Macaulay, in his famous third chapter, writes of the “gross, uneducated, untravelled country gentleman” of Charles the Second’s reign; a “man with the deportment, the vocabulary, and the accent of a carter”; a man whose “ignorance and uncouthness, whose low tastes and gross phrases would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian.” It is not easy to reconcile this description with the accounts given by contemporary observers. The portrait certainly does not err on the side of flattery, and those who are familiar with the printed literature and unpublished records of that age will ask themselves with amazement whether it can be a likeness. Macaulay asserts that the country squire of that period never visited London and never opened a book. Contemporary writers tell us that the latter was always riding post to London, and spending his substance there when he ought to have been occupied with the care of his estate, and that there were more private libraries in England than in any other country in Europe. Now it is possible, of course, that Macaulay knew more about the manners of that age than did the people who lived in it; but it is also possible that he wilfully and maliciously caricatured a class of men which he had political reasons for disliking. The “gross, uneducated, untravelled country gentleman” was usually a Tory. [Illustration: Country Gentlemen on the London Road.] It may readily be admitted that in the seventeenth century country gentlemen could understand the local dialect, for intercourse with their tenants and the servants and labourers in their employ would otherwise have been difficult or impossible, and that the accent of some Yorkshire squires might betray their origin as surely as that of some Irish gentlemen to-day. But life in the country is no proof of rusticity, and everyone who speaks with a brogue is not necessarily a carter. At the time of which Macaulay writes, civilization was not confined to London. York and Derby, to the inhabitants of those counties, were “town” in the same sense that London is to their descendants. London had not yet gathered to itself all the business, the fashion, and the culture of the nation, and country gentlemen still flocked in winter to cities which had once, perhaps, been the capitals of independent kingdoms, and were even now centres of society, of learning, and of government.