Revolution has accurately described the changes
which had taken place within his own recollection. He assures us that,
in his younger days, the gentlemen who visited the springs slept in
rooms hardly as good as the garrets which he lived to see occupied
by footmen. The floors of the dining rooms were uncarpeted, and were
coloured brown with a wash made of soot and small beer, in order to hide
the dirt. Not a wainscot was painted. Not a hearth or a chimneypiece
was of marble. A slab of common free-stone and fire irons which had cost
from three to four shillings were thought sufficient for any fireplace.
The best-apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and were
furnished with rushbottomed chairs. Readers who take an interest in the
progress of civilisation and of the useful arts will be grateful to the
humble topographer who has recorded these facts, and will perhaps wish
that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few
pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose
of letting us know how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors
looked. [102]

The position of London, relatively to the other towns of the empire,
was, in the time of Charles the Second, far higher than at present. For
at present the population of London is little more than six times the
population of Manchester or of Liverpool. In the days of Charles the
Second the population of London was more than seventeen times the
population of Bristol or of Norwich. It may be doubted whether any other
instance can be mentioned of a great kingdom in which the first city
was more than seventeen times as large as the second. There is reason to
believe that, in 1685, London had been, during about half a century, the
most populous capital in Europe. The inhabitants, who are now at least
nineteen hundred thousand, were then probably little more shall half a
million. [103] London had in the world only one commercial rival, now
long ago outstripped, the mighty and opulent Amsterdam. English writers
boasted of the forest of masts and yardarms which covered the river from
the Bridge to the Tower, and of the stupendous sums which were collected
at the Custom House in Thames Street. There is, indeed, no doubt that
the trade of the metropolis then bore a far greater proportion than at
present to the whole trade of the country; yet to our generation the
honest vaunting of our ancestors must appear almost ludicrous. The
shipp