on, and want;
and the nation, amid the prosperity of the kingdom in a long reign of
peace, was nourishing in its breast the secret seeds of discontent and
turbulence.

From the days of Elizabeth to those of the Charleses, Cabinet transmitted
to Cabinet the caution to preserve the kingdom from the evils of an
overgrown metropolis. A political hypochondriacism: they imagined
the head was becoming too large for the body, drawing to itself all the
moisture of life from the middle and the extremities. A statute against
the erection of new buildings was passed by Elizabeth; and from James to
his successors proclamations were continually issued to forbid any growth
of the city. This singular prohibition may have originated in their
dread of infection from the plague, but it certainly became the policy
of a weak and timid government, who dreaded, in the enlargement of
the metropolis, the consequent concourse of those they designated as
"masterless men,"--sedition was as contagious as the plague among the
many. But proclamations were not listened to nor read; houses were
continually built, for they were in demand,--and the esquires, with their
wives and daughters, hastened to gay or busy London, for a knighthood, a
marriage, or a monopoly. The government at length were driven to the
desperate "Order in Council" to pull down all new houses within ten miles
of the metropolis--and further, to direct the Attorney-General to indict
all those sojourners in town who had country houses, and mulct them in
ruinous fines. The rural gentry were "to abide in their own counties, and
by their housekeeping in those parts were to guide and relieve the meaner
people _according to the ancient usage of the English nation_." The
Attorney-General, like all great lawyers, looking through the spectacles
of his books, was short-sighted to reach to the new causes and the new
effects which were passing around. The wisest laws are but foolish when
Time, though not the lawyers, has annulled them. The popular sympathy was,
however, with the Attorney-General, for it was imagined that the country
was utterly ruined and depopulated by the town.

And so in the view it appeared, and so all the satirists chorused! for in
the country the ancient hospitality was not kept up; the crowd of
retainers had vanished, the rusty chimneys of the mansion-house hardly
smoked through a Christmas week, while in London all was exorbitantly
prosperous; masses of treasure were mel