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din as of earthquakes; their Turnkeys answer | Bread! Bread! Great is the combined voice vaguely. of men; the utterance of their instincts, which Wo to thee, De Launay, with thy poor hun are truer than their thoughts: it is the greatest dred Invalides! Broglie is distant, and his ears a man encounters, among the sounds and heavy: Besenval hears, but can send no help. shadows which make up this World of Time. One poor troop of Hussars has crept, recon- He who can resist that, has his footing somenoitering, cautiously along the Quais, as far as where beyond Time. De Launay could not do the Pont Neuf.13 "We are come to join you," it. Distracted, he hovers between two; hopes said the Captain; for the crowd seems shore- in the middle of despair; surrenders not his less. A large-headed dwarfish individual of Fortress; declares that he will blow it up, smoke-bleared aspect, shambles forward, open-seizes torches to blow it up, and does not blow ing his blue lips, for there is sense in him; and it. Unhappy old De Launay, it is the deathcroaks: "Alight then, and give up your agony of thy Bastille and thee! Jail, Jailorarms!" The Hussar-Captain is too happy to ing, and Jailor, all three, such as they may have be escorted to the Barriers, and dismissed on been, must finish. parole. Who the squat individual was? Men answer, It is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific Avis au Peuple!14 Great truly, O thou remarkable Dogleech, is this thy day of emergence and new-birth: and yet this same day come four years- !-But let the curtains of the Future hang.15

For four hours now has the World-Bedlam roared: call it the World-Chimera, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets: they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade,18 or seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge: a porthole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank, swinging over the abyss of that stone Ditch; plank resting on parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots, he hovers perilous: such a Dove towards such an Ark! Deftly, thou shifty Usher; one man already fell; and lies smashed, far down there, against the masonry; Usher Maillard falls not; deftly, unerring he walks, with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his porthole; the shifty Usher snatches

What shall De Launay do? One thing only De Launay could have done: what he said he would do. Fancy him sitting, from the first, with lighted taper, within arm's length of the Powder-Magazine; motionless, like old Roman Senator, or Bronze Lamp-holder; coldly apprising Thuriot, and all men, by a slight motion of his eye, what his resolution was:-Harmless, he sat there, while unharmed; but the King's Fortress, meanwhile, could, might, would, or should, in nowise be surrendered, save to the King's Messenger: one old man's life is worthless, so it be lost with honour; but think, ye brawling canaille,16 how will it be when ait, and returns. Terms of surrender: Pardon, whole Bastille springs skyward!—In such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies De Launay might have left Thuriot, the red Clerks of the Basoche, Curé of Saint-Stephen and all the tag-rag-and-bobtail of the world, to work their will.

And yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou considered how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter Gluck 17 confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest Operas, was the voice of the Populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser:

13 "New Bridge."

14 "Advice to the People."

15 He was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, July 13, 1793.

16 rabble

17 Of Germany. A Ritter is a knight.

immunity to all! Are they accepted?—"Foi d' officier, On the word of an officer," answers half-pay Hulin,- -or half-pay Elie, for men do not agree on it, "they are!" Sinks the drawbridge,-Usher Maillard bolting it when down; rushes-in the living deluge: the Bastille is fallen! Victoire! La Bastille est prise!19

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We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of the streets and squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The great majority of the houses, indeed, have, since that time, been wholly, or in great part, rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts of the capital could be placed before us, such as they then were,

ance, and poisoned by their noisome atmosphere. In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought, cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of Durham.

The town did not, as now, fade by imperceptible laid there till two generations had passed withdegrees into the country. No long avenues of out any return of the pestilence, and till the villas, embowered in lilacs and laburnums, ex-ghastly spot had long been surrounded by build tended from the great centre of wealth and ings. civilization almost to the boundaries of Middlesex and far into the heart of Kent and Surrey. In the east, no part of the immense line of warehouses and artificial lakes which now stretches from the Tower to Blackwall had even been projected. On the west, scarcely one of those stately piles of building which are inhabited by the noble and wealthy was in exist- | we should be disgusted by their squalid appearence; and Chelsea, which is now peopled by more than forty thousand human beings, was a quiet country village with about a thousand inhabitants. On the north, cattle fed, and sportsmen wandered with dogs and guns, over the site of the borough of Marylebone, and over far the greater part of the space now covered by the boroughs of Finsbury and of The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an the Tower Hamlets. Islington was almost a open space where the rabble congregated every solitude; and poets loved to contrast its silence evening, within a few yards of Cardigan House and repose with the din and turmoil of the and Winchester House, to hear mountebanks monster London. On the south the capital is harangue, to see bears dance, and to set dogs now connected with its suburb by several at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every part of the bridges, not inferior in magnificence and solid-area. ity to the noblest works of the Caesars. In gars were as noisy and importunate as in the 1685, a single line of irregular arches, overhung by piles of mean and crazy houses, and garnished, after a fashion, worthy of the naked barbarians of Dahomy, with scores of mouldering heads, impeded the navigation of the river. |

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He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded part of Regent Street4 found himself in a solitude, and was sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock. On the north the Oxford road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred yards to the south were the garden walls of a few great houses which were considered as quite out of town. On the west was a meadow renowned for a spring from which, long afterwards, Conduit Street was named. On the east was a field not to be passed without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in a place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the dead-carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infeetion, and could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life. No foundations were

1 Popularly pronounced Marlibun, or Maribun. 2 Cp. Cowley: Discourse of Solitude.

3 In West Africa. (This is a description of the famous old London Bridge.)

4 A fashionable shopping district in West London.

Horses were exercised there. The beg

worst governed cities of the Continent. A Lincoln's Inn mumper7 was a proverb. The whole fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every charitably disposed grandee in the neighbour. hood, and, as soon as his lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in crowds to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many accidents, and of some legal proceedings, till, in the reign of George the Second, Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, was knocked down and nearly killed in the middle of the square. Then at length palisades were set up, and a pleasant garden laid out.

Saint James's Squares was a receptacle for all the offal and cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. At one time a cudgel player10 kept the ring there. At another time an impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a shed for rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons in which the first magnates of the realm, Norfolk, Ormond,

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Kent, and Pembroke, gave banquets and balls. It was not till these nuisances had lasted through a whole generation, and till much had been written about them, that the inhabitants applied to Parliament for permission to put up rails, and to plant trees.

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 rose 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.

When such was the state of the region inhabited by the most luxurious portion of society, we may easily believe that the great body of the population suffered what would now be considered as insupportable grievances. The pavement was detestable; all foreigners cried shame upon it. The drainage was so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon became torrents. Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury with which these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill, bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable filth from the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. This flood was profusely thrown to right and left by coaches and carts. To keep as far from the carriage road as possible was therefore the wish of every pedestrian. The mild and timid gave the wall. The bold and athletic took it. If two roisterers met, they cocked their hats in each other's faces, and pushed each other about till the weaker was THE LONDON COFFEE HOUSES. shoved towards the kennel.11 If he was a mere bully he sneaked off, muttering that he should find a time. If he was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind Montague House.12

The houses were not numbered. There would indeed have been little advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen,13 porters, and errand boys of London, a very small proportion could read. It was necessary to use marks which the most ignorant could understand. The shops were therefore distinguished by painted or sculptured signs, which gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the streets. The walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through an endless succession of Saracens' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears, and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer required for the direction of the common people.

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

11 gutter

TER III

FROM CHAP

The coffee house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention. It might indeed at that time have been not improperly called a most important political institution. No Parliament had sat for years. The municipal council of the City had ceased to speak the sense of the citizens. Public meetings, harangues, resolutions, and the rest of the modern machinery of agitation had not yet come into fashion. Nothing resembling the modern newspaper existed. In such circumstances the coffee houses were the chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself.

The first of these establishments had been set up, in the time of the Commonwealth, by a Turkey merchant, who had acquired among the Mahometans a taste for their favourite beverage. The convenience of being able to make appointments in any part of the town, and of being able to pass evenings socially at a very small charge, was so great that the fashion spread fast. Every man of the upper or middle class went daily to his coffee house to learn the news and to discuss it. Every coffee house had one or more orators to whose eloquence the crowd listened with admiration, and who soon became, what the journalists of our own time

12 in Whitehall, the region of the Government have been called, a fourth Estate of the realm. offices.

13 sedan-chair bearers

The court had long seen with uneasiness the

5

One

growth of this new power in the state. An at- was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, tempt had been made, during Danby 's1 admin- a faction for Boileau and the ancients.3 istration, to close the coffee houses. But men group debated whether Paradise Lost ought not of all parties missed their usual places of resort to have been in rhyme. To another an envious so much that there was an universal outery. poetaster demonstrated that Venice Preserved+ The government did not venture, in opposition ought to have been hooted from the stage. Unto a feeling so strong and general, to enforce der no roof was a greater variety of figures to a regulation of which the legality might well be be seen. There were Earls in stars and garters, questioned. Since that time ten years had clergymen in cassocks and bands, pert Temelapsed, and during those years the number and plars, sheepish lads from the Universities, influence of the coffee houses had been con- translators and index makers in ragged coats stantly increasing. Foreigners remarked that of frieze. The great press was to get near the the coffee house was that which especially dis- chair where John Dryden sat. In winter that tinguished London from all other cities; that chair was always in the warmest nook by the the coffee house was the Londoner's home, and fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To that those who wished to find a gentleman bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet of Racine's last tragedy or of Bossu's treatise Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he fre- on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A quented the Grecian or the Rainbow. Nobody pinch from his snuff-box was an honour suffiwas excluded from these places who laid down cient to turn the head of a young enthusiast. his penny at the bar. Yet every rank and pro- There were coffee houses where the first medical fession, and every shade of religious and polit-men might be consulted. Doctor John Radcliffe, ical opinion, had its own headquarters. There who, in the year 1685, rose to the largest pracwere houses near Saint James's Park where fops congregated, their heads and shoulders covered with black or flaxen wigs, not less ample than those which are now worn by the Chancellor and by the Speaker of the House of Commons. The wig came from Paris; and so did the rest of the fine gentleman's ornaments, his embroidered coat, his fringed gloves, and the tassel which upheld his pantaloons. The conversation was in that dialect which, long after it had ceased to be spoken in fashionable circles, continued, in the mouth of Lord Foppington,2 to excite the mirth of theatres. The atmosphere was like that of a perfumer's shop. Tobacco in any other form than that of richly scented snuff was held in abomination. If any clown, ignorant of the usages of the house, called for a pipe, the sneers of the whole as sembly and the short answers of the waiters soon convinced him that he had better go somewhere else. Nor, indeed, would he have had far to go. For, in general, the coffee rooms reeked with tobacco like a guard-room; and strangers sometimes expressed their surprise that so many people should leave their own firesides to sit in the midst of eternal fog and stench. Nowhere was the smoking more constant than at Will's. That celebrated house, situated between Covent Garden and Bow Street, was sacred to polite letters. There the talk was about poetical justice and the unities of place and time. There

1 Thomas Osborn, Lord Treasurer under Charles II. 2 A character in Vanbrugh's The Relapse. As an example of the dialect Macaulay gives the word Lord, pronounced Lard.

tice in London, came daily, at the hour when the Exchange was full, from his house in Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the capital to Garraway's, and was to be found, sur rounded by surgeons and apothecaries, at a particular table. There were Puritan coffee houses where no oath was heard, and where lank-haired men discussed election and reprobation through their noses; Jew coffee houses where dark eyed money changers from Venice and from Amsterdam greeted each other; and Popish coffee houses where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their cups, another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the King.

These gregarious habits had no small share in forming the character of the Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, a different being from the rustic Englishman. There was not then the intercourse which now exists between the two classes. Only very great men were in the habit of dividing the year between town and country. Few esquires came to the capital thrice in their lives. Nor was it yet the praetice of all citizens in easy circumstances to breathe the fresh air of the fields and woods during some weeks of every summer. A cockney, in a rural village, was stared at as much as if he had intruded into a Kraal of Hotten

3 Between Perrault and Boileau, two members of the French Academy, arose about 1687 a famous quarrel over the respective merits of modern and ancient literature.

4 By Thomas Otway, a contemporary dramatist. 5 Students or lawyers residing in the Temple.

tots.

On the other hand, when the Lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he stared at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the water spouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor's show. Moneydroppers, sore from the cart's tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the most honest, friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he asked his way to Saint James's,s his informants sent him to Mile End. went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of secondhand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee house, he became a mark for the insolent derision of fops and the grave waggery of Templars. En raged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants, and the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.

THE BATTLE OF KILLIECRANKIE.
TER XIII*

If he

broke forth again more violently than before. Since the splendour of the House of Argyle1 had been eclipsed, no Gaelic chief could vie in power with the Marquess of Athol. The district from which he took his title, and of which he might almost be called the sovereign, was in extent larger than an ordinary county, and was more fertile, more diligently cultivated, and more thickly peopled than the greater part of the Highlands. The men who followed his banner were supposed to be not less numerous than all the Macdonalds and Macleans united, and were, in strength and courage, inferior to no tribe in the mountains. But the clan had been made insignificant by the insignificance of the chief. The Marquess was the falsest, the most fickle, the most pusillanimous, of mankind. Already, in the short space of six months, he had been several times a Jacobite, and several times a Williamite. Both Jacobites and Williamites regarded him with contempt and distrust, which respect for his immense power prevented them from fully expressing. After repeatedly vowing fidelity to both parties, and repeatedly betraying both, he began to think that he should best provide for his safety by abdicating the functions both of a peer and of a chieftain, by absenting himself both from the Parliament House at Edinburgh and from his castle in the mountains, and by quitting the country to which he was bound by every tie of duty and honour at the very crisis of her fate. While all Scotland was waiting with impatience and anxiety to see in which army his numerous retainers would be arrayed, he stole away to England, settled himself at Bath, and pretended to drink the waters. His principality, left without a head, was divided against itself. The general leaning of the Athol men was towards King James. For they had been employed by him, only four years before, as the ministers of his vengeance against FROM CHAP- the House of Argyle. They had garrisoned Inverary: they had ravaged Lorn: they had demolished houses, cut down fruit trees, burned fishing boats, broken millstones, hanged Campbells, and were therefore not likely to be pleased by the prospect of MacCallum More 's2 restoration. One word from the Marquess

While these things were passing in the Parliament House, the civil war in the Highlands, having been during a few weeks suspended,

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7 Offenders were tied to
the end of a cart
and whipped
through the streets.

8 In West London.
9 In East London.

The events here described took place in July, 1689, during the English Revolution. James the Second had lately been deposed, but the success of the party of William was still in doubt. In Scotland, William was supported by the parliament at Edinburgh and had a body of troops commanded by General Mackay. On the other hand, John Graham of Claver

1 The Campbells. The last Earl of Argyle had been executed for participating in Monmouth's rising against James.

2 A name given to the Dukes and Earls of Argyle. 3 broadswords

house. Viscount Dundee, had gathered about him his own Lowland adherents and a considerable force of Highland clansmen who supported James. Compare Scott's poem, Bonny Dundee, p. 448.

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