the officers of justice by galloping down the stone steps and along the flagged path.  Sir Hamilton Seymour (1797-1880) was in his father’s carriage when it was “stopped” by a highwayman in Upper Brook Street.  Young gentlemen of broken fortunes, and tradesmen whose business had grown slack, swelled the ranks of these desperadoes.  It was even said that an Irish prelate—­Dr. Twysden, Bishop of Raphoe—­whose incurable love of adventure had drawn him to “the road,” received the penalty of his uncanonical diversion in the shape of a bullet from a traveller whom he had stopped on Hounslow Heath.  The Lord Mayor was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green.  Stars and “Georges” were snipped off ambassadors and peers as they entered St. James’s Palace.

It is superfluous to multiply illustrations.  Enough has been said to show that the circumscription of aristocratic privilege and the diffusion of material luxury did not precipitate the millennium.  Social Equalization was not synonymous with Social Amelioration.  Some improvement, indeed, in the tone and habit of society occurred at the turn of the century; but it was little more than a beginning.  I proceed to trace its development, and to indicate its source.

FOOTNOTES: 

[9] I have since been told that this happy saying was borrowed from Sir Francis Doyle.

IX.

THE EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE.

Mr. Lecky justly remarks that “it is difficult to measure the change which must have passed over the public mind since the days when the lunatics in Bedlam were constantly spoken of as one of the sights of London; when the maintenance of the African slave-trade was a foremost object of English commercial policy; when men and even women were publicly whipped through the streets when skulls lined the top of Temple Bar and rotting corpses hung on gibbets along the Edgware Road; when persons exposed in the pillory not unfrequently died through the ill-usage of the mob; and when the procession every six weeks of condemned criminals to Tyburn was one of the great festivals of London.”

Difficult, indeed, it is to measure so great a change, and it is not wholly easy to ascertain with precision its various and concurrent causes, and to attribute to each its proper potency.  But we shall certainly not be wrong if, among those causes, we assign a prominent place to the Evangelical revival of religion.  It would be a mistake to claim for the Evangelical movement the whole credit of our social reform and philanthropic work.  Even in the darkest times of spiritual torpor and general profligacy England could show a creditable amount of practical benevolence.  The public charities of London were large and excellent.  The first Foundling Hospital was established in 1739; the first Magdalen Hospital in 1769.  In 1795 it was estimated that the annual expenditure on charity-schools, asylums, hospitals, and similar institutions in London was L750,000.