Fi'om Restoration to Revohttioji. 353 



present day. Its squires would vary tlie routine of farm life 

 with periodical visits to market, and whenever news from the 

 capital penetrated their isolated circles, it would arouse a 

 momentary growl at the royal neglectfulness of their past 

 services, or an imprecation against the baneful influences at 

 work about their royal master's person. Most of them wore 

 coats, whose every threadbare seam and ill-patched rent spoke 

 eloquently as to the magnitude of their fathers' sacrifices in 

 the royal cause. Even that awkwardness of m.anner engen- 

 dered by long absence from court life, was in itself a badge of 

 a loyalty which had spent as much as would have defrayed 

 the luxuries of two generations. But coarse clothing and. 

 rustic manners were not in accord with the gallantry and gay 

 plumes exhibited by the favourites of King Charles's palaces, 

 and so the country gentry stopped at home and perhaps con- 

 soled themselves with the thought that their present dress, 

 unlike the lace and ruffles of their fathers, aroused no popular 

 odium. 



But when the creatures upon whom he had showered riches 

 turned against the king, when the officers of his own house- 

 hold deserted him, and when the Secretaries of State, and 

 Lords of his Treasury were joining the opposition, up rose 

 the English landed classes to a man and swarmed up to the 

 capital in order to rally around his sacred person, until the 

 danger was over. The Church was the sole institution which 

 ranked before that of royalty in their affections, and when at 

 length James II. forced them to make choice between the two, 

 he took the only possible step to estrange a class which was the 

 most devoted of all his subjects. Any historian of the English 

 landed interest would be inspired with eloquence over the 

 description of so sturdy a form of manhood as these squires of 

 the Stuart era must have been ; but where the master pen 

 of Macaulay has been beforehand it would be superfluous for 

 others to follow.^ With the graphic touches peculiar to his genius 

 he has depicted these needy, ill-educated, hard swearing 

 patricians, now examining samples of grain or handling 



* Macaulay, Hist, of Eng.^ cli. iii. 



A A 



