with flowing cravats—or falls, as they were called—and hanging ruffles of Mechlin or other lace. Then there were the shoes—the beaux wore them—with red heels and silver or brilliant buckles; and, again, the sword-hilt, band, and knot, allowed of a variety of dainty devices, the sword-hilt being sometimes of plain steel or silver only, but sometimes gilt and jewelled. No record remains to us of the great ladies who gave the encouragement of their presence to the fashion of the Hampstead Wells in those early years; but we know that Addison, and Garth, and Steele, and Arbuthnot, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Swift, and all the Kit-Cats, were of the company. And their presence there has made the Heath and Well Walk classic ground for all who love the eighteenth century. It was a time of lordly bows, deep curtseys, stately manners, and coarse speech, and the day of depraved morality and affected sentiment. Women in want of an expletive had hardly given up the use of oaths; Her Grace of Marlborough habitually retained them; and men felt but little restriction in the presence of women. Indecent equivoke and _double entendre_ were thought witty even in good society, and judging from Swift’s correspondence with Lady Betty Germain and Miss Arbuthnot, there was a freedom of speech between the sexes that astonishes one. Modesty must have been relegated to the fan, for evidently it was not on guard in the ear any longer. Away from the temptations, engagements, and frivolities of town life, as housewives and mothers (to give them their due), these ladies took an active part in domestic affairs, and taught their children, harshly enough sometimes, the lesson of dutifulness and obedience—a lesson too much neglected in modern education. But for a woman to exhibit a love of learning or a predilection for its pursuit was to incur the suspicion and contempt of her own sex, and the derision of the other. Ordinarily women read, in the language of the day, ‘to kill time,’ and this amusement was chiefly supplied to them by the playwrights or the novels of Fielding or Mrs. Aphra Behn, works of fiction that taught their readers a new use for the squabs of the settee or sofa whenever a visitor was announced. The mission of the essayists who produced the _Spectator_ and _Guardian_ was to purify the manners of the times, to awaken an interest in literature for its own sake, and to show through the amusing medium of narrative and anecdote the meanness and wickedness of much that was going on unconcealed, and yet unnoticed, around them. It is said that the publication of these works exercised a perceptible influence on society, and produced a permanent improvement in morals, no mean mission, nor contemptible result, if they ever effected it.