self-denying and diligent soul had satisfied himself as to the condition of every gaol in the different counties of England. Arriving at Warrington, where his friend Aikin practised surgery, Howard resolved to publish the results of his investigations. Eyres, a printer of Warrington, printed the manuscript under the personal supervision of the author, and Cadell, of the Strand, published it. The preface was dated from Cardington, in Bedfordshire, on April 5, 1777, and the work itself was dedicated to the Legislative Assembly, ‘in gratitude for the encouragement which they had given to the design.' Howard was particularly careful in causing copies to be supplied to such members of Parliament as were at all likely to proceed to an investigation of the appalling array of stubborn facts contained in them. In so doing he displayed much wisdom, for shortly before 'The State of Prisons' made its appearance, the Government had decided in favour of the detention of convicts under sentence of penal servitude in their own country, instead of inundating the colonies with them. By way of experiment, it was decided to send a certain number of criminals to the hulks, or floating prisons. The resolve was carried into execution. In the autumn of the year 1776, Howard visited the hulks, and, as might be expected, saw very much in the system to condemn ; but, as the scheme was new and temporary, he was unwilling to complain.' Two years later a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed for the consideration of the hulks system, and Howard, being among the number of those examined, described what had come under his own observation on board the 'Justitia '— the bad clothing, the worse food and accommodation; the sickness and death; the neglect and indifference-nothing was withheld. The exposure produced some effect, seeing that early in 1778 Howard found on examination that while much hideousness remained, much had been removed. Con

that alarmed the women. Place, who understood these matters, had collected all the halfpence he could, and by throwing a few at a time over the heads of the felons, set them scrambling, swearing, and all but fighting, and while it continued the women and the rest made their way as quickly as possible across the yard.-Add. MSS. Brit. Mus. 27826, p. 186.

vinced that the hulks system was in most respects a beneficial one, Parliament passed an Act for its continuance. What effect did the system produce in the reformation of criminals? Hear Dr. Patrick Colquhoun :-Most of them, instead of profiting by the punishment they have suffered, forgetting they were under sentence of death, and undismayed by the dangers they have escaped, immediately rush into the same course of degradation and warfare upon the public.'1

The seed which had been sown through the labours of Howard had not fallen on stony ground, though it was slow in coming up, and did not bear fruit until many years afterwards. Nor was the great philanthropist allowed to see the desire of his eyes dying as he did in a similar mission at Kherson in Russia in January, 1790. Two years before that event an expedition conveying more than seven hundred convicts had left England under command of Captain Philip, who, having selected the coast of Port Jackson as the place of landing, hoisted, on January 26, 1788, the British ensign on the beach of Sydney cove, and laid the foundations of the first penal settlement in New South Wales.

1 Police of the Metropolis, ed. 1800, p. 470.

VOL. II.

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CHAPTER XIX.

THE RELIGIOUS WORLD.

State of religion in England under Queen Anne-Under the first Georges --The National Church-Social condition of the Anglican clergy Pluralities Non-residence, episcopal and clerical -The Presbytery and the Hierarchy-Ordination--The Methodist revival – Church servicesChurch abuses-The congregation in church-The parish clerkSermons--Epitaphs-Bells-State of English Protestant nonconformity --The Evangelical revival and its results.

No sketch, however slight, of the social condition of England in the last century can lay any pretensions to completeness if it does not include some account, although it be but a very cursory one, of the religious world of the time.

The eighteenth century, following as it did almost immediately upon that season of thick moral darkness and spiritual depression which hung like a curtain over the country during the reign of Charles II.-the reaction against the domination of the martial saints who had in the eyes of the nation inherited the earth far too long-cannot be pronounced as an improvement upon it, if regarded from a religious and moral point of view. That the profligacy of the age was neither so open nor yet so unblushing may perhaps be admitted, but that its depravity was quite as deep is beyond all question. The court until long after the accession of George III. still continued to be tainted by much of that shameless licentiousness with which it had been characterised during the last forty years of the preceding century; leaders, both in Church and State, careless in their lives and ungodly in their conduct, neglected their duty and became corrupt and altogether abominable; while the public and private life of the aristocracy, of the upper

323 and middle classes, as of the lower orders, was marked by nothing so much as duplicity, conjugal infidelity, dissoluteness, and laxity.

As is always the case, the habits prevailing in other spheres at once acted on, and were influenced by, religion. The selfishness, the corruption, the worship of expediency, the scepticism as to all higher motives that characterised the politicians of the school of Walpole, the heartless cynicism reigning in fashionable life, which is so clearly reflected in the letters of Horace Walpole and Chesterfield, the spirit of a brilliant and varied contemporary literature, eminently distinguished for its measured sobriety of judgment and for its fastidious purity and elegance of expression, but for the most part deficient in depth, in passion, and in imagination, may all be traced in the popular theology.'

Bearing this state of things in mind, it is not suprising that piety should have decayed, that public truth and morality should have evaporated, and that the National Church, losing its hold upon the conduct and habits of all classes of society, should have soon sunk into a state of torpor and supineness not far removed from that into which Western Christendom had relapsed before the dawn of the Renaissance.

It would not be difficult to adduce, in confirmation of the truth of the foregoing observations, much evidence derived from contemporaneous sources. In July, 1710, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu expressed her conviction in a letter written to the Bishop of Salisbury, accompanying a copy of her translation of 'Epictetus,' that more atheists were to be found among the fine ladies of the times than among the lower sort of rakes.2 Addison, writing in No. 47 of the Freeholder,' declared that there was less appearance of religion in England than in any neighbouring State or kingdom.' A similar note was sounded in a clause of the memorial which was drawn up by Convocation, and presented to Queen Anne in 1711. It asserted that 'a due regard to religious persons, places, and things has scarce in any age been more wanting.' The poet Gay, in that amusing sketch satirically depicting the alarm and apprehension which was inspired in the bosoms of the London citizens by the comet that appeared in the heavens during the month of October, 1712,

Lecky's Hist. of England in Eighteenth Century, ii. 531. 2 Misc. Corr. ed. Lord Wharnecliffe, ii. 4.

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and which Whiston had foretold would utterly destroy the earth, gives a sly hit at the fact that the ordinances of religion were more honoured in the breach than in the observance, when he causes the fictitious author to observe:-'It was now I reflected with exceeding trouble and sorrow that I had disused family prayer for above five years-a custom of late entirely neglected by men of any business or station.' If the accession of the House of Hanover was a blessing to the country; it was not an unmixed blessing, since its two first monarchs contributed neither by precept nor by example towards the elevation of the tone of society, and brought no refining influences to bear upon the vice and immorality which flourished rampant in every direction. During the early years of Sir Robert Walpole's administration there was no joke which obtained greater currency among the upper classes of society than one to which Lady M. W. Montagu refers in a letter to the Countess of Mar (1723)—one which asserted that certain statesmen were then engaged in 'cooking up a Bill at a hunting-seat in Norfolk,' for the purpose of excising the word 'not' from the Decalogue and inserting it in every clause in the Creed. 'It certainly might be carried on with great ease,' observes her ladyship, 'the world being utterly revenu de bagatelles; and honour, virtue, and reputation, which we used to hear of in our nursery, are as much laid aside as crumpled ribbons.'

When George II. had been king about two years, the famous Charles de Secundat, Baron de Montesquieu, a man of great parts, visited England. He resided among the best society in the capital from 1729 till 1730, and was greatly impressed with all that he heard and saw of our social condition. There is no reason to doubt, therefore, that he was giving expression to what was nothing more than the plain truth when, in his 'Pensées Diverses,' speaking 'de la religion,' he said, 'Il n'y a pas de nation qui ait plus besoin de religion que les Anglais. Ceux qui n'ont pas peur de se perdre doivent avoir la peur d'être damnés,' nor when, in reference to his stay in England, he says, 'Je passe en France pour avoir peu de religion, en Angleterre pour en avoir trop.' Had Montesquieu