e been always playing on some whimsical appellative by which
he characterised his ministers and favourites, analogous to the notions of
a huntsman. Many of our writers, among them Sir Walter Scott, have
strangely misconceived these playful appellatives, unconscious of the
origin of this familiar humour. The age was used to the coarseness. We did
not then excel all Europe, as Addison set the model, in the delicacy of
humour; indeed, even so late as Congreve's time, they were discussing its
essential distinction from wit.]

The men were dissolved in all the indolence of life and its wantonness;
they prided themselves in traducing their own innocence rather than
suffer a lady's name to pass unblemished.[B] The marriage-tie lost
its sacredness amid these disorders of social life. The luxurious
idlers of that day were polluted with infamous vices; and Drayton, in the
"Moon-calf," has elaborately drawn full-length pictures of the lady and
the gentleman of that day, which seem scarcely to have required the
darkening tints of satire to be hideous--in one line the Muse describes
"the most prodigious birth"--

He's too much woman and She's too much man.

[Footnote B. The expression of one of these gallants, as preserved by
Wilson, cannot be decently given, but is more expressive, p. 147.]

The trades of foppery, in Spanish fashions, suddenly sprung up in this
reign, and exhibited new names and new things. Now silk and gold-lace
shops first adorned Cheapside, which the continuator of Stowe calls "the
beauty of London;" the extraordinary rise in price of these fashionable
articles forms a curious contrast with those of the preceding reign.
Scarfs, in Elizabeth's time, of thirty shillings value, were now wrought
up to as many pounds; and embroidered waistcoats, which in the queen's
reign no workman knew how to make worth five pounds, were now so rich and
curious as to be cheapened at forty. Stowe has recorded a revolution in
shoe-buckles, portentously closing in shoe-roses, which were puffed knots
of silk, or of precious embroidery, worn even by men of mean rank,
at the cost of more than five pounds, who formerly had worn gilt copper
shoe-buckles.

In the new and ruinous excess of the use of tobacco, many consumed three
or four hundred pounds a year. James, who perceived the inconveniences of
this sudden luxury in the nation, tried to discountenance it, although the
purpose went to diminish his own scanty revenue. Nor was this