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they themselves were in their dead sleeps." Stow says that in Queen Mary's day one of each ward " began to go all night with a bell, and at every lane's end, and at the ward's end, gave warning of fire and candle, and to help the poor, and pray for the dead." This is the more poetical bellman of Milton's 'Il Penseroso: '

"Some still removed place will fit,

Where glowing embers through the room
Teach light to counterfeit a gloom;

Far from all resort of mirth,

Save the cricket on the hearth;

Or the bellman's drowsy charm,

To bless the doors from nightly harm."

Herrick, also, has given us the verses of the bellman of poetry, in one of the charming morsels of his Hesperides:'

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"From noise of scare-fires rest ye free,

From murders Benedicite;

From all mischances that may fright
Your pleasing slumbers in the night,

Mercy secure ye all, and keep
The goblins from ye while ye sleep.
Past one o'clock, and almost two,

My masters all, 'Good day to you!""

But, with or without a bell, the real prosaic watchman continued to make the same demand as his predecessors for lights, through a long series of years; and his demand tells us plainly that London was a city without lamps. But though he was a prosaic person, he had his own verses. He addressed himself to the He exhorted them to make their lanthorns" bright and clear." He told them how long their candles were expected to burn. And, finally, like a considerate lawgiver, he gave a reason for his edict. In a print which is of the time of James I. we have the watchman here represented, with the following lines underwritten :

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The making of lanthorns was a great trade in the early times. We clung to King Alfred's invention for the preservation of light with as reverend a love, during many centuries, as we bestowed upon his civil institutions. The horn

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of the favoured utensil was a very dense medium for illumination, but science had substituted nothing better; and, even when progressing people carried about a neat glass instrument with a brilliant reflector, the watchman held to his ponderous and murky relic of the past, making "night hideous" with his voice,

while he made "darkness visible" with his lanthorn. But, as we see, in the early days of lanthorns, when the cresset was being superseded by " Hang out your lights," there was a wonderful demand for these commodities; and upon the maids and their mistresses, who were nightly appealed to for the provision of the external light that was to protect the ward from thieves and murderers, must have rested a very serious responsibility of keeping "horns clear and bright," and securing the candle against "chinks," either made by "time" or bad manufacturers. We have an old print of Hans Schopper's before us, representing the lanthorn-shop; and it will be observed that the lady has taken this piece of furniture under her especial care.

Paris was in the same condition as London for a long period. The nightly passengers through the streets walked about with lanthorns; and it was only in times of alarm and imminent danger that ordinances were issued, commanding each occupier of a house to place a light in the window of his first floor. La Reinie, the first lieutenant-general of police, introduced public lanthorns in 1667. This was hailed as a great event, for a medal was struck upon the occasion, bearing the legend Urbis securitas et nitor. One lanthorn, lighted with candles, in the middle of each street, and one at each end, constituted the amount of the security and splendour which Louis XIV. and his minister of police bestowed upon the Parisians. We cannot exactly say whether Boileau had composed his sixteenth satire before this event, but about this period he describes the darkest wood as far less dangerous than the streets of Paris, in which the “lated traveller" would encounter four bandits as he turned a corner:

"Le bois le plus funeste et le moins fréquenté
Est au prix de Paris un lieu de sûreté.
Malheur donc à celui qu'une affaire imprévue
Engage un peu trop tard au détour d'une rue :
Bientôt quatre bandits, lui serrant les côtés,

La bourse-—.”

London was perhaps better off, with its general system of private lights, however imperfect that system might be. In 1694 a licence was granted by the corporation to certain persons" concerned and interested in glass-lights, commonly called or known by the name of convex lights," for the sole supply of the public lights in all public places in the city, for twenty-one years. Here, one would have thought, would have been the prosperous commencement of a system which would really have insured safety to the inhabitants of London. But when the lease was expired we hear no more of the glass-lights or convex lights; and every housekeeper whose house fronts any street or lane and is of the rent of ten pounds, and every person having the charge of a public building, are each required and obliged, in every dark night, from the twenty-ninth of September until the twenty-fifth day of March, to hang out one or more lanthorn or lanthorns, with sufficient cotton-wick candles lighted therein, and to continue the same burning in every such dark night, from the hour of six until the hour of eleven of the same night. The act of Common Council which makes these provisions tells us they are, "for securing the houses against robbers and thieves, for the prevention of murder, and the conveniency of passengers." Glorious provisions indeed were they for accomplishing those ends! When there were clouds over the moon, and whole streets and portions of streets were without light, because

the inhabitants were not rated at ten pounds, and there was no light at all after eleven o'clock, we must admire the sagacity of the civic authorities who thus proposed to put down robbery and murder. Defoe, who in many things was a century before his age, published a pamphlet in 1729, wherein he suggested a plan" by which our streets will be so strongly guarded, and so gloriously illuminated, that any part of London will be as safe and pleasant at midnight as at noon-day, and burglary totally impracticable." London continued to be strongly guarded by its" ancient and most quiet watchmen" for another hundred years; and the authorities began to think of rendering the streets illuminated “with a convenient and sufficient number of glass lamps," not until they had gone up in terror to George II., to implore " a speedy, rigorous, and exemplary execution of the laws upon the persons of offenders." This was in 1744. But we have

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something to say upon the period that intervened between the old days of Hang out your lights," and those semi-modern days when society, pretending to be in the most civilized condition, was really going backwards in many of the essential matters that constitute the "salt of life."

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It has been generally held that crimes of violence belong only to what are called the rudest states of society. They belong, unquestionably, to an imperfect state of civilization; but they may nevertheless exist under a condition which admits of great wealth amongst the higher individuals, a diffusion of wealth amongst the middle classes, and a certain refinement amongst those classes who are supposed to give the tone to an age. But they nevertheless indicate something radically wrong in the general social state-some imperfect application of the preventive forces which belong to a really civilized condition-some gross inequality in the distribution of freedom, and of the means for securing the comforts which are due even to the lowest class, conjoined with the inability, through the exercise of honest industry, to rise out of that class. These crimes are not always confined to the poorest, but spring out of the desire to employ the strong hand, under circumstances where mere brute force is a general indication of power, even amongst those whose peculiar interest, rightly understood, would be to show that no real power should be lawless. We can understand how a watch came to be established in London, when it was a common practice in this city that a hundred or more in a company, young and old, would make nightly invasions upon houses of the wealthy, to the intent to rob them; and if they found any man stirring in the city within the night that were not of their crew, they would presently murder him; insomuch that when night was come no man durst adventure to walk in the streets."* This was an age of general lawlessness; and the establishment of the watch in cities by Henry III. was the first step towards a preventive police. But it is not so easy to comprehend how, nearly five hundred years afterwards (in 1744), London should have been in such a state that the Lord Mayor and aldermen went up with an address to the king, representing "that divers confederacies of great numbers of evil-disposed persons, armed with bludgeons, pistols, cutlasses, and other dangerous weapons, infest not only the private lanes and passages, but likewise the public streets and places of usual concourse, and commit most daring outrages upon the persons of your Majesty's good subjects, whose affairs oblige them to pass through the streets, by terrifying, robbing, and wounding them; and these facts are frequently perpetrated at such

* Roger Hovenden, quoted by Stow in his Survey.

times as were heretofore deemed hours of security." If in the "hours of security" armed gangs thus destroyed the safety of ordinary life, what must they have been in the hours of darkness, when a feeble light was hung out here and there from six to eleven o'clock, and after that the city was surrendered to gloom and rapine? In the first fifty years of the eighteenth century we should assuredly have thought that society had settled into order and security. These atrocities could not have existed without a most lamentable weakness in the government. Everything was then left to the narrow-minded local authorities. There was no central power. The government (what a misnomer!) had nothing to do but to make war and to hang. The Lord Mayor and aldermen cried, "Hang, hang!" "Permit us, Sir, to express our hopes that a speedy, rigorous, and exemplary execution of the laws upon the persons of offenders, as they shall fall into the hands of justice, may, under your Majesty's princely wisdom, conduce greatly to the suppressing these enormities, by striking terror into the wicked, and preventing others from entering into such evil courses." And the king promised he would hang: "Nothing shall be wanting on my part to put the laws in execution, to support the magistrates rigorously to punish such heinous offenders." Some person, whose good deeds, like those of many others, have fallen into oblivion, suggested a wiser course; and Maitland, the historian of the city, from whose work we collect these remarkable facts, tells us, "this year was enacted another act of Parliament for making more effectual provision for enlightening the streets of this city." A mental illumination had been required before this desirable event. In the long interval between the vigour of despotism and the better vigour of sound legislation, London must have been anything but a pleasant abode. Under the one sway (in the latter days of Elizabeth for example), Fleetwood, the recorder, strung up a dozen cutpurses on a morning; and although he says, "It is grown for a trade now in court to make means for reprieves-twenty pound for a reprieve is nothing,"* yet he contrived to clear London for a season of the rogues, by dint of the halter and the whip. But then came the age of weakness-a necessary consequence of a government relaxing its discipline, in that regard for the "liberty of the subject" which was another name for its own ignorance and idleness. All the social pictures of the days of Anne and of the two first Georges exhibit a state of police much worse than the days of Elizabeth. London was then a prey not only to daring thieves, but to swaggering bullies and hired assassins, who had lost the old salutary terror of the Star-chamber, and despised the ordinary administration of justice. In the time of Charles II. Dryden was waylaid and beaten by a gang of ruffians hired by Rochester, as he walked home from Will's Coffeehouse to Gerrard Street. This was a solitary case. But the Spectator has left us the unquestionable evidence of the existence of "the Mohocks,"-a class that would appear as impossible to have existed in the London of the days of Anne as of those of George IV.: "An outrageous ambition of doing all possible hurt to their fellow-creatures is the great cement of their assembly, and the only qualification required in the members. In order to exert this principle in its full strength and perfection, they take care to drink themselves to a pitch that is beyond the possibility of attending to any motions of reason or humanity, then make a general sally, and attack all that are so unfortunate as to walk the streets through which they Ellis's Letters, First Series, vol. ii.

p. 299.

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