The enormous increase in the facilities for travelling and for the interchange of information contributed to the same result; and grave men lamented the growing fondness of the provincial ladies for the card-table, the theatre, the assembly, the masquerade, and—­singular social juxtaposition—­the Circulating Library.  The process of social assimilation, while it spread from town to country and from nobility to gentry, reached down from the gentry to the merchants, and from the merchants to the tradesmen.  The merchant had his villa three or four miles away from his place of business, and lived at Clapham or Dulwich in a degree and kind of luxury which had a few years before been the monopoly of the aristocracy.  The tradesman no longer inhabited the rooms over his shop, but a house in Bloomsbury or Soho.  Where, fifty years before, one fire in the kitchen served the whole family, and one dish of meat appeared on the table, now a footman waited at the banquet of imported luxuries, and small beer and punch had made way for Burgundy and Madeira.

But the subject expands before us, and it is time to close.  Now I propose to inquire how far this Social Equalization was accompanied by Social Amelioration.

VIII.

SOCIAL AMELIORATION.

At this point it is necessary to look back a little, and to clear our minds of the delusion that an age of splendour is necessarily an age of refinement.  We have seen something of the regal state and prodigal luxury which surrounded the English aristocracy in the middle of the eighteenth century.  Yet at no period of our national history—­unless, perhaps, during the orgies of the Restoration were aristocratic morals at so low an ebb.  Edmund Burke, in a passage which is as ethically questionable as it is rhetorically beautiful, taught that vice loses half its evil when it loses all its grossness.  But in the English society of his time grossness was as conspicuous as vice itself, and it infected not only the region of morals, but also that of manners.

Sir Walter Scott has described how, in his youth, refined gentlewomen read aloud to their families the most startling passages of the most outrageous authors.  I have been told by one who heard it from an eye-witness that a great Whig duchess, who figures brilliantly in the social and political memoirs of the eighteenth century, turning to the footman who was waiting on her at dinner, exclaimed, “I wish to G—–­ that you wouldn’t keep rubbing your great greasy belly against the back of my chair.”  Men and women of the highest fashion swore like troopers; the Princes of the Blood, who carried down into the middle of the nineteenth century the courtly habits of their youth, setting the example.  Mr. Gladstone told me the following anecdote, which he had from the Lord Pembroke of the period, who was present at the scene.