than those of continental
countries. This was often remarked upon by foreign visitors, one of
whom observes that "among the common people the husbands seldom make
their wives work. As to the women of quality, they don't trouble
themselves about it." The position of the wife in middle-class society
has been set before us by Fielding in a satire that has in it much
of truth: "The Squire, to whom that poor woman had been a faithful
upper-servant all the time of their marriage, had returned that
behavior by making what the world calls a good husband. He very seldom
swore at her, perhaps not above once a week, and never beat her. She
had not the least occasion for jealousy, and was perfect mistress
of her time, for she was never interrupted by her husband, who was
engaged all the morning in his field exercises, and all the evening
with his bottle companions." Certainly home had come to have attached
to it a notion of greater sanctity than ever before, and women were
accorded their natural rights and position, with the respect and
deference in the tenderer relations of life, which signified much more
than the profuse chivalry of the Middle Ages or the mock courtesy of
the time of Charles II.

The English people were above all domestic; and the period, in its
emphasis upon this phase of social life,--the English home,--marks in
a way the beginning of that conception which is now regarded as being
at the very foundation of a secure society. While France was going on
in its iconoclastic way, destroying all things sacred in a mad desire
to seize for the Third Estate the rights which they realized belonged
to them, and the grasping of which was to cause French history to be
written in the blood and fire of the great Revolution, the English,
having passed out of the social depravity of the reign of Charles II.,
became eminently steady and conservative of those elements of social
progress which, in their case, unlike that of their French neighbors,
had already been secured for them by progressive and largely peaceful
measures.

It is interesting to note that the term "old maid" had now entered
into the popular vernacular, although "spinster," with its transferred
meaning, was the more respectful way of speaking of unmarried women.
"An old maid is now thought such a curse," says the author of the
_Ladies' Calling_, "as no Poetick Fury can exceed; looked on as the
most calamitous creature in nature. And I so far yield to the opinio