belong altogether to the second group. Yet, though all æsthetic taste involves some emotional sensibility, there is within the limits of the class sharing in this capacity a clearly marked distinction between the intellectual and the emotional cultivators of the beautiful. The former are mainly concerned with clarifying their æsthetic impressions, with apprehending the sources of pleasure in nature and art; the latter live rather to enjoy beauty without understanding it, and to have the delights of art with the least admixture of definite thought.

It is commonly supposed that what is known as æsthetic culture tends to elevate the intellectual at the expense of the emotional. The education of taste, it may be said, consists in the main in a development of the powers of attention, discrimination, and comparison. The very frequent use of the term connoisseur (cognoscente) for an artistically cultivated person seems to show that a refined taste in matters of art means a highly intellectualised taste. If so, however, it looks as if the higher æsthetic culture would tend to exclude the vague and indefinite emotional effects described just now. One might even urge that it is impossible for an æsthetically trained mind ever to suspend the intellectual functions in order to taste of the mysterious delights of the unthinking dreamer.

There is a measure of truth in these remarks; yet they do not accu