England was a strange mixture of richness and poverty, of learning and superstition, of refined luxury and brutal amusements at that age. Hentzner describes how in a theatre built of wood he one day sat to listen to excellent music and noble poetry of tragedy or comedy, the next time he witnessed the cruel baiting of bulls and bears by English bull-dogs. "To this entertainment there often follows that of whipping a blinded bear, which is performed by five or six men standing around in a circle with whips, which they exercise upon him without any mercy, as he cannot escape from them because of his chain: he defends himself with all his force and skill, throwing down all who come within his reach, and tearing the whips out of their hands and breaking them. At these spectacles" (he writes in 1598) "the English are constantly smoking tobacco, and in this manner: they have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the farther end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder; putting fire to it they draw the smoke into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like to funnels." The writer has one of these Elizabethan pipes: it is made with an exceedingly small bowl, showing how precious was the weed which Raleigh had recently introduced. The pipes have been found by workmen employed on the banks of the Thames in Southwark. We must remember, in criticising the conduct of Elizabethan heroes, that they lived in a cruel age; that torture was still employed by the law, even to delicate ladies; that much of their sport was brutal, and much of their merriment gross and indelicate. There is, and there has been, a decided progress in the manners of Europeans; so that it is with a moral effort that we try to see things with their eyes and judge them with discrimination. For instance, many of their great seamen may in one aspect be regarded as pirates; for the great Queen sometimes did not sanction their raids over western waters until they had brought her some priceless spoil. The pirate was then knighted and commended for his valiant deeds of patriotism. Even along the coasts of England local jealousy set the galleys of the Cinque Ports in the south at making reprisals upon the traders of Yarmouth. When these depredations were made upon foreigners there were few who denounced them; for it became a kind of sport, an adventure well worth the attention of any squire's son, to snatch some rich prize from the wide ocean and distribute largesse on safely coming to port.