Rtistic Manners and C2istoms. 69 



reassured the profaniim vulgusJ^ At any rate, the bulk of the 

 English rural classes seem to have settled down quietly enough 

 under the new rule, and applied all their thoughts and ener- 

 gies to improving their own individual fortunes. Save by the 

 difference (wide enough, we admit) in the religious views of the 

 late and present sovereigns, there does not appear to have been 

 much in the state of the country to justify our seventeenth 

 century author in adopting so startling a title as " The New 

 State of England " must have been to his readers. 



For instance, his account of English weather in 1692 is 

 grimly like that described by Roman writers and that ex- 

 perienced by ourselves in the year of grace 1892. England in 

 the seventeenth century had the happiness of being seldom 

 tried with a long frost in winter, or a long drought in sum- 

 mer : there was, in fact, that equable climate especially 

 favourable to corn and pasture. But, on the other hand, the 

 air was considered nothing like so pure nor the weather so 

 serene as it was on the Continent. " Most part of the winter 

 England " was " under a cloud, often stuffed with fogs, troubled 

 with rainy Aveatlier, and (except there happen a frost) but 

 seldom enjoying the sun in its splendour." There was 3'et 

 another inconvenience ; the weather being so irregular as to 

 have changed four times in one day, and this too under the 

 author's own personal observation.^ It is not, therefore, in this 

 seventeenth century weather-chart surely that anything can be 

 found to justify the writer's adoption of so revolutionary a title 

 as that borrowed by us from him for the heading of this chapter. 

 The clouded nature of the atmosphere at the present day is 

 largely attributed to its intermixture with the waste products 

 of a combustion which fills the nation's purse while it poisons 

 the nation's lungs ; yet if our author has painted a faithful 

 picture, the subjects of William and Mary must have experi- 

 enced, from November to May, weather very like that to 

 which we have to submit. 



Again, if we run through our author's topographical descrip- 

 tion of the English counties, there is very little change to 



' Id. Ibid., ch. iii. p. 13. 



