A more inconvenient reformation, and not a more sensible one, was set on foot by societies of tradesmen, who denounced to the magistrate all bakers that baked or sold bread on Sundays. Alum, and the variety of spurious ingredients with which bread, and indeed all wares, were adulterated all the week round, gave not half so much offence as the vent of the chief necessary of life on the seventh day. Indecent prints were prohibited: the Chief-Justice Mansfield caused to be seized at an auction a well-known tale, called “The Woman of Pleasure,” a work that simplified novels to their original intention. Some of the elders, too, of our own Church, seeing what harvests were brought into the tabernacles of Whitfield and Wesley by familiarizing God’s word to the vulgar, and by elevating vulgar language, had the discretion to apply the same call to their own lost sheep, and tinkled back their old women by sounding the brass of the Methodists. One Ashton, a quaint and fashionable preacher of the Orthodox, talked to the people in a phrase compounded of cant and politics: he reproved them for not coming to church, where “_God keeps a day, but sees little company_;” and informed them that “_our ancestors loved powder and ball, and so did our Generals; but the latter loved them for their hair and hands_.” Yet to do justice to better principles, the age had made some estimable improvements. Prize-fighting, in which we had horribly resembled the most barbarous and most polite nations, was suppressed by the Legislature. Hogarth had undertaken the cause of humanity, and painted satires on all species of cruelty. From France and Italy, we had adopted hospitals for foundlings; and from the dictates of nature, all manner of hospitals. Our stage grew chaste; indecency dared not to show its face in a modern comedy, though it still remained in possession of the old ones; and what is remarkable, having been tolerated when women went to the theatre in masks, preserved its hold, now they went without them. About this time, Lord Bute[19] obtained by the means of Pitt the place of Commissioner of Excise for Scott, the late Preceptor, to whom it had been promised. It was even wrested from a young Pelham, to whom Newcastle had actually given it. Lord Bute thought this service to Scott necessary, and had insisted warmly--otherwise Pitt shunned all interfering in the disposal of employments. The King, on the death of Princess Caroline, had voluntarily promised to continue her allowance to Princess Emily, who handsomely engaged to pay the same pensions and the same grants to the prisons that her sister Caroline had done. She had even desired to impart a large portion of it to her sister Mary of Hesse; but the King, while the vapour of munificence lasted, said he should take care of Mary. In a month’s time, the Duke of Newcastle was sent in form to notify to Princess Emily that the King retracted his promise, and should not continue to her the allowance of Princess Caroline.