To show how much luxurious living has increased during the present century I propose to quote a portion of that wonderfully brilliant third chapter of Macaulay’s England which we all know.  Speaking of the squire of former days, he says, “His chief serious employment was the care of his property.  He examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop merchants.  His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality.  His language and pronunciation were such as we should now expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns.  His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accent of his province.  It was easy to discern from the first words which he spoke whether he came from Somersetshire or Yorkshire.  He troubled himself little about decorating his abode, and, if he attempted decoration, seldom produced anything but deformity.  The litter of a farm-yard gathered under the windows of his bed-chamber, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew close to his hall door.  His table was loaded with coarse plenty; and guests were cordially welcomed to it.  But as the habit of drinking to excess was general in the class to which he belonged, and as his fortune did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies daily with claret or canary, strong beer was the ordinary beverage.  The quantity of beer consumed in those days was indeed enormous.  For beer was then to the middle and lower classes not only what beer is now, but all that wine, tea, and ardent spirits now are.  It was only at great houses or on great occasions that foreign drink was placed on the board.  The ladies of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast, retired as soon as the dishes were devoured, and left the gentlemen to their ale and tobacco.  The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table.”

I quote again from another portion of the same chapter in Macaulay:—­“Slate has succeeded to thatch, and brick to timber.  The pavements and the lamps, the display of wealth in the principal shops, and the luxurious neatness of the dwellings occupied by the gentry, would, in the seventeenth century, have seemed miraculous.”  Speaking of watering-places he says:—­“The gentry of Derbyshire and of the neighbouring counties repaired to Buxton, where they were crowded into low wooden sheds and regaled with oatcake, and with a viand which the hosts called mutton, but which the guests strongly suspected to be dog.”  Of Tunbridge Wells he says—­“At present we see there a town which would, a hundred and sixty years ago, have ranked in population fourth or fifth among the towns in England.  The brilliancy of the shops and the luxury of the private dwellings far surpasses anything that England could then show.”  At Bath “the poor patients to whom the waters