a hero; but it is
significant to remember that the two principal of these idols were
_calves_--Sacheverel, namely, and Jack Wilkes. The wars in that age were
almost entirely destitute of imaginative interest; those of Marlborough,
such as Blenheim and Ramilies, were just large games of chess, played on
a blood-red board--who now ever thinks or talks about the battles of
Fontenoy or Minden?--some tolerable sea-fights, indeed, there were; on
the heights of Abraham a brave man expired in the arms of victory, and a
glory still lingers on the field of Prestonpans and on the bloody plains
of Culloden; but there was no Trafalgar, no Waterloo, and no Inkermann.
The manners of the age were not only dissolute, but grossly and brutally
so. In England, there was no Burns to cast a gleam of poetry even on the
orgies of dissipation; all was as coarse as it was corrupt; it was a
drunken dance of naked satyrs: and disgust at this state of things, we
believe, principally made Burke, contrasting the Continent with England,
to utter the paradox, that vice, by losing all its grossness, lost half
its evil. Foreigners were then, as they are still, more depraved in
morals and filthier in personal habits than we; but they had, and have,
a grace, a politeness, a reticence, and an ease, which gilded, if they
did not lessen, the abominations. The religion of the country was
reduced to a very low point of depression; the churches were filled with
drowsy divines, drowsily reading what they never wrote, to yet drowsier
congregations; many of the upper classes, and of the literary men, were
avowed infidels; till the rise of Methodism, religious enthusiasm in any
class did not exist--even in Scotland the load of patronage had nearly
extinguished the old fires of Covenanting zeal--the state of the lower
classes was deplorable, so far, at least, as mental culture and morality
were concerned; cock-fighting, grinning through collars, bull-baiting,
and hard drinking, were their main amusements; the hallowing and
spiritualising influences of the Sabbath-day were scarcely known; and
the upper ranks had no feeling that they were in some measure
responsible for the ignorance and the vice of the lower, and were bound
to circulate education and religion amidst their masses; indeed, how
could they be expected, since they themselves had little education and
less religion to circulate? In science, philosophy, and general
literature, there prevailed a partial syncope