hich every day was exhibited in
the Gothic castles of the old chieftains! Four or five hundred knights
and squires in the domestic retinue of a warlike earl was not uncommon,
nor was the pomp of embroidery inferior to the profuse waste of their
tables; in both instances unequalled by all the mad excesses of the
present age.

While the baron thus lived in all the wild glare of Gothic luxury,
agriculture was almost totally neglected, and his meaner vassals fared
harder, infinitely less comfortably, than the meanest industrious
labourers of England do now; where the lands are uncultivated, the
peasants, ill-clothed, ill-lodged, and poorly fed, pass their miserable
days in sloth and filth, totally ignorant of every advantage, of every
comfort which nature lays at their feet. He who passes from the trading
towns and cultured fields of England to those remote villages of
Scotland or Ireland which claim this description, is astonished at the
comparative wretchedness of their destitute inhabitants; but few
consider that these villages only exhibit a view of what Europe was ere
the spirit of commerce diffused the blessings which naturally flow from
her improvements. In the Hebrides the failure of a harvest almost
depopulates an island. Having little or no traffic to purchase grain,
numbers of the young and hale betake themselves to the continent in
quest of employment and food, leaving a few, less adventurous, behind,
to beget a new race, the heir of the same fortune. Yet from the same
cause, from the want of traffic, the kingdom of England has often felt
more dreadful effects than these. Even in the days when her Henries and
Edwards plumed themselves with the trophies of France, how often has
famine spread all her horrors over city and village? Our modern
histories neglect this characteristic feature of ancient days; but the
rude chronicles of these ages inform us, that three or four times in
almost every reign was England thus visited. The failure of the crop was
then severely felt, and two bad harvests in succession were almost
insupportable. But commerce has now opened another scene, has armed
government with the happiest power that can be exerted by the rulers of
a nation--the power to prevent every extremity[29] which may possibly
arise from bad harvests; extremities, which, in former ages, were
esteemed more dreadful visitations of the wrath of Heaven than the
pestilence itself. Yet modern London is not so certainly defen