re also burnt at the stake by a law that was not repealed until
1794. Of the heads on Temple Bar, daily exposed to Johnson's eyes in his
beloved Fleet Street, we are reminded by an apposite quotation of
Goldsmith; and Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, who died as recently as
1855, remembered having seen one there in his childhood. The public
exhibition of offenders in the pillory was not calculated to refine the
manners of the people. It afforded a cruel entertainment to the mob, who
may be said to have baited these poor victims as they were accustomed to
bait bulls and bears. Every kind of offensive missile was thrown at
them, and sometimes the strokes proved deadly.

Men who could thus torture a human being were not likely to abstain
from cruelty to the lower animals. The poets indeed protested then, as
poets had done before, and always have done since, against the unmanly
treatment of the dumb fellow-creatures committed to our care, but their
voices were little heeded, and even the Prince of Wales visited
Hockley-in-the-Hole, in disguise, to witness the torturing of bulls.
'The gladiatorian and other sanguinary sports,' says the author of the
_Characteristics_, 'which we allow our people, discover sufficiently our
national taste. And the baitings and slaughters of so many sorts of
creatures, tame as well as wild, for diversion merely, may witness the
extraordinary inclination we have for amphitheatrical spectacles.'[7]

The majesty of the law was maintained by disembowelling traitors, by
cutting off the ears, or branding the cheeks of political offenders, and
by the penalties inflicted on Roman Catholics, and on Protestant
dissenters. Men who deemed themselves honourable gained power through
bribery and intrigue. It was through a king's mistress and a heavy bribe
that Bolingbroke was enabled to return from exile; Chesterfield
intrigued against Newcastle with the Duchess of Yarmouth; and clergymen
eager for promotion had no scruple in paying court to women who had lost
their virtue.

Never, unless perhaps during the Civil War, was the spirit of party more
rampant in the country. Patriotism was a virtue more talked about than
felt, and in the cause of faction private characters were assailed and
libels circulated through the press. Addison, who did more than any
other writer to humanize his age, saw the evil of the time and struck a
blow at it with his inimitable humour. The _Spectator_ discovers, on his
journey to Sir