ong those who took up the question was Mr. Henry Fordham, then a
young man at Hertford.

Let me conclude this reference to sweeps with a story from this
district, vouched for by the old newspapers at the time, viz., that in
one of the villages in the district was a chimney sweep who had sixteen
sons all following the same occupation!

Among outside agencies which broke in upon the old domestic life of the
period none was more potent or omnipresent than the tax-gatherer. You
could not be born, married, or buried, without the consent of the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, so to speak; for there was at the end of
the last century a 3d. tax upon births, marriages, and burials, and it
{79} appears that the clergy were allowed a commission of 2s. in the L,
for the collection of the tax. Among the objections to it was that the
poor man could not sometimes pay it without borrowing the money, and
yet was made equal with the rich in regard to the amount. Even
occupiers of cottages had to pay the window tax, unless exempt by the
receipt of parish relief, but, by many thoughtful men of the time, its
application to agricultural labourers was looked upon with disfavour.

About the end of the last century there was hardly anything that a man
could see, taste, handle, or use, that was not taxed--windows, candles,
tobacco pipes, almanacs, soap, newspapers, hats, bricks, domestic
servants, watches, clocks, hair powder, besides nearly every article of
food! All these in turn came under the hands of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, till, as Sydney Smith said, "the school-boy had to whip a
taxed top, the youth drove a taxed horse with taxed bridle along a
taxed road; the old man poured medicine, which had paid 7 per cent.,
into a spoon that had paid 15; fell back upon a chintz bed which had
paid 22 per cent., and expired in the arms of an apothecary who had
paid a licence of L100 for the privilege of putting him to death; and
immediately his property paid 2 to 10 per cent., and his virtues were
handed down to posterity on taxed marble."

The extravagant vagaries in the fashions of dressing the hair formed a
tempting point for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to come down upon,
and the tax in the form of "hair-powder certificates," at the rate of a
guinea a head, occasioned perhaps more commotion in fashionable circles
than any other tax. It was a profitable source of revenue owing to the
great use of hair-powder, and at the same time it