"And in luxurious cities, when the noise Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers, And injury and outrage, and when night Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons Of Belial, flown With innocence and wine."124 Seymour's London.
125 Angliae Metropolis, 1690, Sect. 17, entitled, "Of the new lights"; Seymour's London.
126 Stowe's Survey of London; Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia;Ward's London Spy; Stat. 8 & 9 Gul. III. cap. 27.
127 See Sir Roger North's account of the way in which Wright was made a judge, and Clarendon's account of the way in which Sir George Savile was made a peer.
128 The sources from which I have drawn my information about the state of the Court are too numerous to recapitulate. Among them are the Despatches of Barillon, Van Citters, Ronquillo, and Adda, the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo, the works of Roger North, the Diares of Pepys, Evelyn, and Teonge, and the Memoirs of Grammont and Reresby.
129 The chief peculiarity of this dialect was that, in a large class of words, the O was pronounced like A. Thus Lord was pronounced Lard. See Vanbrugh's Relapse. Lord Sunderland was a great master of this court tune, as Roger North calls it; and Titus Oates affected it in the hope of passing for a fine gentleman. Examen, 77, 254.
130 Lettres sur les Anglois; Tom Brown's Tour; Ward's London Spy; The Character of a Coffee House, 1673; Rules and Orders of the Coffee House, 1674; Coffee Houses vindicated, 1675; A Satyr against Coffee; North's Examen, 138; Life of Guildford, 152; Life of Sir Dudley North, 149; Life of Dr. Radcliffe, published by Curll in 1715. The liveliest description of Will's is in the City and Country Mouse. There is a remarkable passage about the influence of the coffee house orators in Halstead's Succinct Genealogies, printed in 1685.
131 Century of inventions, 1663, No. 68.
132 North's Life of Guildford, 136.
133 Thoresby's Diary Oct. 21,1680, Aug. 3, 1712.
134 Pepys's Diary, June 12 and 16,1668.
135 Ibid. Feb. 28, 1660.
136 Thoresby's Diary, May 17,1695.
137 Ibid. Dec. 27,1708.
138 Tour in Derbyshire, by J. Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, 1662; Cotton's Angler, 1676.
139 Correspondence of Henry Earl of Clarendon, Dec. 30, 1685, Jan. 1, 1686.
140 Postlethwaite's Dictionary, Roads; History of Hawkhurst, in the Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica.
141 Annals of Queen Anne, 1703, Appendix, No. 3.
142 15 Car. II. c. 1.
143 The evils of the old system are strikingly set forth in many petitions which appear in the Commons' Journal of 172 5/6. How fierce an opposition was offered to the new system may be learned from the Gentleman's Magazine of 1749.
144 Postlethwaite's Dict., Roads.
145 Loidis and Elmete; Marshall's Rural Economy of England, In 1739 Roderic Random came from Scotland to Newcastle on a packhorse.
146 Cotton's Epistle to J. Bradshaw.
147 Anthony a Wood's Life of himself.
148 Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684. See also the list of stage coaches and waggons at the end of the book, entitled Angliae Metropolis, 1690.
149 John Cresset's Reasons for suppressing Stage Coaches, 1672.
These reason. were afterwards inserted in a tract, entitled "The Grand Concern of England explained, 1673." Cresset's attack on stage coaches called forth some answers which I have consulted.
150 Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; North's Examen, 105;Evelyn's Diary, Oct. 9,10, 1671.
151 See the London Gazette, May 14, 1677, August 4, 1687, Dec.
5, 1687. The last confession of Augustin King, who was the son of an eminent divine, and had been educated at Cambridge but was hanged at Colchester in March, 1688, is highly curious.
152 Aimwell. Pray sir, han't I seen your face at Will's coffeehouse? Gibbet. Yes. sir, and at White's too.--Beaux' Stratagem.
153 Gent's History of York. Another marauder of the same description, named Biss, was hanged at Salisbury in 1695. In a ballad which is in the Pepysian Library, he is represented as defending himself thus before the Judge:
"What say you now, my honoured Lord What harm was there in this?
Rich, wealthy misers were abhorred By brave, freehearted Biss."154 Pope's Memoirs of Duval, published immediately after the execution. Oates's Eikwg basilikh, Part I.
155 See the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Harrison's Historical Description of the Island of Great Britain, and Pepys's account of his tour in the summer of 1668. The excellence of the English inns is noticed in the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo.
156 Stat. 12 Car. II. c. 36; Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; Angliae Metropolis, 1690; London Gazette, June 22, 1685, August 15, 1687.
157 Lond. Gaz., Sept. 14, 1685.
158 Smith's Current intelligence, March 30, and April 3, 1680.
159 Anglias Metropolis, 1690.
160 Commons' Journals, Sept. 4, 1660, March 1, 1688-9;Chamberlayne, 1684; Davenant on the Public Revenue, Discourse IV.
161 I have left the text as it stood in 1848. In the year 1856the gross receipt of the Post Office was more than 2,800,000?;and the net receipt was about 1,200,000? The number of letters conveyed by post was 478,000,000. (1857).
162 London Gazette, May 5, and 17, 1680.
163 There is a very curious, and, I should think, unique collection of these papers in the British Museum.
164 For example, there is not a word in the Gazette about the important parliamentary proceedings of November, 1685, or about the trial and acquittal of the Seven Bishops.
165 Roger North's Life of Dr. John North. On the subject of newsletters, see the Examen, 133.