The reason for this seems plain enough. The eighteenth century had been distinguished for the coarseness of its language, manners, and morals. The upper classes combined a good deal of old world politeness with a surprisingly frank disregard of moral considerations. There were conspicuous exceptions, but the singular impunity enjoyed by men of high rank and position made them often callous as to the opinion of their inferiors. The lower classes were accustomed to brutal sports and cruel amusements and unrestrained by any effective police, besides being entirely uneducated. The middle class, which was daily becoming more and more important to the life of the nation owing to the rapid development of trade and manufacture, was gradually monopolising the political control of the nation. It was in this class that the evangelical and Methodist movements had achieved their chief successes; and those who composed it were fundamentally serious minded. Under the Regency and during the reign of George IV and William IV the court was essentially aristocratic, and neither monarch gave it any prestige on the side of morality. Queen Victoria took a middle-class view of life; domesticity was the key-note of her reign. The Prince Consort was the model husband and father, so correct, so admirable, so exemplary, that even now we are apt to forget how able and wise a man he was and how heavy a debt his adopted country owes him. One of the effects of the Victorian age was that England awoke to a most amazing sense of its own virtue. People were continually contrasting the present with the past, to the disadvantage of the latter. In the ‘forties,’ and even ‘fifties,’ many people could remember the time when it was unsafe to approach London after dusk on account of the highwaymen, when men, women, and children were hung by the score for the merest trifles, when duels were of almost daily occurrence, when the grossest abuses existed in church and state, when immorality in the highest quarters flaunted itself unashamed before the world. Old men could recall a time when to get drunk and use the foulest possible language was almost necessary, if a man were not to be written down as a milksop. And the contrast was almost too delightful to the newly emancipated middle class in their neat villas with trim gardens, whence they went to church decorously, sat in their select pew, their large families around them, and thanked God that they were not as other people’s wicked ancestors had been.