SCULPTURE. ARCHITECTURE. 497 Of the sculptors of the period, the most famous were CHAP. from the Low Countries domiciled in England. The earliest XXVIII. in date and first in celebrity was Grinling Gibbons, generally known to fame by the unsurpassed excellence of the woodcarving with which he has adorned so many English mansions and churches. Gibbons, who lived till 1720, was also a statuary, his best-known work being the statue of James II. in front of the Admiralty. James Gibbs, the architect, was much employed upon funeral monuments. His designs are heavy and tasteless, the best known of them being the monument in Westminster Abbey to John Holles, Duke of Newcastle. Many of his designs were executed by Francis Bird, a sculptor employed by Wren on the statuary decorating St. Paul's. Bird's own monument of Sir Clowdisley Shovell in the abbey was not unfairly called by Pope "the bathos of sculpture". Rysbrack, a Fleming, who came to England in 1720, by the introduction of a simpler taste and by the excellence of his statuary, greatly improved this class of art. Two other Flemish sculptors, Delvoux and Scheemakers, were also much in vogue, especially for statuary in gardens. Scheemakers, among many other monuments, executed that of Shakespeare from Kent's design, and the bust of Dryden in Westminster Abbey. Their supremacy began to be challenged about 1738 by the French sculptor Roubiliac, who executed the tomb of John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll, also in the abbey. Much of Roubiliac's work is to be seen at Trinity College, Cambridge. Joseph Wilton, who sent busts to the first exhibition of British artists, and Joseph Nollekens, arrived at fame about the close of this period. The period witnessed the death of the greatest of English architects, Sir Christopher Wren. But though he lived until 1723, Wren's work substantially belongs to the previous century. The fashionable architect of Queen Anne's reign was Sir John Vanbrugh (d. 1726), who had been educated in France, and had been in turn an officer in the army, a prisoner in the Bastille, and a successful dramatist. His architecture merits the sarcasm of the well-known epigram of Abel Evans, Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he but Castle Howard, his best work, evoked from Horace WalVOL. IX. 32 XXVIII. CHAP. pole, no favourable critic, the epithet "sublime ". He built many other" Brobdingnagian mansions" for the nobility of his day, of which the most famous is Blenheim Palace. As a subordinate of Wren and Vanbrugh, and afterwards as an independent architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor (d. 1736) was much employed, especially upon churches, being surveyor of the new churches which parliament voted for London in 1711. He was also one of the earliest to introduce modern Gothic, of which the twin towers of All Souls College, Oxford, are a specimen. James Gibbs (d. 1754), another of the architects employed upon the parliamentary churches, adorned London with St. Mary-le-Strand, and Oxford with the Radcliffe Library. Among British architects of the century Gibbs stands next after Wren. The accomplished Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington (d. 1753), had studied architecture in Italy, and reproduced in London and at Chiswick Palladian mansions of which the external taste and the internal inconvenience provoked the gibes of Chesterfield. Sir William Chambers, the architect in 1775 of Somerset House, was coming into vogue at the close of the period. At a time when classical scholarship, of which Richard Bentley was the most eminent representative, was part of the equipment of a gentleman, the collection and study of antiquities naturally enlisted sympathy. William Stukeley, who took a part in the foundation of the Society of Antiquaries in 1718, left upon his death in 1765 a collection not only of antiquities but of fossils. To coins and medals Maurice Johnson (d. 1755) added plants. But these collectors of natural objects were before their age. Addison, in the Tatler (No. 216), derides them as virtuosi, and insinuates (No. 221) that to be a fellow of the Royal Society was to be a little mad. Dr. John Woodward, the geologist, and his collections became the butt of the wits, of Gay, who in 1717 ridiculed them in a farce, in which Pope and Arbuthnot were believed to have had a hand, called Three Hours after Marriage, and of Arbuthnot, who jeered at his "knicknackatory". When, upon the death of Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, Horace Walpole found himself a trustee of Sloane's botanical and other collections, which formed the nucleus of the British Museum, he ridiculed them as " embryos and cockleshells". He himself was ardently devoted to the acquisition of bric-a-brac by way of decoration for his "little SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP. 499 XXVIII. Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill. Classical archæology, CHAP. such as that which occupied the Society of Dilettanti, was an evidence of culture; the pursuit of science an eccentricity. Nevertheless, the act for the establishment of the British Museum, passed in 1753, indicates that outside the circle of fashion scientific research was beginning to command appreciation. Sloane and Woodward seem to have been the only scientific collectors among the physicians of the day. Dr. Radcliffe and Dr. Arbuthnot were bon-vivants; Garth was a wit and a poet; Blackmore a poet but not a wit. Freind, Mead, and William Heberden the elder (d. 1801) wrote treatises on medical subjects, and were eminent classical scholars. Scholarship was well represented upon the bench of bishops, among whom were men of great attainments, especially such as owed their appointments to the discernment of the philosophic Queen Caroline, who told Sale the Orientalist that she read Butler's Analogy every morning at breakfast. She loved to encourage debates in her presence between Bishops Berkeley, Sherlock, and Secker against Hoadly, supported by Samuel Clarke. Of Anne's bishops the most considerable was William Wake of Lincoln, afterwards primate, whose correspondence on Gallicanism with the theologians of the Sorbonne made him famous throughout Europe. William Fleetwood, Bishop of St. Asaph and afterwards of Ely, is still known as the author of the history of prices called Chronicon Pretiosum; George Bull, Bishop of St. David's, had in 1685 received the thanks of the Gallican Church for his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae. Atterbury was pronounced by the learned nonconformist hymnwriter, Philip Doddridge, "the glory of English orators". Thomas Wilson is still remembered as the organiser of a High Church theocracy in the Isle of Man. William Nicolson, Bishop of Carlisle, was a student of Runic as well as of astronomy. Two men of great learning were nominated bishops under George I.: Edmund Gibson, Bishop of Lincoln, and afterwards of London, who went by the nickname of "Walpole's Pope," was the author of the Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani (1711), and John Potter, Bishop of Oxford, afterwards primate, was distinguished for classical scholarship and archæology. To these may be added White Kennett, Bishop of Peterborough, an antiquary and a historian. The revivalism of Whitefield and the CHAP. Wesleys was a protest against the subordination of religious instinct to intellectual and other secular interests. XXVIII. In commerce and industry the first sixty years of the eighteenth century was not a period of rapid developement. Constant war absorbed the interest and diminished the resources of the nation. The iron manufacture was stagnant, the woollen trade was slowly improving. Paper manufacture and the silk industry were stimulated by the immigration of French artisans, and by the invention in 1719 of Sir T. Lombe's machine for silk-throwing. The export of cotton goods increased, doubtless with the extension of the East India Company's operations. Calico-printing developed to such an extent as to excite the jealousy of the woollen manufacturers. The Society of Arts was founded in London in 1754 for the encouragement of technical skill. A considerable advance was made in agriculture during the reign of George II., partly as a consequence of a revived activity in inclosing; partly through the improvements introduced by Lord Townshend after his retirement from office in the cultivation of his Norfolk estates. By the practice of marling, and by the four-course system of husbandry," Turnip Townshend" increased the rental value of the land tenfold. A bounty on the export of wheat when the price was below 48s. encouraged cereal cultivation. But all trade was much impeded by the founderous condition of the roads, which did not improve till after the general turnpike act of 1755. Goods were, in consequence, largely carried on the backs of packhorses, and though the nobility had carriages, and numerous servants to pull them out of the ruts, the gentry frequently travelled on horseback and their wives behind them on pillions. Public coaches, often known as "flying coaches," became more common during the reign of George I., but they could not make more than about five miles an hour, and were commonly drawn by six horses with postillions. "Stagewaggons" travelled at a less perilous speed, and at a lower price, accomplishing the distance between Lancashire and London in ten days during summer and eleven in winter. A journey without accident was scarcely expected. To the risk of being upset was added the risk of being plundered. It was the golden age of the highwaymen, of whom the best known to fame, Richard Turpin, was executed at York in 1739. XXVIII. The age was one in which men's callings were marked by CHAP. their costume. Physicians carried a Physicians carried a gold- or silver-headed stick, and a muff to conserve the temperature of their hands. Barristers, like Counsellor Silvertongue in Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode, wore "the long robe" in the streets and clergymen their gown. The two were only distinguishable from behind by the absence of powder from the clerical wig, except in the case of military chaplains, who in this followed the mode of officers. The Spectator complains that young clergymen were parading the town in the scarves of doctors of divinity, to which noblemen's chaplains were also entitled, an innovation ridiculed by the poet Savage in The Progress of a Divine. The scarf, nevertheless, became commonly adopted. An analogous change complained of in the Tatler was the assumption by tradesmen of the laced hats, swords, and wigs tied with ribbon, worn by the gentry. A man's character might be discerned from his wig. In an amusing poem of Shenstone, The Extent of Cookery, the hero when a hard student, wears "a plain brown bob"; when a rising politician, his own hair in a bag; when a judge, "a full-bottom". Hogarth divides wigs into five orders. Swift complained of paying three guineas for a wig; a beau would pay forty. The wire frames of the head-dresses of the ladies of Anne's reign, called "commodes," fell, according to the Spectator, by a change of fashion, two feet in height. Hoops, varying in shape more than in size, maintained themselves, despite ridicule, throughout the period; as did lace shirts and ruffles among men. The cost even of men's dress was very great. In 1746 Vice-Admiral Medley paid £51 5s. Id. and £73 8s. for two embroidered waistcoats. Umbrellas were carried by women only, until, in 1756, Jonas Hanway, the philanthropist, broke through the rule. The dangers of the streets of London, their filthy state, the streams from the gutter-spouts, the pestilential “kennel,” the scanty light from the lanterns and oil lamps at night were much the same in 1760 as when Gay wrote Trivia in 1716. But these inconveniences were trifling compared to the risk of being tormented by brawling men of fashion called " Mohocks and "Hawkubites," or robbed and murdered by the footpads, who molested unfrequented thoroughfares. The severity of 1 Lady Ducane's MSS., p. 117, Hist. MSS. Comm., 1995. |