edias and similar vehicles for the diffusion of
general knowledge. The love of natural beauty was beginning to move the
hearts of men, and it found expression at once in an entirely new school
of landscape painting, and in a more romantic and natural form of
poetry.

But against these marked instances of social amelioration must be set
some darker traits of national life. The public conscience had not yet
revolted against violence and brutality. The prize-ring, patronized by
Royalty, was at its zenith. Humanitarians and philanthropists were as
yet an obscure and ridiculed sect. The slave trade, though menaced, was
still undisturbed. Under a system scarcely distinguishable from slavery,
pauper children were bound over to the owners of factories and subjected
to the utmost rigour of enforced labour. The treatment of the insane
was darkened by incredible barbarities. As late as 1828 Lord Shaftesbury
found that the lunatics in Bedlam were chained to their straw beds, and
left from Saturday to Monday without attendance, and with only bread and
water within their reach, while the keepers were enjoying themselves.
Discipline in the services, in poorhouses, and in schools was of the
most brutal type. Our prisons were unreformed. Our penal code was
inconceivably sanguinary and savage. In 1770 there were one hundred and
sixty capital offences on the Statute-book, and by the beginning of the
nineteenth century the number had greatly increased. To steal five
shillings' worth of goods from a shop was punishable by death. A girl of
twenty-two was hanged for receiving a piece of woollen stuff from the
man who had stolen it.

In 1789 a woman was burnt at the stake for coining. People still living
have seen the skeletons of pirates and highwaymen hanging in chains. I
have heard that the children of the Bluecoat School at Hertford were
always taken to see the executions there; and as late as 1820 the dead
bodies of the Cato Street conspirators were decapitated in front of
Newgate, and the Westminster boys had a special holiday to enable them
to see the sight, which was thus described by an eye-witness, the late
Lord de Ros: "The executioner and his assistant cut down one of the
corpses from the gallows, and placed it in the coffin, but with the head
hanging over on the block. The man with the knife instantly severed the
head from the body, and the executioner, receiving it in his hands, held
it up, saying in a loud voice, 'This is the h