Zbc tHater Stuart ipcriot). 



CHAPTER XXVIIL 



THE DOMESTIC ACQUIREMENTS OF THE LANDED INTEEEST. 



The times of which we are speaking were the days when they 

 execnted, burned in the hand, or whipped felons ; when spite- 

 ful old women were condemned to the stake as witches ; when 

 the swarms of highwaymen who infested the main roads were 

 regarded as popular heroes ; when wild boars still ravaged the 

 crops, and the last wolf had only just been hunted down; when 

 red deer herded together in the wilds of Hants and Gloucester ; 

 when cattle lifting was still a fashion in the country betwixt 

 Tweed and Trent ; when border farmhouses were fortified and 

 their inmates slept armed ; when the parish bloodhound hunted 

 down freebooters ; when it was necessary for the judges on 

 northern circuits to be escorted by armed attendants ; when 

 one-third of England was a barren waste, and two-thirds of its 

 inhabitants could scarcely sign their own names. And yet 

 this was the age of Milton and Drydeu, of Hobbes and Bunyan, 

 of Lely and Grinling Gibbons, and to come back to the special 

 subject in hand, it was the age of Houghton and of King. 

 Men such as the last two mentioned must have written their 

 books out of sheer love for writing and not from ?inj hope of 

 emolument. There were no printing presses out of London, 

 save those of the two universities, while north of the Trent an 

 editor vv^as as rare as a nightingale. The library of a manor or 

 parsonage house consisted generally of half-a-dozen standard 

 works, and as long as freightage dues continued as high as 



they were in the Stuart days no literature but that which 



0:7 



