[Sidenote: Private life in different classes of society.] To a debased public life private life corresponded. The houses of the rural population were huts covered with straw-thatch; their inmates, if able to procure fresh meat once a week, were considered to be in prosperous circumstances. One-half of the families in England could hardly do that. Children six years old were not unfrequently set to labour. The lord of the manor spent his time in rustic pursuits; was not an unwilling associate of pedlars and drovers; knew how to ring a pig or shoe a horse; his wife and daughters "stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and made the crust for the venison pasty." Hospitality was displayed in immoderate eating, and drinking of beer, the guest not being considered as having done justice to the occasion unless he had gone under the table. The dining-room was uncarpeted; but then it was tinted with a decoction of "soot and small beer." The chairs were rush-bottomed. In London the houses were mostly of wood and plaster, the streets filthy beyond expression. After nightfall a passenger went at his peril, for chamber windows were opened and slop-pails unceremoniously emptied down. There were no lamps in the streets until Master Heming established his public lanterns. As a necessary consequence, there were plenty of shoplifters, highwaymen, and burglars. [Sidenote: General immorality and brutality.] As to the moral condition, it is fearfully expressed in the statement that men not unfrequently were willing to sacrifice their country for their religion. Hardly any personage died who was not popularly suspected to have been made away with by poison, an indication of the morality generally supposed to prevail among the higher classes. If such was the state of society in its serious aspect, it was no better in its lighter. We can scarcely credit the impurity and immodesty of the theatrical exhibitions. What is said about them would be beyond belief if we did not remember that they were the amusements of a community whose ideas of female modesty and female sentiment were altogether different from ours. Indecent jests were put into the mouths of lively actresses, and the dancing was not altogether of a kind to meet our approval. The rural clergy could do but little to withstand this flood of immorality. [Sidenote: Degraded condition of the lower clergy.] Their social position for the last hundred years had been rapidly declining; for, though the Church possessed among her dignitaries great writers and great preachers, her lower orders, partly through the political troubles that had befallen the state, but chiefly in consequence of sectarian bitterness, had been reduced to a truly menial condition. It was the business of the rich man's chaplain to add dignity to the dinner-table by saying grace "in full canonicals," but he was also intended to be a butt for the mirth of the company. "The young Levite," such was the phrase then in use, "might