There was little communication between town and town or between town and country. The rustic never left his native village unless he enlisted. Then he never returned. The mechanic lived out his life over his work on the spot where he was born and where he was brought up. The London shopkeeper never went farther afield than Hampstead, and generally found sufficient change of air at Bagnigge Wells or in Moorfields. If wealth and trade increased, which they did by leaps and bounds, it was still on the old lines: the City jealous of its rights, the masters keeping the wealth for themselves, and the men remaining in silence and submission. One important change may, however, be noted. The City had by this time ceased altogether to attract the younger sons of the country gentry; the old connection, therefore, between London and the counties was severed. The chief reason was that the continual wars of the century found employment and a career for all the younger sons in the services, and that the value of land went up enormously. Trade was no longer recruited from the better sort, class distinctions were deepened and more sharply defined even among the middle class: a barrister looked down upon a merchant, and would not shake hands with an attorney, while a simple clergyman would not associate with a man in business. Sydney Smith, for instance, refused to stay a night at a country-house because its owner was a banker and a tradesman. The real extent of the contempt with which trade was regarded, and the width of the breach between the court and the City, was illustrated when the corporation entertained the Queen on her accession at Guildhall, when the Lord Mayor and the corporation, the _givers of the feast_, were actually set down at a lower table separate from the Queen their guest! Think of that other great dinner chronicled above, where the mayor entertained four kings and played cards with them after dinner! In the picture of London just before the present age we will confine ourselves as much as possible to the life of the bourgeois. For the court, for the life of the aristocracy, the statesmen, the poets, the scholars, the artists--they are sufficiently written about elsewhere. Here we will keep as much as we can to the great mass of the London citizens who know nothing of court and noble, but are sober, hard-working, honest folk, their chief care being to pay their way, avoid bankruptcy, and amass a certain sum of money before they die; their chief subject of admiration being the man who leaves behind him a great fortune made in trade; their chief pleasures being those of the table. First, for the extent of the City.