CAMEO Sacheverell. fight, Sunderland replied that he must be guided by discretion, and, if possible, use no violence. None was needed, the rioters ran away at Trial of sight of the soldiery, and no harm was done to life or limb. Indeed, the mob believed that though the Queen had been obliged to permit the trial, it was against her will, and as she went to witness it in Westminster Hall, they surrounded her chair with cries of, "Bless your Majesty and the Church. We hope your Majesty is for Dr. Sacheverell." 1710. Finally, the House of Peers voted him guilty, by a majority of sixty-nine against fifty-two. Seven Bishops voted against him, two for him. And the sentence was the burning of the sermon, and his suspension from preaching for three years; but the addition that he should not be eligible for preferment during that interval was lost, and the upshot of the trial was treated as a triumph. He was carried away in a chair on the shoulders of his supporters, amid a mob cheering enthusiastically; he was followed in the same way when he went about to return thanks to his supporters; bonfires were lighted in his honour; presents of money flowed in; the Queen herself presented him to the rich living of St. Andrew's, Holborn, and the parish of Salatin in Shropshire was likewise conferred upon him. His journey to take possession was like a royal progress; he was feasted by the Tory gentlemen, the bells were rung, and the streets garlanded as he passed, he gave receptions and had audiences; medals were struck with his head, and on the reverse a mitre for the Tories, the Pope's head for the Whigs. He was a handsome, well-mannered man of considerable fluency, though without much depth or real ability, but for the time the trial and the sympathy it excited, produced an enormous effect. The Church was more popular than it had ever been since the Reformation ; and Anne saw her way to freedom from the thraldom in which she was kept by the Whig Cabinet. The activity of the English Church told upon that of Ireland, though it was too much the custom to send thither as Lord Lieutenants persons who needed reward, but were inconvenient at home. There was a struggle in the Irish Parliament against the Test Act, for the staunchest Protestants were the northern Presbyterians; yet, on the other hand, the repeal might admit Romanists. The Earl of Wharton, one of the cleverest and most profligate of the unprincipled statesmen of the day, was Lord Lieutenant, sent, indeed, by the Whigs to bring about the repeal. Only one clergyman was in favour of it—a disreputable dependant of his own, whom he nominated as Bishop of Cork; but the Queen, on the representation of both the Archbishops, refused the appointment. Peter Brown, whom she chose instead, was so eloquent both in reading and preaching, that after a sermon before the Queen, she exclaimed, "Never man spake like this man!" Several churches were built, and there was a grant made for printing the Bible, Prayer-book, and an Exposition of the Church Catechism in Irish. 6,000 copies seem to have been distributed, but the effect was not very visible. The most remarkable character then in the Irish hierarchy was certainly Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, a man who, as we have already shown, never should have been a clergyman, and whose genius and wit were marred by a terrible coarseness, which prevented his ability from being all the gain it ought to have been, even though he espoused the right side. His life was a very strange one; living alone, while Stella, as he called Esther Johnson, who was certainly his wife, dwelt in another abode under her own name, and received numerous letters from him whenever he was absent from Dublin. He was by far the cleverest writer then living, so far as satire went, and his bitter pictures of society reveal a great amount of evil, scarcely reckoned as evil. Apparently England was divided between the staunch remnants of the stern Puritan morality, which kept Sunday strictly, delighted in long sermons, and eschewed all public amusements; the orthodox Loyalist, with a scholarly, refined taste, an ardent love of the Church, and often saintliness of life; and, on the other hand, the fashionable, effeminate fop, aping French manners and French dissipation, going about in a sedan chair, and indulging in a fatal licentiousness, but with a kind of lacquer that was wanting to the gross habits of the drinking, swearing, uncultivated country squire, whose best employment was hunting, as his wife's was cookery. Of course each class was recruited from the rest. Religious convictions might throw a person into the conscientious and devout ranks, whether Church or Puritan. A spendthrift might, according to opportunity or inclination, become a fashionable beau or a coarse rustic; but few in any degree, except perhaps the orthodox, seem to have had much notion of duties towards the poor. Hunting was practised regardless of mischief to crops; the Queen went out at Windsor in a sort of high-wheeled gig, driven across country at speed; gentlemen rode wherever they chose, and rewarded farmers who remonstrated with a horse-whipping. Blows, indeed, were profuse, not only to schoolboys, but girls. Refractory grown-up daughters were beaten, and a housewife of the most exalted rank thought boxing her maid's ears only proper discipline. The vice of drunkenness seems to have grown upon the nation. It is said that the wars with France had led to light wines being less used by the gentry than the heavier wines of Spain and Portugal, which became universal; and at any rate, intoxication was scarcely looked on as disgraceful. Gentlemen thought it unmanly not to swallow a bottleful or more at a sitting, and that more than half the guests, at a hunting or election dinner, or even an ordinary party, should be under the table at the end, was thought only natural. That menservants and messengers should be tipsy was considered inevitable, and public opinion was such, that religious people seem to have looked on the propensity in others as one of the hopeless infirmities to be CAMEO Swift. 1702. CAMEO Customs of Anne's 1712. tolerated. The terrible gout, the fatality from small-pox, and the mortality of infants, probably arose from injured constitutions. Hardly a mother reared half the children to whom she gave birth, though of course many of these deaths were owing to utter ignorance of all sanitary conditions, and to the extraordinary notions of medicine, which made bleeding an almost universal remedy. The ladies were at least exempt from the vice of drinking, but they shared with the gentlemen in that of gambling, which, from the Queen downwards, was carried to a frightful extent, ombre being one of the most fashionable games. The gentlemen met at their coffee houses, the ladies had their chocolate or their tea-tay, as they called it-more correctly than as we know the word. Their dress, like that of their bewigged lords, showed how low taste had sunk, with morals and all else. The huge hoop and towering powdered headgear had begun to prevail, and continued to increase till the violent reaction towards simplicity at the close of the century. Addison and Steele were doing their best in the Tatler and Spectator to improve the public tone by their praise of the noblest models they knew, and by their satire of the popular follies and extravagances. Their papers were read with the greatest eagerness. Thin sheets of rough paper stitched together, and coming out twice a week; they were utterly unattractive in externals, but they had an enormous circulation, and the coaches that brought parcels of them were besieged by eager readers. The papers were most of them ephemeral, but the beautiful study of the old country knight, Sir Roger de Coverley, has become a classic. It is said that the character was partly taken from an old Wiltshire squire, Mr. Duke, and that the widow was Mrs. Catharine Bovey of Flaxley Abbey, who lived an exemplary life, and catechised the village children on Sundays, before Sunday-schools existed. Alexander Pope, the Roman Catholic linen draper's deformed son, whose talents raised him to be one of the foremost of the writers of the so-called Augustan age, was in his prime under Queen Anne. In epigrammatic couplets, ringing in perfect metre, he is unrivalled. He gave the Spectator his really beautiful poem of the Messiah, where he adopted the prophecies of Isaiah so as to sound like the Sibylline verses, as amplified by Virgil. The sound is very grand. "The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay, This was almost the only remarkable contribution to sacred poetry in the generation succeeding that of Herbert, Vaughan, Milton, and Ken, who had not long passed away, but whose Morning and Evening Hymns abbreviated, were not long in finding their way into the Prayer-book, as a pendant to the New Version of the Psalms by Nahum Tate and Nathanael Brady, which was published about this time, and was for a long time regarded by old-fashioned people as a dangerous innovation, even down to the days of Hannah More at the close of the century. Their work was smoother but much less literal than that of Sternhold and Hopkins. Some verses sink into doggerel, but others are really beautiful, and were more beloved and linked with sacred associations than the younger generation can believe. Addison also first brought into notice Andrew Marvell's beautiful paraphrase of the beginning of the 19th Psalm— "The spacious firmament on high." It was long attributed to Addison himself. He also first turned the general attention to Milton's "Paradise Lost," which ranked next to the Bible in the minds of the lovers of poetry during the ensuing century. Pope was translating Homer, as Dryden had not long before translated Virgil. He cleverly parodied his own translation of Sarpedon's speech in his "Rape of the Lock," a brilliant mock heroic upon a quarrel between Miss Arabella Fermor and Lord Petre, which made a great sensation, and to this day marks the Court habits and manners of the time when "Great Anna, whom three realms obey, Sometimes a Council takes, and sometimes tea." САМЕО XXI. The Augus tin Age. 1712. CAMEO Mrs. Mas ham. 1710. THE English mind is ordinarily disposed to lament Queen Anne's change of policy, but it is quite open to be questioned whether it could be well, after the death of Joseph I., to continue the War of the Succession in Spain on behalf of his brother and successor, or after having effectually checked the ambitious advances of Louis XIV., to go on to the utter crushing of an already broken and defeated enemy. The Whigs, as the opponents of arbitrary power, were disposed to drive matters to the very utmost; the Tories not only had some pity, but felt that the balance of power would be destroyed by further humiliation of France-and Anne was naturally far more inclined in principle to the Tory than to the Whig, not only as a sovereign, but personally, and as a Churchwoman. It is not fair to say that the whole change was the consequence of the intrigues of Mrs. Masham and Robert Harley. It is true that the Duchess of Marlborough had become an intolerably insolent tyrant, galling the Queen's private life continually; but Anne's conscience was distressed by the attacks on the Church, and by the continuance of war and bloodshed. Tardy though that conscience was, it acted at last-perhaps the more decidedly that the influence of her husband was removed. As a foreign Protestant, he had no sympathy with the Church, and used to say to the supporters of the Occasional Conformity Bill, when urged to come to the House of Lords to vote for it, "My heart is wid you.' The Ministry were still the servants of the Sovereign, not of the Commons, and Anne, soon after the Session of 1710 had ended, began to take measures. First she made Lord Shrewsbury Lord Chamberlain in spite of Godolphin's remonstrance, and next it became known that the Earl of Sunderland, Marlborough's son-in-law, was to be no longer |