ostrich-plumes of great ladies mingled with the peacock-feathers of
courtesans in the rotunda at Ranelagh Gardens; and young lords in velvet
suits and embroidered ruffles played away their patrimony at White's
Chocolate-House or Arthur's Club. Vice was bolder than to-day, and
manners more courtly, perhaps, but far more coarse.

The humbler clergy were thought--sometimes with reason--to be no fit
company for gentlemen, and country parsons drank their ale in the
squire's kitchen. The passenger-wagon spent the better part of a
fortnight in creeping from London to York. Travellers carried pistols
against footpads and mounted highwaymen. Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard
were popular heroes. Tyburn counted its victims by scores; and as yet no
Howard had appeared to reform the inhuman abominations of the prisons.

The middle class, though fast rising in importance, was feebly and
imperfectly represented in parliament. The boroughs were controlled by
the nobility and gentry, or by corporations open to influence or
bribery. Parliamentary corruption had been reduced to a system; and
offices, sinecures, pensions, and gifts of money were freely used to
keep ministers in power. The great offices of state were held by men
sometimes of high ability, but of whom not a few divided their lives
among politics, cards, wine, horse-racing, and women, till time and the
gout sent them to the waters of Bath. The dull, pompous, and irascible
old King had two ruling passions,--money, and his Continental dominions
of Hanover. His elder son, the Prince of Wales, was a centre of
opposition to him. His younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, a character
far more pronounced and vigorous, had won the day at Culloden, and lost
it at Fontenoy; but whether victor or vanquished, had shown the same
vehement bull-headed courage, of late a little subdued by fast growing
corpulency. The Duke of Newcastle, the head of the government, had