grossness of his conversation and the periodical
debaucheries of Houghton, which were to
the whole country matters of talk, but not of
censure. They belonged to the life of the
day. Of three men who were leading ministers
during the early part of the reign of
George the Third, two, Lord Sandwich and
Sir Francis Dashwood— the one successively
Secretary of State and First Lord of the
Admiralty, the other Chancellor of the
Exchequer— were the most notoriously
profligate men of the day. They were the
founders of the Franciscan Club, which, in
the ruins of Medmenham Abbey, scoffed at
the sacred things of hearth and altar.

In those days ministers of state held daily
levees, at which bishops and priests, jobbing
members of parliament, mayors who had
boroughs to sell, agents, pamphleteers, coffee-
house politicians were accustomed to attend,
flocking about the man who possessed power
and patronage, deserting him as he lost
influence, ever in search of notice from the man
in whose courts it seemed to them most
profitable to be time-servers and sycophants.
The mansion of the Duke of Newcastle in
Lincoln's Inn Fields was the most extensive
mart of patronage ever opened in this country,
and it was thronged with clients. When
this duke fell, after a dictatorship of fifteen
years, the king himself assumed the keeping
of the great source of corruption; his
Majesty's own levees were thrown open, and the
saloons of ministers were thronged no more.

We have referred to the gaming, and we
return to that. It was the great vice of
England during a large part of the eighteenth
century. Cards, dice, and betting engaged
people of all ranks and all ages—learned
or unlearned—man or woman. Whist required
too much thought, the gambler also
could not intoxicate himself with it rapidly
enough. Brag, crimp, basset, ombre, hazard,
commerce, loo, spadille could be played
quickly without brains. The ordinary stakes
were high. At one of the proprietary clubs
—White's, Brookes's, Boodle's— instituted to
evade the statute against gaming-houses, the
lowest stake was fifty pounds, and it was a
common thing for a gentleman to lose or win
ten thousand pounds in an evening. Sometimes
a whole fortune was lost at a sitting.
Every fashionable assembly was a gaming-
house. Large balls and routs had not yet
come into vogue. A ball seldom consisted of
more than ten or twelve couples. When a
lady received company, card-tables were
provided for all the guests, and even when there
was dancing, cards formed the principal part
of the entertainment. Ladies often contracted
debts of honour to fine gentlemen larger than
they could pay, larger than they could venture
to confess to a father or a husband. All this
tended to evil.

Few women were well taught. In town,
levity was the fashion. In the days of Queen
Anne, the daughter of a country gentleman
was bred as a cook; and, that she might do
her duty as a hostess, often received lessons
from a carving- master. If she married in
the country, she might get a husband with
the graces of a publican who would press
friends to drink away their reason as urgently
as she was bound, if possible, to make them
eat to absolute repletion. She probably
became the mistress of a hall containing no
literature beyond a cookery-book, and a
filthy book of drinking-songs—the Justice of
the Peace—a book of sports and a theological
tract or two.

The country town, if not of the first
class, depended for its supply of literature
solely on the occasional visits of a hawker or
travelling agent of some distant house of
business. The state of the roads during a
great part of the year made visiting
impossible. Agriculture was still represented by
patches of cultivation, seen at intervals
between the swamps and wastes that formed
the pervading character of the landscape.
Neat country villas with trim lawns, and
well-kept walks, shrubberies furnished from
all regions of earth, and bright conservatories,
did not then exist; even a common flower-
garden was not a usual appendage to the
house of a gentleman qualified to be knight
of the shire. The house, though substantial,
was rarely clean, and had, under its windows,
not the jessamine and roses, but the stables
and the kennel. No wonder that people who
had means flocked out of the country
into London, and, if they did not stay there,
carried London fashions home.

In the early days of George the Third there
were still to be found country gentlemen of
the old type; but, commonly, the country lady
had received some polish in the metropolis,
and took her daughters for the like benefit to
spend a winter in London or a season at
Bath, after they came home from the
boarding-school. London had grown, and roads
into it had thriven, so that, about a hundred
years ago, a writer had to speak with
wonder of the new town lately sprung up from
Piccadilly to Tyburn Road (now Oxford
Street) as covering an area larger than the
cities of Bristol, Exeter, and York put
together.

Up to the middle of the Iast century,
gaming remained the fashionable entertainment;
but the high play of the clubs then
made of it a pursuit too serious for mixed
society. Other diversions were invented, and
numerous places of amusement opened in
London and the suburbs. The fashionable
dinner hour was three or four. The evening
began at seven. The theatre, a card-drum, a
ball and an occasional masquerade, no longer
sufficed for the crowd of pleasure seekers that
was flocking every year into London. Ranelagh,
Vauxhall, Mrs. Cornelys's, and the Pantheon,
therefore, became fashionable places of
resort.

Ranelagh supplied, at Chelsea, spacious