"'Really, I declare 'pon my honor it's true' (said Ly. Bridget Talmash to the Dutchess of Bolton) 'that a great many People now go to Chapel. I saw a vaste number of Carriages at Portman Chapel last Sunday.' The Dut. told her she always went to Chapel on Sunday, and in the country read Prayers in the Hall to her Family." But where the Evangelical influence reached, it brought a marked abstention from such forms of recreation as dancing, card-playing, and the drama. Sunday was observed with a Judaical rigour. A more frequent attendance on public worship was accompanied by the revival of family prayers and grace before meat. Manuals of private devotion were multiplied. Religious literature of all kinds was published in great quantity. A higher standard of morals was generally professed. Marriage was gradually restored in public estimation to its proper place, not merely as a civil bond or social festival, but as a chief solemnity of the Christian religion. There was no more significant sign of the times than this alteration. In the eighteenth century some of the gravest of our social offences had clustered round the institution of marriage, which was almost as much dishonoured in the observance as in the breach. In the first half of that century the irregular and clandestine weddings, celebrated without banns or licence in the Fleet Prison, had been one of the crying scandals of the middle and lower classes; and in the second half, the nocturnal flittings to Gretna Green of young couples who could afford such a Pilgrimage of Passion lowered the whole conception of marriage. It was through the elopement of Miss Child--heiress of the opulent banker at Temple Bar--from her father's house in Berkeley Square (now Lord Rosebery's) that the ownership of the great banking business passed eventually to the present Lord Jersey; and the annals of almost every aristocratic family contain the record of similar escapades.