56 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



tion of progress. Every landed proprietor was a mere soldiery 

 and eager for the opportunity of a fray. Prompted by pride, ava- 

 rice, or revenge, he was ever engaged in some petty quarrel; vice 

 and idleness were perpetually engendering new sources of ani- 

 mosity; the grossest ignorance disabled all men from reasonable 

 adjustment; law became merged in brute force, coarse obstinacy 

 rendered such disputes hereditary, and the social history of the 

 age became embodied in the distich : 



" Theirs was the good old rule, 



The plain and simple plan, 

 That those should get who had the power, 



And they should keep who can." 



Even in a later age of society, we note a king of England impri 

 soned a Jew and ordered one of his teeth to be drawn daily until 

 he consented to yield up his wealth to his tormentor, or later still 

 the absence of all lower emotions than those which consigned to 

 the headsman's axe and the continually reeking block the lives of 

 a Russell, a Sidney, a Mary Stuart, or oh ! shame upon human 

 nature, a Lady Jane Grey ! Ferocious and bloody were the 

 legitimate political movements of our ancestors ; truly in all ages 

 have the "dark places of the earth" been "the habitations of cru- 

 elty." Novelists may gild those later ages with the glittering tin- 

 sel of romance, but the verdict of common sense and sober history 

 consigns them to a barbarism unredeemed by even the wild hos- 

 pitalities of the savage. The compilers of such erroneous illustra- 

 tions of past ages, the writers of historical novels, care little 

 whether their feudal chiefs, their middle ages burgher, or their 

 Puritan portraits be like the reality or not. Why should they 7 

 They know well that the mass of mankind are quite as ignorant 

 of the matter as themselves. 



In endeavoring to form a comparative estimate of ancient and 

 modern intellect, and of the respective bearings of the two upon 

 the masses of the people, the first and the most obvious matter for 

 investigation is, the mode in which respectively it has been exer- 

 cised in past and modern times. It was once a matter of grave 

 debate how many thousand angelic spirits could dance upon the 

 point of a needle without jostling each other, but it was reserved 



