If politics had run to commonplace, so had morals; and so too had religion.  Despondent writers of the day even complained that British courage had died out.  There was little sign to the common eye that under a dull and languid surface, forces were at work preparing a new life, material, moral, and intellectual.  As yet, Whitefield and Wesley had not wakened the drowsy conscience of the nation, nor the voice of William Pitt roused it like a trumpet-peal.

It was the unwashed and unsavory England of Hogarth, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; of Tom Jones, Squire Western, Lady Bellaston, and Parson Adams; of the “Rake’s Progress” and “Marriage a la Mode;” of the lords and ladies who yet live in the undying gossip of Horace Walpole, be-powdered, be-patched, and be-rouged, flirting at masked balls, playing cards till daylight, retailing scandal, and exchanging double meanings.  Beau Nash reigned king over the gaming-tables of Bath; the ostrich-plumes of great ladies mingled with the peacock-feathers of courtesans in the rotunda at Ranelagh Gardens; and young lords in velvet suits and embroidered ruffles played away their patrimony at White’s Chocolate-House or Arthur’s Club.  Vice was bolder than to-day, and manners more courtly, perhaps, but far more coarse.

The humbler clergy were thought—­sometimes with reason—­to be no fit company for gentlemen, and country parsons drank their ale in the squire’s kitchen.  The passenger-wagon spent the better part of a fortnight in creeping from London to York.  Travellers carried pistols against footpads and mounted highwaymen.  Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard were popular heroes.  Tyburn counted its victims by scores; and as yet no Howard had appeared to reform the inhuman abominations of the prisons.

The middle class, though fast rising in importance, was feebly and imperfectly represented in parliament.  The boroughs were controlled by the nobility and gentry, or by corporations open to influence or bribery.  Parliamentary corruption had been reduced to a system; and offices, sinecures, pensions, and gifts of money were freely used to keep ministers in power.  The great offices of state were held by men sometimes of high ability, but of whom not a few divided their lives among politics, cards, wine, horse-racing, and women, till time and the gout sent them to the waters of Bath.  The dull, pompous, and irascible old King had two ruling passions,—­money, and his Continental dominions of Hanover.  His elder son, the Prince of Wales, was a centre of opposition to him.  His younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, a character far more pronounced and vigorous, had won the day at Culloden, and lost it at Fontenoy; but whether victor or vanquished, had shown the same vehement bull-headed courage, of late a little subdued by fast growing corpulency.  The Duke of Newcastle, the head of the government, had gained power and kept it by his rank and connections, his wealth, his county influence, his control of boroughs, and the extraordinary