of our iron was also imported. No beds of rock-salt had been worked,-edible salt was imported,-for the wretched produce of our brine-pits was nauseous and injurious. And yet salt was of prime necessity at a period when the rotation of crops was unknown, and winter-food for sheep and cattle not being raised, the greater number were killed and salted at Martinmas. The coal-mines were limited in their produce, partly by the want of machinery, and partly by the difficulty of communication. The greater part of the coal consumed in the kingdom was sea-borne-hence called sea-coal; but occasionally pack-horses travelled with coal inland, for the supply of blacksmiths' forges. Factories, in the modern sense, did not exist. Even the great wool manufacture was, in most of its processes, domestic. Weavers left their shuttles idle in their cottages, when harvest work demanded their labour in the fields; and this, not as a matter of choice, but under legal compulsion.

The Norwich and the Yorkshire looms were the subjects of minute regulation, as to wages and material. We imported spun silk for our Spitalfields looms. John Lombe built his Derby silk-mill in 1717. An ingenious adventurer, who made the attempt in 1702, was ruined. Our linen fabrics were imported from France, Germany, and Holland, and so were our threads. We manufactured hats and glass only after the accession of William the Third, when the war with France drove us to employ our capital and skill in their production. It was the same with paper. Before the Revolution there was little made in England, except brown paper. We imported our writing and printing papers from France and Holland. We imported our crockery-ware, which retained the name of Delft, even when our Potteries had begun to work. Sheffield produced its old whittle '-the common knife for all uses; but the finer cutlery was imported from France. We obtained most of our printing-type from Holland-not that England wanted letter-founders, but that their characters were so rude, that our neighbours supplied us, till an ingenious. artist, William Caslon, established his London foundry in

1720. There was a demand then for types, for the age of newspapers was. come. When England was restricted to twenty master-printers-as it was before the Revolutionthere was little need of skilful type-founders.

In the May-Fair of 1701 the news-venders would be busy. There would be half-a-dozen papers bearing the name of 'Intelligence,' or 'Intelligencer;' there would be similar varieties of the family of 'Flying Post,' and Mercury,' and 'Observator;' there would be 'Dawks's News Letter, done upon good writing-paper, and blank space left, that any gentleman may write his own private business.' Each of these would hold less matter than a modern column. The writers upon Dawks's good writing-paper,' or any other paper, were not very numerous in a population of five millions. The Postage revenue was about sixty thousand pounds, which, averaging the rate of letters at threepence each (single sheets, carried under eighty miles, were twopence), would give us about a letter annually for each of the population; about two-thirds of the letters now delivered in one week; which show about eighteen letters annually for each of the population. The newspapers in May-Fair each had two or three advertisements—some of books, some of luxuries, which are now necessaries of life -such as tea at twenty-four shillings a pound, loaf sugar at eleven shillings, coffee at six shillings. All had advertisements of lotteries. Every description of retail traffic was then carried on by gambling. At the Eagle and Child,' on Ludgate Hill, all sorts of fine silks and goods were to be had at seven pounds ten shillings a ticket; Mrs. Ogle's plate, value twenty pounds, was at sixpence a ticket; Mr. William Morris, the fairest of dealers,' draws his lottery out of two wheels by two parish-boys, giving one hundred pounds for half-a-crown. There were lotteries drawing in May-Fair, and the thimble-rig was not. unknown.

The May morning of 1701 sees the busy concourse in Brook Field of sellers and buyers. There is the Jew from Houndsditch and the grazier from Finchley. From the

distant Bermondsey comes the tanner, with his peltry and his white leather for harness. Beer is freely drunk. Tobacco perfumes, the air from one sunrise to another. It is almost difficult to believe that eleven million pounds of

tobacco were then annually consumed by a population of five millions; but so say the records. The graziers and the drovers were hungry: they indulged themselves with the seldom-tasted wheaten bread of the luxurious Londoners. They had waded through roads scarcely prac

ticable for horsemen. Pedestrians, who kept the crown of the causeway, on whose sides were perilous sloughs and foul ditches, travelled in company, for fear of the frequent highwayman and footpad. Happy were they when the sun lighted the highway from Tottenham or Tyburn; for not a lantern was to be seen, and the flickering link made the morning fog seem denser than its reality. That May-day morning has little cheerfulness in its aspect.

The afternoon comes. Then the beasts and the leather are sold-and the revelry begins. It lasts through the night. We need not describe the brutality of the prizefighting, nor record the licentiousness of the Merry Andrew. All the poetical character of the old May sports was gone. It was a scene of drunkenness and quarrel. May-Fair became a nuisance. The Grand Jury presented it seven years after; and the puppets, and the rope-dancers, and the gambling-booths, the bruisers, and the thieves, had to seek another locality. When Fashion obtained possession of the site, the form of profligacy was changed. The thimble-riggers were gone; but Dr. Keith married all comers to his chapel, with no questions asked, for a guinea, any time after midnight till four in the afternoon.'

JOHN AUBREY, AND HIS EMINENT MEN.

THERE are few books that I take up more willingly in a vacant half-hour, than the scraps of biography which Aubrey, the antiquary, addressed to Anthony à Wood; and which were published from the original manuscripts in the Ashmolean Museum, in 1813. These little fragments are so quaint and characteristic of the writer-so sensible in some passages and so absurd in others--so full of what may be called the Prose of Biography, with reference to the objects of historical or literary reverence,—and so encomiastic with regard to others whose memories have wholly perished in the popular view-that I shall endeavour to look at them a little consecutively, as singular examples of what a clever man thought of his contemporaries and of others who were famous in his day, whether their opinions accord with, or are opposed to, our present estimates. And first of John Aubrey himself.

Our common notion of the man used to be that he was a dreaming, credulous old gossip, with some literary pretensions, and nothing more. He believed in astrology, in omens, dreams, apparitions, voices, knockings. Is he without followers, even at this hour? Anthony à Wood, who was under many obligations to his correspondence, calls him a shiftless person, roving and maggoty-headed.' 'Roving,' indeed he was; for he wandered up and down the land when travelling was not quite so easy as now; and, according to the testimony of Gough, an antiquary after the sober fashion of the race, 'first brought us acquainted with the earliest monuments on the face of the country-the remains of Druidism, and of Roman, Saxon,