anner in which statesmen and persons of condition
passed their time--and what with drinking, and dining, and supping, and
cards, wonder how they got through their business at all. They played all
sorts of games, which, with the exception of cricket and tennis, have
quite gone out of our manners now. In the old prints of St. James's Park,
you still see the marks along the walk, to note the balls when the Court
played at Mall. Fancy Birdcage Walk now so laid out, and Lord John and
Lord Palmerston knocking balls up and down the avenue! Most of those jolly
sports belong to the past, and the good old games of England are only to
be found in old novels, in old ballads, or the columns of dingy old
newspapers, which say how a main of cocks is to be fought at Winchester
between the Winchester men and the Hampton men; or how the Cornwall men
and the Devon men are going to hold a great wrestling match at Totnes, and
so on.

A hundred and twenty years ago there were not only country towns in
England, but people who inhabited them. We were very much more gregarious;
we were amused by very simple pleasures. Every town had its fair, every
village its wake. The old poets have sung a hundred jolly ditties about
great cudgel-playings, famous grinning through horse-collars, great
maypole meetings, and morris-dances. The girls used to run races clad in
very light attire; and the kind gentry and good parsons thought no shame
in looking on. Dancing bears went about the country with pipe and tabor.
Certain well-known tunes were sung all over the land for hundreds of
years, and high and low rejoiced in that simple music. Gentlemen who
wished to entertain their female friends constantly sent for a band. When
Beau Fielding, a mighty fine gentleman, was courting the lady whom he
married, he treated her and her companion at his lodgings to a supper from
the tavern, and after supper they sent out for a fiddler--three of them.
Fancy the three, in a great wainscoted room, in Covent Garden or Soho,
lighted by two or three candles in silver sconces, some grapes and a
bottle of Florence wine on the table, and the honest fiddler playing old
tunes in quaint old minor keys, as the Beau takes out one lady after the
other, and solemnly dances with her!

The very great folks, young noblemen, with their governors, and the like,
went abroad and made the great tour; the home satirists jeered at the
Frenchified and Italian ways which they brought back; but the gr