nce and brutality reigned in the cottage. Drunkenness
reigned in palace and cottage alike. Gambling, cockfighting, and
bullfighting were the amusements of the people. Political life, which,
if it had been pure and vigorous, might have made up for the absence of
spiritual influences, was corrupt from the top of the scale to the
bottom: its effect on national character is pourtrayed in Hogarth's
_Election_. That property had its duties as well as its rights, nobody
had yet ventured to say or think. The duty of a gentleman towards his
own class was to pay his debts of honour and to fight a duel whenever
he was challenged by one of his own order; towards the lower class his
duty was none. Though the forms of government were elective, and
Cowper gives us a description of the candidate at election time
obsequiously soliciting votes, society was intensely aristocratic, and
each rank was divided from that below it by a sharp line which
precluded brotherhood or sympathy. Says the Duchess of Buckingham to
Lady Huntingdon, who had asked her to come and hear Whitefield, "I
thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist
preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured
with disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to
level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to
be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on
the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting; and I cannot but
wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at
variance with high rank and good breeding. I shall be most happy to
come and hear your favourite preacher." Her Grace's sentiments towards
the common wretches that crawl on the earth were shared, we may be
sure, by her Grace's waiting-maid. Of humanity there was as little as
there was of religion. It was the age of the criminal law which hanged
men for petty thefts, of life-long imprisonment for debt, of the stocks
and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors,
of the unreformed prison system, of the press-gang, of unrestrained
tyranny and savagery at public schools. That the slave trade was
iniquitous hardly any one suspected; even men who deemed themselves
religious took part in it without scruple. But a change was at hand,
and a still mightier change was in prospect. At the time of Cowper's
birth, John Wesley was twenty-eight and Whitefield was seve