Third-Class to London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 A Cambridge Election Party . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Triumphal Arch at Buntingford .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Triumphal Arch at Royston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Wimpole Mansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 {1} FRAGMENTS OF TWO CENTURIES. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.--"THE GOOD OLD TIMES." The Jubilee Monarch, King George III., and his last name-sake, had succeeded so much that was unsettled in the previous hundred years, that the last half of the 18th Century was a period almost of comparative quiet in home affairs. Abroad were stirring events in abundance in which England played its part, for the century gives, at a rough calculation, 56 years of war to 44 years of peace, while the reign of George III. had 37 years of war and 23 years of peace--the longest period of peace being 10 years, and of war 24 years (1793-1816). But in all these stirring events, there was, in the greater part of the reign, at least, and notwithstanding some murmurings, the appearance of a solidity in the Constitution which has somehow settled down into the tradition of "the good old times." A cynic might have described the Constitution as resting upon empty bottles and blunder-busses, for was it not the great "three-bottle period" of the British aristocracy? and as for the masses, the only national sentiment in common was that of military glory earned by British heroes in foreign wars. In more domestic affairs, it was a long hum-drum grind in settled grooves--deep ruts in fact--from which there seemed no escape. Yet it was a period in which great forces had their birth--forces which were destined to exercise the widest influence upon our national, social, and even domestic affairs. Adam Smith's great work on the causes of the wealth of nations planted a life-germ of progressive thought which was to direct men's minds into what, strange as it may seem, was almost a new field of research, viz., the relation of cause and effect, and was commercially almost as much a new birth and the opening of a flood gate of activity, as was that of the printing press at the close of the Middle Ages; and, this once set in motion, a good many other things seemed destined to follow.