ce in Royston to be referred to hereafter.

But though the "era of hope," in the particular example of its
application in France, failed miserably and deservedly of realising the
great romantic dream-world of human happiness without parchments and
formularies, it had at least this distinction, that it was in a sense
the birth-hour of the individual with regard to civil life, just as
Luther's bursting the bonds of Monasticism had been the birth-hour of
the {5} individual in religious life. The birth, however, was a feeble
one, and in this respect, and for the social and domestic drawbacks of
a trying time, it is interesting to look back and see how our fathers
carried what to them were often felt to be heavy burdens, and how
bravely and even blithely they travelled along what to us now seems
like a weary pilgrimage towards the light we now enjoy. Carrying the
tools of the pioneer which have ever become the hands of Englishmen so
well, they worked, with such means as they had, for results rather than
sentiment, and, cherishing that life-germ planted by Adam Smith,
earned, not from the lips of Napoleon as is commonly supposed, but from
one of the Revolutionary party--Bertrand Barrere in the National
Assembly in 1794, when the tide of feeling had been turned by events
the well-known taunt--"let Pitt then boast of his victory to a nation
of shop-keepers." The instinct for persistent methodical plodding work
which extracted this taunt, afterwards vanquished Napoleon at Waterloo,
and enabled the English to pass what, when you come to gauge it by our
present standard, was one of the darkest and most trying crises in our
modern history. We who are on the light side of that great cloud which
brooded over the death and birth of two centuries may possibly learn
something by looking back along the pathway which our forefathers
travelled, and by the condition of things and the actions of men in
those trying times--learn something of the comparative advantages we
now enjoy in our public, social, and domestic life, and the
corresponding extent of our responsibilities.

In the following sketches it is proposed to give, not a chapter of
local history, as history is generally understood, but what may perhaps
best be described by the title adopted--glimpses of the condition of
things which prevailed in Royston and its neighbourhood, in regard to
the life, institutions, and character of its people, during the
interesting period which i