tea, or eggs poached, or boiled in the shell; fish plainly dressed, or a sandwich; stale bread; and half a pint of good homebrewed beer, or toast-and-water, with about one-fourth or one-third part of its measure of wine.”  And this prescription would no doubt have worn an aspect of liberal concession to the demands of the patient’s appetite.  It is difficult, by any effort of a morbid imagination, to realize a time when there was no five-o’clock tea; and yet that most sacred of our national institutions was only invented by the Duchess of Bedford who died in 1857, and whose name should surely be enrolled in the Positivist Kalendar as a benefactress of the human race.  No wonder that by seven o’clock our fathers, and even our mothers, were ready to tackle a dinner of solid properties; and even to supplement it with the amazing supper (which Dr. Kitchener prescribes for “those who dine very late”) of “gruel, or a little bread and cheese, or pounded cheese, and a glass of beer.”

This is a long digression from the subject of excessive drinking, with which, however, it is not remotely connected; and, both in respect of drunkenness and of gluttony, the habits of English society in the years which immediately succeeded the French Revolution showed a marked amelioration.  To a company of enthusiastic Wordsworthians who were deploring their master’s confession that he got drunk at Cambridge, I heard Mr. Shorthouse, the accomplished author of John Inglesant, soothingly remark that in all probability “Wordsworth’s standard of intoxication was miserably low."[9] Simultaneously with the restriction of excess there was seen a corresponding increase in refinement of taste and manners.  Some of the more brutal forms of so-called sport, such as bull-baiting and cock-fighting, became less fashionable.  The more civilized forms, such as fox-hunting and racing, increased in favour.  Aesthetic culture was more generally diffused.  The stage was at the height of its glory.  Music was a favourite form of public recreation.  Great prices were given for works of art.  The study of physical science, or “natural philosophy” as it was called, became popular.  Public Libraries and local “book societies” sprang up, and there was a wide demand for encyclopaedias and similar vehicles for the diffusion of general knowledge.  The love of natural beauty was beginning to move the hearts of men, and it found expression at once in an entirely new school of landscape painting, and in a more romantic and natural form of poetry.

But against these marked instances of social amelioration must be set some darker traits of national life.  The public conscience had not yet revolted against violence and brutality.  The prize-ring, patronized by Royalty, was at its zenith.  Humanitarians and philanthropists were as yet an obscure and ridiculed sect.  The slave trade, though menaced, was still undisturbed.  Under a system scarcely distinguishable from slavery, pauper children were bound over to the