Amenities of Literature Part 31

ROGER ASCHAM.

It would, perhaps, have surprised ROGER ASCHAM, the scholar of a learned age, and a Greek professor, that the history of English literature might open with his name; for in his English writings he had formed no premeditated work, designed for posterity as well as his own times. The subjects he has written on were solely suggested by the occasion, and incurred the slight of the cavillers of his day, who had not yet learned that humble t.i.tles may conceal performances which exceed their promise, and that trifles cease to be trivial in the workmans.h.i.+p of genius.

An apology for a favourite recreation, that of archery, for his indulgence in which his enemies, and sometimes his friends, reproached the truant of academic Greek; an account of the affairs of Germany while employed as secretary to the English emba.s.sy; and the posthumous treatise of "The Schoolmaster," originating in an accidental conversation at table, const.i.tute the whole of the claims of Ascham to the rank of an English cla.s.sic--a degree much higher than was attained by the learning of Sir Thomas Elyot, and the genius of Sir Thomas More.

The mind of Ascham was stored with all the wealth of ancient literature the nation possessed. Ascham was proud, when alluding to his master the learned Cheke, and to his royal pupil Queen Elizabeth, of having been the pupil of the greatest scholar, and the preceptor to the greatest pupil in England; but we have rather to admire the intrepidity of his genius, which induced him to avow the n.o.ble design of setting an example of composing in our vernacular idiom. He tells us in his "Toxophilus,"

"I write this English matter in the English language for Englishmen." He introduced an easy and natural style in English prose, instead of the pedantry of the unformed taste of his day; and adopted, as he tells us, the counsel of Aristotle, "to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do."

The study of Greek was the reigning pursuit in the days of Ascham. At the dispersion of the Greeks on the loss of Constantinople, the learned emigrants brought with them into Europe their great originals; and the subsequent discovery of printing spread their editions. The study of Greek, on its first appearance in Europe, alarmed the Latin Church, and was long deemed a dangerous and heretical innovation. The cultivation of this language was, however, carried on with enthusiasm, and a controversy was kindled, even in this country, respecting the ancient p.r.o.nunciation. A pa.s.sion for h.e.l.lenistic lore pervaded the higher cla.s.ses of society. There are fas.h.i.+ons in the literary world as sudden and as capricious as those of another kind; and which, when they have rolled away, excite a smile, although possibly we have only adopted another of fresher novelty. The Greek mania raged. Ascham informs us that his royal pupil Elizabeth understood Greek better than the canons of Windsor; and, doubtless, while the queen was translating Isocrates, the ladies in waiting were parsing. Lady Jane Grey studying Plato was hardly an uncommon accident; but the touching detail which she gave to Ascham of her domestic persecution, on trivial forms of domestic life, which had induced her to fly for refuge to her Greek, has thrown a deep interest on that well-known incident. All educated persons then studied Greek; when Ascham was secretary to our amba.s.sador at the Court of Charles the Fifth, five days in the week were occupied by the amba.s.sador reading with the secretary the Greek tragedians, commenting on Herodotus, and reciting the Orations of Demosthenes. But this rage was too capricious to last, and too useless to be profitable; for neither the national taste nor the English language derived any permanent advantage from this exclusive devotion to Greek, and the fas.h.i.+on became lost in other studies.

It was a bold decision in a collegiate professor, who looked for his fame from his lectures on Greek, to venture on modelling his native idiom, with a purity and simplicity to which it was yet strange. Ascham, indeed, was fain to apologise for having written in English, and offered the king, Henry the Eighth, to make a Greek or a Latin version of his "Toxophilus," if his grace chose. "To have written in another tongue had been both more profitable for my study, and also more honest [honourable] for my name; yet I can think my labour well bestowed, if, with a little hindrance of my profit and name, may come any furtherance to the pleasure or commodity of _the gentlemen and yeomen of England_.

As for the Latin and Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in them that none can do better; _in the English tongue_, contrary, _everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and handling, that no man can do worse_."

Such were the first difficulties which the fathers of our native literature had to overcome. Sir Thomas Elyot endured the sneer of the cavillers, for his attempt to inlay our unpolished English with Latin terms; and Roger Ascham, we see, found it necessary to apologise for at all adopting the national idiom. Since that day neologisms have fertilised the barrenness of our Saxon, and the finest geniuses in Europe have abandoned the language of Cicero, to transfuse its grace into an idiom whose penury was deemed too rude for the pen of the scholar. Ascham followed his happier genius, and his name has created an epoch in the literature of England.

A residence of three years in Germany in the station of confidential secretary of our amba.s.sador to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, placed him in a more extensive field of observation, and brought him in contact with some of the most remarkable men of his times. It is much to be regretted, that the diary he kept has never been recovered. That Ascham was inquisitive, and, moreover, a profound observer at an interesting crisis in modern history, and that he held a constant intercourse with great characters, and obtained much secret history both of persons and of transactions, fully appears in his admirable "Report of the Affairs and State of Germany, and the Emperor Charles' Court." This "Report" was but a chance communication to a friend, though it is composed with great care. Ascham has developed with a firm and masterly hand the complicated intrigues of the various powers, when Charles the Fifth seemed to give laws to Germany and Italy. This emperor was in peace with all the world in 1550, and in less than two years after, he was compelled to fly from Germany, surrounded by secret enemies. Ascham has traced the discontents of the minor courts of Italian dukes, and German princes, who gradually deserted the haughty autocrat--an event which finally led to the emperor's resignation. It is a moral tale of princes openly countenancing quietness, and "privily brewing debate"--a deep catastrophe for the study of the political student. Ascham has explained the double game of the court of Rome, under the ambitious and restless Julius the Third, who, playing the emperor against the French monarch, and the French monarch against the emperor, worked himself into that intricate net of general misery, spun out of his own crafty ambidexterity. This precious fragment of secret history might have offered new views and many strokes of character to the modern historian, Robertson, who seems never to have discovered this authentic doc.u.ment; yet it lay at hand. So little even in Robertson's day did English literature, in its obscurer sources, enter into the pursuits of our greatest writers.

Ascham's first work was the "Toxophilus, the Schole, or Part.i.tions of Shootinge." At this time fire-arms were so little known, that the term "shooting" was solely confined to the bow, then the redoubtable weapon of our hardy countrymen. In this well-known treatise on archery, he did what several literary characters have so well done, apologised for his amus.e.m.e.nt in a manner that evinced the scholar had not forgotten himself in the archer.

It affords some consolation to authors, who often suffer from neglect, to observe the triumph of an excellent book. Its first appearance procured him a pension from Henry the Eighth, which enabled him to set off on his travels. Subsequently, in the reign of Mary, when that eventful change happened in religion and in politics, adverse to Ascham, our author was cast into despair, and hastened to hide himself in safe obscurity. It was then that this excellent book, and a better at that time did not exist in the language, once more recommended its author; for Gardiner, the papal bishop of Winchester, detected no heresy in the volume, and by his means, the Lords of the Council approving of it, the author was fully reinstated in royal favour. Thus Ascham twice owed his good fortune to his good book.

"The Schoolmaster," with its humble t.i.tle, "to teach children to understand, write, and speak the Latin tongue," conveys an erroneous notion of the delight, or the knowledge which may be drawn from this treatise, notwithstanding that the work remains incomplete, for there are references to parts which do not appear in the work itself. "The Scholemaster" is a cla.s.sical production in English, which may be placed by the side of its great Latin rivals, the Orations of Cicero, and the Inst.i.tutes of Quintilian. It is enlivened by interesting details. The first idea of the work was started in a real conversation at table, among some eminent personages, on occasion of the flight of some scholars from Eton College, driven away by the iron rod of the master.

"Was the schoolhouse to be a house of bondage and fear, or a house of play and pleasure?" During the progress of the work the author lost his patron, and incurred other disappointments; he has consigned all his variable emotions to his volume. The accidental interview with Lady Jane Grey; his readings with Queen Elizabeth in their daily intercourse with the fine writers of antiquity, and their recreations at the regal game of chess--for such was the seduction of Attic learning, that the queen on the throne felt a happiness in again becoming the pupil of her old master; these, and similar incidents, present those individual touches of the writer, which give such a reality to an author's feelings.[1]

It is to be regretted that Ascham held but an indolent pen. Yet it were hard to censure the man for a cold neglect of his fame, who seems equally to have neglected his fortune. Ascham has written little; and all he left his family was "this little book" (The Schoolmaster), and which he bequeathed to them, as the right way to good learning, "which, if they follow, they shall very well come to sufficiency of living."

This was an age when the ingenious clung to a patron; the widow and the son of Ascham found the benefits of this testamentary recommendation. It must, however, be confessed to have been but a capricious legacy, for no administrator might have been found to "the will." The age of patronage was never that of independence to an author.

Johnson, in his admirable "Life of Ascham," observed, that "his disposition was kind and social; he delighted in the pleasure of conversation, and was probably not much inclined to business." It is certain that he preferred old books to pounds sterling, for once he requested to commute a part of his pension for a copy of the "Decem Rhetores Graeci," which he could not purchase at Cambridge. His frequent allusions in his letters when abroad to "Mine Hostess Barnes," who kept a tavern at Cambridge in the reign of Edward the Sixth, with tender reminiscences of her "fat capons," and the "good-fellows.h.i.+p" there; and further, his sympathy at the deep potation, when standing hard by the emperor at his table, he tells us, "the emperor drank the best I ever saw,--he had his head in the gla.s.s five times as long as any of us, and never drank less than a good quart at once of Rhenish wine," and his determination of providing "every year a little vessel of Rhenish" for his cronies: and still further, his haunting the c.o.c.kpit, and sometimes trusting fortune by her dice, notwithstanding that he describes "dicing"

as "the green pathway of h.e.l.l;" all these _traits_ mark the boon companion loving his leisure and his lounge.

When engaged in public life, a collegiate fellows.h.i.+p appeared to him to offer supreme felicity. He writes thus,--"Ascham to his friends: who is able to maintain his life at Cambridge, knows not what a felicity he hath." Such was the conviction of one who had long lived in courts.

But when we consider that Ascham was Latin secretary to Edward the Sixth, to Mary, and to Elizabeth, and intimately acquainted with the transactions of these cabinets, with the sovereigns, and the ministers; and during three years held a personal intercourse with the highest foreign court;--we must regret, if we no not censure, the man who, possessing these rare advantages, with a vigorous intellect, and a felicitous genius, has left the world in silence. a.s.suredly, in Ascham, we have lost an English Comines, who would have rivalled our few memoir-writers, who, though with pens more industrious, had not eyes more observant, nor heads more penetrating, than this secretary of three sovereigns.

There is, however, reason to conclude, that he himself was not insensible to these higher claims which his station might have urged on his genius and his diligence. Every night during his residence abroad, which was of no short period, he was occupied by filling his Diary, which has not, in any shape, come down to us. He has also himself told, that he had written a book on "The c.o.c.kpit," one of the recreations of "a courtly gentleman." We cannot imagine that such writings, by the hand of Ascham, would be destroyed by his family, who knew how to value them.

A modern critic, indeed, considers it fortunate for Ascham's credit, that this work on "The c.o.c.kpit" has escaped from publication. The criticism is fallacious, for if an apology for c.o.c.k-fighting be odious, the author's reputation is equally hurt by the announcement as by the performance. But the truth is, that such barbarous sports, like the bear-baiting of England and the bull-fights of Spain, have had their advocates. Queen Elizabeth had appointed Ascham her bear-keeper; and he was writing in his character when disclosing the mysteries of the c.o.c.kpit. But the genius of our author was always superior to his subject; and this was a treatise wherein he designed to describe "all kinds of pastimes joined with labour used in open place, and in the day-light." The curious antiquary, at least, must regret the loss of Ascham's "c.o.c.kpit."

Ascham lived in the ferment of the Reformation: zealously attached to the new faith under Edward the Sixth and Elizabeth, how did he preserve himself during the intermediate reign, when he partook of the favours of the papistical sovereign? His master and friend, the learned Sir John Cheke, had only left for himself the choice of a recantation, or a warrant for execution; but of Ascham's good fortune, nothing is known but its mystery. The novel religion had, however, early heated the pa.s.sions, and narrowed the judgment, of Ascham. He wrote at a period when the Romanist and the Protestant reciprocally blackened each other.

Ascham not only abhorred all Italians as papists, but all Italian books as papistical. He invokes the interposition of the civil magistrate against Petrarch and Boccaccio, whose volumes were then selling in every shop. Baretti strikes at his manes with his stiletto-pen, in an animated pa.s.sage;[2] and Warton is indignant at his denunciation of our ancient romances, of which the historian of our poetry says, "he has written in the spirit of an early Calvinistic preacher, rather than as a sensible critic and a polite scholar"--he who, in his sober senses, was eminently both.

We may lament that the first steps in every revolution are taken in darkness, and that the reaction of opinions and prejudices is itself accompanied by errors and prejudices of its own. The bigotry of the new faith was not inferior to the old. The reforming Archbishop Grindal subst.i.tuted the dull and barbarous Palingenius, Sedulius, and Prudentius, for the great cla.s.sical authors of antiquity. The Reformation opened with fanaticism; and men were reformers before they were philosophers. Had Ascham, a learned scholar, and a man of fine genius, been blessed with the prescient eye of philosophy, he had perceived that there was not more papistry in the solemn "Trionfi" of Petrarch, and not less "honest pastime" in a "merrie tale" of Boccaccio, than in c.o.c.k-fighting and dicing; and that with these works the imagination of the public was gradually stepping out of a supernatural world of folio legends, into a world of true nature, which led to that unrivalled era which immortalised the closing century.

We must recollect that the bigotry of the Reformation, or that which afterwards a.s.sumed the form of puritanism, in their absurd notion of the nature of idolatry attached to every picture and every statue on sacred subjects, eventually banished the fine arts from England for a long century, and r.e.t.a.r.ded their progress even to our own days. A curious dialogue has been preserved by Strype, whose interlocutors are Queen Elizabeth and a Dean. The Dean having obtained some of those fine German paintings, those book-miniatures which are of the most exquisite finish, placed them in her majesty's prayer-book. For this the queen proscribed the dean, as she did those beautiful illuminations, as "Romish and idolatrous;" and with a Gothic barbarism, strange in a person with her Attic taste, commanded the clergy "to wash all pictures out of their walls." To this circ.u.mstance the painter Barry ascribes the backward state of the fine arts, which so long made us a by-word among the nations of Europe, and even induced the critical historian of the arts, Winkelman, to imagine that the climate of England presented an internal obstruction to the progress of art itself; it was too long supposed that no Englishman could ever aspire to be an artist of genius. The same principle which urged Ascham to denounce all Italian books, instigated his royal pupil "to wash out all pictures;" and even so late as the reign of George the Third, when the artists of England made a n.o.ble offer, gratuitously to decorate our churches with productions of their own composition, the Bishop of London forbade the glorious attempt to redeem English art from the anathema of foreign critics.

Ascham, whose const.i.tutional delicacy often impeded his studies, died prematurely. The parsimonious queen emphatically rated his value by declaring, that she would rather have lost ten thousand pounds--no part of which, during his life, the careless yet not the neglected Ascham ever shared.

Roger Ascham was truly what Pope has described Gay to have been, "in wit a man, simplicity a child;" and he has developed his own character in his letters. Latin and English, they are among the earliest specimens of that domestic and literary correspondence in which the writer paints himself without reserve, with all the warm touches of a free pencil, gay sallies of the moment, or sorrows of the hour, confiding to the bosom of a friend the secrets of his heart and his condition; such as we have found in the letters of Gray and of Shenstone.

The works of Ascham, which are collected in a single volume, remain for the gratification of those who preserve a pure taste for the pristine simplicity of our ancient writers. His native English, that English which we have lost, but which we are ever delighted to recover, after near three centuries, is still critical without pedantry, and beautiful without ornament: and, which cannot be said of the writings of Sir THOMAS ELYOT and Sir THOMAS MORE, the volume of ASCHAM is indispensable in every English library, whose possessor in any way aspires to connect together the progress of taste and of opinion in the history of our country.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] There were five editions of "The Scholemaster" within twenty years of its first publication, of which that of 1573 is the most correct and rare.--Dr. Valpy's "Cat."

[2] Baretti's "Account of the Manners of Italy," ii. 137--the most curious work of this Anglo-Italian.

PUBLIC OPINION.

How long has existed that numerous voice which we designate as "Public Opinion;" which I shall neither define nor describe?

The history of the English "people," considered in their political capacity, cannot be held to be of ancient date. The civil wars of England, and the intestine discords of the b.l.o.o.d.y Roses, seem to have nearly reduced the nation to a semi-barbarous condition; disputed successions, cruel factions, and family feuds, had long convulsed the land, and the political disorganization had been as eventful as were, not long after, the religious dissensions.

The grandfather of Elizabeth, Henry the Seventh, had terminated a political crisis. It was his policy to weaken the personal influence of the higher n.o.bility, whose domination our monarchs had often fatally experienced. This seems to have been the sole "public" concern of this prudential and pa.s.sionless sovereign, who, as the authority of the potent aristocracy declined, established that despotic regality which remained as the inheritance of the dynasty of the Tudors.

In the days of the queen's father all "public interests" were concentrated in the court-circle and its dependencies. The Parliament was but the formal echo of the voice which came from the cabinet. The learned Spelman has recorded that when the Lower House hesitated to pa.s.s the bill for the dissolution of the monasteries, they were summoned into the king's presence; and the Commons being first kept in waiting some hours in his gallery, the king entered, looking angrily on one side and then on the other: the dark scowl of the magnificent despot announced his thoughts; and they listened to the thunder of his voice. "I hear,"

said he, "that my bill will not pa.s.s, but I will have it pa.s.s, or I will have some of your heads."[1] I do not recollect whether it was on this occasion that his majesty saluted his faithful Commons as "brutes!" but the burly tyrant treated them as such. The penalty of their debates was to be their heads; therefore this important bill pa.s.sed _nemine contradicente_!

However contemptuously this monarch regarded those who were within his circle, he was sufficiently enlightened in the great national revolution he meditated to desire to gain over the mult.i.tude on his side. The very circ.u.mstance of the king allowing, as the letters patent run, "the free and liberal use of the Bible in _our own natural English tongue_," was a _coup-d'etat_, and an evidence that Henry at one time designed to create a people of readers on whom he counted to side with him. The people were already possessed of the Reformation, before Henry the Eighth had renounced the papacy. The reformers abroad had diligently supplied them with versions of the Scriptures, and no small numbers of pamphlets printed abroad in English were dispersed among the early "gospellers,"

the expressive distinction of the new heretics; a humble but fervent rabble of tailors, joiners, weavers, and other handicraftsmen, who left "the new for the old G.o.d," ready martyrs against the gross papistical impostures, and many females theological, who turned away from the corporal presence, and whom no bishop could seduce to curtsey to a saint.

The new concession made to this people was indeed received with enthusiasm. All flocked to read, or to be read to. Never were the Scriptures so artlessly scrutinised; they furnished whole scenes for interludes, and were tagged with rhymes for ballads; even the grave judges, before they delivered their charges, prefaced them by a text.

Each reader became an expounder, and new schismatics were busied with new heresies. The king had not calculated on this result; and when he found the nation abounded not with readers so much as with disputants--that controversies raged where uniformity was expected--Henry became so irritated at the universal distraction of opinion, that his first attempt to raise a public voice ended, as has been since often attempted, in its suppression. The permission to read the sacred volume was contracted by the most qualifying clauses. The n.o.ble and the gentry might read it "alone in their garden or orchard, or other retired places," but men and women in the lower ranks were absolutely forbidden to read it, or to have it read to them.[2]

The clas.h.i.+ng polemics of the brother and the sister of Elizabeth did not advance the progress of civil society. The novelists, if we may so term these lovers of novelty, flushed with innovation, were raging with every rapid change, while the ancients, in spite and in despondence, sullenly clung to the old, which they held could never be the obsolete. The first movements of the great reform seemed only to have transferred the late civil wars which had distracted the land, to the minds of the people in a civil war of opinions.

When Elizabeth ascended the throne, there was yet no recognised "public"

in the commonwealth; the people were mere fractional and incoherent parts of society. This heroic queen, whose position and whose masculine character bear some affinity to those of the great Catharine of Russia, had to create "a people" subservient to the very design of advancing the regal authority in its ascendancy. The policy of the maiden queen was that of her ancestors; but the same jealousy of the aristocracy turned her genius to a new source of influence, unknown to her progenitors, and which her successors afterwards hardly recognised. In the awful mutations through which society had been pa.s.sing, some had been silently favourable to the queen's views. The population had considerably risen since the reign of Henry the Seventh.[3] Property had changed hands, and taken new directions; and independent cla.s.ses in society were rising fast.

The great barons formerly had kept open houses for all comers and goers; five hundred or a thousand "blue coats" in a single family crowded their castles or their mansions; these were "trencher slaves" and "swash-bucklers;" besides those numerous "retainers" of great lords, who, neither menial nor of the household, yet yielded their services on special occasions, for the privilege of s.h.i.+elding their own insolence under the ostentatious silver "badge," or the family arms, which none might strike with impunity, and escape from the hostility of the whole n.o.ble family. In the opening scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ our national bard has perpetuated the insolence of the wearers with all the reality of nature and correctness of custom. Such troops of idling partisans were only reflecting among themselves the feuds and the pride of their rival masters; shadows of the late civil wars which still lingered in the land.[4]

The first blow at the independent grandeur of the n.o.bles had been struck by the grandfather of the queen; the second was the consequence of the acts of her father. The new proprietors of the recently-acquired abbey-lands, and other monastic property, were not only courtiers, but their humbler dependents; many of them the commissioners who had undervalued all these manors and lords.h.i.+ps, that they might get such "Robin Hood's pennyworths" more easily by the novelty of "begging" for them. These formed a new body of proprietors, who gradually const.i.tuted _a new gentry_, standing between the n.o.bles and the commonalty; and from the nature of their property they became land-jobbers, letting and under-letting, raising rents, enhancing the prices of commodities, inclosing the common lands, and swallowing up the small farms by large ones. There arose in consequence a great change in agricultural pursuits, no longer practised to acquire a miserable subsistence; the land was changed into a new mine of wealth; and among the wealthiest cla.s.ses of English subjects were the graziers, who indeed became the founders of many families.[5]

The n.o.bles found their revenues declining, as an excess of expenditure surprised them; this changeable state only raised their murmurs, for they seemed insensible to the cause. Their ancient opulence was secretly consuming itself; their troops of domestics were thinned in numbers; and a thousand families disappeared, who once seemed to have sprung out of the soil, where whole generations had flourished through the wide domains of the lord. A great change had visibly occurred in the baronial halls. The octogenarians in Elizabeth's later days complained that the country was depopulating fast; and the chimneys of the great mansions which had smoked the year round, now scarcely announced "a merry Christmas."

A transition from one state of society to another will always be looked on suspiciously by those who may deem the results problematical; but it will be eagerly opposed by those who find the innovation unfavourable to themselves. The results of the new direction of landed property, incomprehensible to the n.o.bles, were abhorrent to the feelings of the people. Among "the people," that is, the populace, there still survived tender reminiscences of the warmth of the abbots' kitchens; and many a wayfaring guest could tell how erst by ringing at the monastic gate the wants of life had been alleviated. The monks, too, had been excellent landlords living amid their tenants; and while the husbandmen stood at easy rents, the public markets were regularly maintained by a constant demand. In the breaking up of the monasteries many thousands of persons had been dispersed; and it would seem that among that st.u.r.dy community of vagabonds which now rose over the land, some low Latin words in their "pedler's French," as the canting language they devised is called, indicate their origin from the familiar dialect of the ejected poor scholars of the late monastic inst.i.tutions.

The commotions which rose in all parts of the country during the brief reign of Edward the Sixth were instigated by the ancient owners of these lands, who conceived that they had been disinherited by the spoliators; thus weakly they avenged their irrecoverable losses; nor did such leaders want for popular pretences among a discontented populace, who, as they imagined, were themselves sufferers in the common cause. We are informed, on the indubitable authority of the diary of the youthful Edward, that "_the_ PEOPLE had conceived a wonderful hatred against GENTLEMEN whom they held as _their enemies_." The king seems distinctly to distinguish the gentry from the n.o.bility.

In the decline of the great households a result, however, occurred, which tended greatly to improve the independent condition of "the people." The manual arts had been practised from generation to generation, the son succeeding the father in the wide domains of some n.o.ble; but when the great lords were contracting the scale of their establishments, and failed to furnish occupation to these dependents, the mechanics and artificers took refuge in the towns; there localised, they were taught to reap the fruits of their own daily industry; and as their labour became more highly appreciated, and the arts of commerce were more closely pursued, they considerably heightened the cost of those objects of necessity or pleasure which supplied the wants or the luxuries of the n.o.ble. In becoming citizens, they ceased to be mere domestics in the great households; a separate independence was raised between the lord and his mechanic; the humble cla.s.s lost something in leaving the happy carelessness of life for a condition more anxious and precarious; but the influence of the n.o.ble was no longer that of the lord paramount, but simply the influence of the customer over the tradesman; "an influence," as Hume shrewdly remarks, "which can never be dangerous to civil government."

We now distinctly perceive new cla.s.ses in civil society rising out of the decline of the preponderating power of the great barons, and of the new disposition of landed property; the gentry, the flouris.h.i.+ng agriculturist, and those mechanics and artificers who carried on their trades, independently of their former lordly patrons; we now, therefore, discern the first elements of popularity.