VII. MID-VICTORIANISM. W. M. THACKERAY 261 VIII. SPORT, AND RURAL ENGLAND 302 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND LECTURE I LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ILLUSTRATED BY THE CAREER OF JOHN WESLEY In order to depict social life in England in the eighteenth century I am going to take the career of one of its most remarkable men, though you may be surprised at the choice I have made. For the eighteenth century was an eminently social age and the stage is crowded with figures of men and women of the world. Their letters, their talk, their scandals, their amusements have come down to us in profusion; and it is not difficult for us to imagine ourselves in their midst. You may well ask me why I did not select a really brilliant character to expound the life of this time. I might for example have taken Lord Chesterfield or Horace Walpole, or Boswell, that most observant of men, or the great character whom he immortalised. Or I might have selected others less known, but equally interesting, and rather than a revivalist preacher like John Wesley. I had written thus far when I came across the following words by the British man of letters, Mr. Birrell: “How much easier to weave into your page the gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven it with a heartless jest of George Selwyn, to make it blush with the sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with the rhetoric of Burke, to humanise it with the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay of the constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of Bristol, or to the bleak moors near Burslem, when he met face to face in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity the living men, women, and children, who made up the nation.”