(and all estimates upon the subject must necessarily be rough, owing to the absence of precise statistics), two hundred years ago there were at least four times as many gentry residing in the country as there are to-day. Allowing for the increase of population there ought to have been four times as many resident gentry to-day as there were two hundred years ago. Villages, which now have their one or two country-houses, could then count their dozen or score of "bonnet lairds." The very monuments of the village church, above all its registers, are eloquent witnesses to the extent of the disaster, for a disaster it assuredly is. "In the sixteenth century," writes Mr. Baring Gould, in his OLD COUNTRY LIFE, of the parish of Ugborough in South Devon, "we find in them [the parish registers] the names of the following families all of gentle blood, occupying good houses,―The Spealts, the Prideaux, the Stures, the Fowels, the Drakes, the Glass family, the Wolcombes, the Fountaynes, the Heles, the Crokers, the Percivals. In the seventeenth century occur the Edgcumbes, the Spoores, the Stures, the Glass family again, the Hillerdens, Crokers, Coolings, Heles, Collings, Kempthornes, the Fowells, Williams, Strodes, Fords, Prideaux, Stures, Furlongs, Reynolds, Hurrells, Fownes, Copplestones, and Saverys. In the eighteenth century there are only the Saverys and Prideaux; by the middle of the nineteenth these are gone. The grand old mansion of the Fowells, that passed to the Savery family, is in Chancery, deserted save by a caretaker, falling to ruins. What other mansions there were in the place are now farmhouses." At the present day indeed the vicar writes that there is not a single family of resident gentlefolk in the parish; and Ugborough is, in the opinion of Mr. Baring Gould, only an example, though

perhaps a striking example, of a universal change.

The records of the heralds' visitations, according to the same authority, tell the same tale. Of one hundred and twenty-four Devonshire families of gentle blood entered on the visitation of 1620, one hundred and thirteen are extinct in the male line; a few are represented through a daughter's descendants. One hundred and ninetyfive families were entered in Ashmole's visitation of Berkshire in 1664; "but few survive," writes Mr. Cooper King, the latest historian of that county. Of the list of knights, gentlemen, and freeholders in the county of Chester drawn up in 1579, eight alone of the eighty-one from East Cheshire are still represented on their old estates.1 In 1601 there were ninety gentlemen on the Commission of the Peace for Berkshire; by 1824 eighty-seven out of the ninety houses were extinct or had parted with their lands. Of fortythree estates in the valley of the Ribble in Lancashire and Yorkshire, six and no more are still owned by the families who held them under Elizabeth. Fifty years ago, in his RURAL RIDES, Cobbett noted the same phenomena in southern England. On the road from Warminster to Devizes within a hundred years of the time he wrote there were twenty-two mansionhouses of sufficient note to be marked on the county map; in 1826 there were only seven. Upon his map of thirty miles of the valley of the Avon above Salisbury he marks the sites of fifty mansion-houses; forty-two of them were, when he wrote, mansion-houses no longer. A host of similar instances confront one in any countyhistory.

The evidence indeed is overwhelming, not only as to the strange way in which the number of the country

1 Earwaker's EAST CHESHIRE, i. 17.

2 Clarke's HUNDRED OF WANTING, p. 14.

gentry has crumbled and mouldered away, but that it was at the latter end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries that the change took place. The causes are no doubt complex. In part they were economical. The Civil War was responsible for much. Apart from its direct losses, the "slighted" houses, the destroyed woods, the bare farms, hundreds of squires had to face the fact, when the shouting was over for the return of his most Sacred Majesty, that their estates were saddled with legacies of the struggle in the shape of debts, the payment of which was hopeless, or which at best would cripple the family fortunes for a generation. What with the free gifts and loans to the King, and the exactions of the Parliament, many an honest gentleman, who had fought hard for the one and been correspondingly fined by the other, found himself in the position of Colonel Kirkby of Kirkby Ireleth, who "so encumbered his estate that neither he nor his descendants ever succeeded in clearing it of debt"; or like Sir John Danvers of Danby found himself forced to sell his estate to his own tenants. And it must be remembered that with a land-tax of four shillings in the pound on the gross value, and mortgage-interest at seven or eight per cent., he who went borrowing in Restoration days had a fair chance of fulfilling the old adage. Redress from the King was hopeless. The low prices of corn from 1666 to 1671 must have been the last straw to many an ancient house, already tottering on the verge of disaster. "They did talk much," noted Pepys on New Year's Day 1663, "of the present cheapness of corn, even to a miracle; so as their farmers can pay no rent but do fling up their lands.” Many estates went staggering on under the load of debt until the end of the 1 ANNALS OF CARTMEL, p. 77.

1

century. The list of Private Acts for the sale of lands,-one hundred and twenty-four in the thirty-one years of Charles the Second, two hundred and ten in the twelve years of William and Mary, two hundred and fifty-one in the short reign of Anne-is an instructive commentary. Well might Evelyn remark in 1795 that there were never so many private bills passed for the sale of estates, showing the wonderful prodigality and decay of families."

"the

There was always, too, before the eyes of the needy squire, who was naturally reluctant to part with his battered house and starved patrimony, the prospect, almost the certainty, that his family acres or their proceeds would yield him a far better return in trade than he could ever expect from farming. To trade indeed the smaller gentry had nothing of the modern aversion. The courtly mind of Chamberlayne was shocked to see sons of Baronets, Knights, and Gentlemen sitting in Shops and sometimes of Pedling Trades; "2 no such scruples troubled the poorer squires. They married traders' daughters; it was nothing strange for their younger sons to become clothiers or merchants. Many a one, even of those who had no need to turn trader, was like Squire Blundell of Crosby not above "going £40" with his sister and cousin "in an adventure to the Barbadoes." 3 And the profits were enormous. Squire Blundell in his adventure cleared a hundred per cent. ; something better this than trying to find a purchaser for a granary of unsaleable wheat.

If the squire did desire to sell, there were a host of purchasers ready to hand. The same influences which induce men now to invest in broad acres the fortunes made in the City or

2 PRESENT STATE OF ENGLAND, 1695, p. 261. 3 A CAVALIER'S NOTEBOOK p. 248.

at the Bar were at work, but with tenfold force. The political value of land was far higher than it is to-day. To purchase land was not only to obtain a safe investment in days when trustees' stocks, Government securities, and railway debentures were still in the far future, nor only, thanks to Orlando Bridgman, the surest method of securing the stability of a family against the caprices of fortune or the wastefulness of one's descendants; it was the sole method by which in politics the weight of one's money could be felt. And as the eighteenth century wore on and the profits to be derived from the new agriculture became apparent, the habit of buying up the smaller estates became a settled policy. Wealthier squires who had saved money, noble houses that had repaired their fortunes by a marriage into the City," East India nabobs, soldiers, chancellors, merchants, bankers, sinecurists, all were jostling each other in their anxiety to help the little squire out of his difficulties by taking over his acres. The Scotts, the Addingtons, the Finches, the Duncombes, the Clives, the Somers, the Pratts, the Yorkes, the Churchills, are a few and only a few of the great fortunes which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were turned into land.

Social causes hastened the downfall. A drinking-bout was looked upon as the fitting close to a day's pleasure, and drunkenness as the most venal of peccadilloes. One of Mr. Spectator's correspondents in his 474th number found himself compelled to protest against the forced tippling at these gatherings. Nor was drinking the only form of extravagance. Sir Jeffrey Notch, the gentleman of an ancient family "that came to a great estate some years before he had discretion, and run it out in hounds, horses, and cockfighting," was not

without his imitators among the smaller squires. There had come over country life a new scale and a new extravagance, which was viewed with undisguised dislike by such old-fashioned cavaliers as Squire Blundell. The habit of visits to London or a watering-place grew rapidly in the closing years of the seventeenth century. By 1710 the London season and the town-house were an accomplished fact, and Hanover and Grosvenor Squares, New Bond Street, the upper part of Piccadilly, and a host of adjoining streets, had sprung into being within seventy years of the death of Charles the Second for the housing of the gentry during the season.

The earthen pot comes off worst in the race down stream. In the struggle for survival it was naturally the smaller squires who went to the wall. Their position tended to grow more and more untenable. With the greater gentry who could afford a town-house, who were versed in the affairs of the day, wore the latest fashion in perruques, and could quote the new plays, the smaller squires must have fallen further and further out of touch; the pressure to sell must have proved stronger and stronger. Once the ranks were broken the process of destruction went on with increased and increasing speed, for the survivors found themselves more and more isolated. Some of them, we know, by judicious marriages, or by thrift and consequent purchasing out their neighbours, rose into the higher ranks of the squirearchy. Many without doubt simply dropped back into the yeomanry, and shared in the yeomanry's destruction. bulk were bought out; and upon the ruins of their order grew up the modern squire, with ten times their acreage and twenty times their rental.

The great

1 See on the whole subject Toynbee's LECTURES ON THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND.

It may be doubted whether any of the great agrarian changes of the eighteenth century was a more serious disaster to rural society. No doubt the "bonnet laird" in his habits and ideas resembled, as Macaulay puts it, the village miller or ale-house keeper of our own day. Probably, as Cobbett says, he was a bigoted Tory, an obstinate opponent of all improvement, and a hard master. But his function in rural society was not a trivial one. He was a link, and a link the need of which we are sorely feeling to-day, between the great proprietor and his tenants, attached to the one by the ties of tradition and status, to the other by community of interest. Un

courtly, rough, almost brutal as he was, his influence was a factor to be considered, and must have made the rule of one man impossible in rural society. He made for rural independence, even if that independence were only of a stolid and limited character. With all his faults and shortcomings, his destruction blotted an important feature out of country life. And occurring, as it did, as part and parcel, with the destruction of the yeoman and the peasant-farmer, of the agrarian revolution of the eighteenth century, it was the leading incident in a process which drained the rural districts of the very elements of rural life.

THE two wide glass doors that form the end of the little dining-room are thrown open, and the breakfast-table is set in the midst of the inrushing sunshine. Outside, beyond the steep edge of the descending garden, there is a luminous width of air and dimpled water, freckled with sunshine and with a multitude of boats, and streaked by the busy paddles of frequent ferrysteamers. The further shore recedes into an azure shadow, and the islands float uncertainly amid the shining stretches of water; the world for the nonce is ceiled and floored with a changing radiance of amethyst and silver, and there is no beauty of material things that can measure itself to-day against the large splendour of sunlight.

Below, at the foot of the cliff, one can hear the plash of water tumbling upon the rocks, and lapping against the edge of the steps that run steeply down from the garden to the beach, starting at the top between a clump of aloes and a scarlet trail of Virginia creeper, and fragrant on its way with overhanging heliotrope; the sound of plashing water, cool and softly restless, lapping the stone stair with an infinity of little noises and the deeper overtone of the incoming tide. But that is only one note of the chord that makes the music of the silence.

It is ten o'clock in the morning, and it is Toussaint; all the bells across the bay and behind us are ringing, and their voices fill the air with the crossing of many songs. There is one that is deep and sonorous that sings to us from over the water; and another, more ancient, that chimes

in with the broken voice of age; it is tremulous, one thinks, with the weight of many memories and the long vision of tears. Yet to-day it rings out with the rest of its neighbours, and it is only in a plaintive querulous undertone that one may hear sometimes the bitterness of its age, age, the touch of the forgotten, yet unforgotten past. "Combien je regrette... le temps perdu

For all the world is en fête to-day, and hungry moreover, for yesterday was maigre. There is not a cloud in the sky, nor a shadow across the golden sun; and though it is barely ten o'clock in the morning, and the 1st of November, it is as radiantly hot and serene as a July day at home should be. Yet we are not on the Riviera, not at all, only in a French village on the gray Breton coast, that wakes up into a short mad jollity in summer, and dozes peacefully through the rest of the uneventful year; and we shall have cold days yet, I doubt not, though it is a sheltered and a sunny corner, and keeps winter well at bay. But it is something to sit in the sunshine this November day, drowsily watching the boats on the bay below, and listening to the clash of bells pealing across the water; something to be pleasantly aware of the merry chatter in the street, and the pattering sabots of the happy children free from school; something to be lazily warm and sunlapped, while yonder, at home, it is winter already and cold even beside the fire.

It is a day for idle thought and idle speech, when one's fancy strays in the wake of every sunbeam, or is