till coaches came into England; and that a ten-pound rent now was scarce twenty shillings then, till the witchcraft of the coach quickly mounted the price of all things.”  The Water-poet, were he now living, might have acknowledged that if, in the changes of time, some trades disappear, other trades rise up, and in an exchange of modes of industry the nation loses nothing.  The hands which, like Taylor’s, rowed boats, came to drive coaches.  These complainers on all novelties, unawares always answer themselves.  Our satirist affords us a most prosperous view of the condition of “this new trade of coachmakers, as the gainfullest about the town.  They are apparelled in sattins and velvets, are masters of the parish, vestrymen, and fare like the Emperor Heliogabalus and Sardanapalus—­seldom without their mackeroones, Parmisants (macaroni, with Parmesan cheese, I suppose), jellies and kickshaws, with baked swans, pastries hot or cold, red-deer pies, which they have from their debtors, worships in the country!” Such was the sudden luxurious state of our first great coachmakers! to the deadly mortification of all watermen, hackneymen, and other conveyancers of our loungers, thrown out of employ!

Tobacco.—­It was thought, at the time of its introduction, that the nation would be ruined by the use of tobacco.  Like all novel tastes the newly-imported leaf maddened all ranks among us, “The money spent in smoke is unknown,” said a writer of that day, lamenting over this “new trade of tobacco, in which he feared that there were more than seven thousand tobacco-houses.”  James the First, in his memorable “Counterblast to Tobacco,” only echoed from the throne the popular cry; but the blast was too weak against the smoke, and vainly his paternal majesty attempted to terrify his liege children that “they were making a sooty kitchen in their inward parts, soiling and infecting them with an unctuous kind of soot, as hath been found in some great tobacco-eaters, that after their death were opened.”  The information was perhaps a pious fraud.  This tract, which has incurred so much ridicule, was, in truth, a meritorious effort to allay the extravagance of the moment.  But such popular excesses end themselves; and the royal author might have left the subject to the town-satirists of the day, who found the theme inexhaustible for ridicule or invective.

Coal.—­The established use of our ordinary fuel, coal, may be ascribed to the scarcity of wood in the environs of the metropolis.  Its recommendation was its cheapness, however it destroys everything about us.  It has formed an artificial atmosphere which envelopes the great capital, and it is acknowledged that a purer air has often proved fatal to him who, from early life, has only breathed in sulphur and smoke.  Charles Fox once said to a friend, “I cannot live in the country; my constitution is not strong enough.”  Evelyn poured out a famous invective against “London Smoke.”  “Imagine,” he cries, “a solid tentorium