The roadways had not long been in this enviable condition; only, indeed, so recently as the days of George the Second had they been rescued from the bad state into which they had been suffered to fall during the civil wars, and, generally speaking, the English knew little or nothing of the art of road-making. The repairing of the high-roads was at the expense of them that used them. Neither rank nor dignity was exempted from the payment of tolls; the king himself was subject to them, and the turnpike would have been shut against his equipage if none of his officers paid the money before passing by. These high-roads had all along them a little raised bank, two or three feet broad, with a row of wooden posts whose tops were whitewashed so that the coachmen should see them at night. This was for the conveniency of foot-passengers. In places where the road was too narrow to admit of this arrangement, the proprietors of lands adjoining were obliged to give passage through their fields, which were all enclosed with tall hedges or with strong hurdles about four feet high, over which passengers leapt or climbed. Custom had so habituated the village girls to this exercise that they acquitted themselves in it with a peculiar grace and agility. The great attention of the English to the conveniency of foot-passengers had several causes. Firstly, they set the highest value upon the lives of their fellow-creatures, and in that peculiar circumstance they sacrificed to pleasure and conveniency. Secondly, their laws were not exclusively made and executed by persons who rode in their chariots. Thirdly, as the English carriages moved as swiftly in the country as slowly in the town, the meeting with persons who were so foolish or so ill-geared as to walk a-foot would have been disastrous to those wayfarers; and in so democratic a country as this the chariot-riders would have had a bad time in store for them for so small a matter as playing, as it were, the secular Juggernaut with pedestrians. Eventually this moralising Frenchman reached London through Rochester, which place was one long street inhabited solely by ships' carpenters and dockyard men. At Greenwich, the shores of Thames loomed upon his enraptured gaze, agreeably confounded with long lines of trees and the masts of ships, and then came delightful London, and that haven where he would be--ah! you guess it, do you not? It was Leicester Fields, _le Squarr de Leicesterre_ of a later generation of Frenchmen. XVII [Sidenote: MILTON]