is pillow. If he was in easy circumstances,
his clothing was of leather, if poor, a wisp of straw wrapped round his
limbs kept off the cold. It was a melancholy social condition when
nothing intervened between reed cabins in the fen, the miserable wigwams
of villages, and the conspicuous walls of the castle and monastery. Well
might they who lived in those times bewail the lot of the ague-stricken
peasant, and point, not without indignation, to the troops of pilgrims,
mendicants, pardoners, and ecclesiastics of every grade who hung round
the Church, to the nightly wassail and rioting drunkenness in the
castle-hall, secure in its moats, its battlements, and its warders. The
local pivots round which society revolved were the red-handed baron,
familiar with scenes of outrage and deeds of blood, and the abbot,
indulging in the extreme of luxury, magnificent in dress, exulting in
his ambling palfrey, his hawk, his hounds. Rural life had but little
improved since the time of Caesar; in its physical aspect it was
altogether neglected. As to the mechanic, how was it possible that he
could exist where there were no windows made of glass, not even of oiled
paper, no workshop warmed by a fire. For the poor there was no
physician, for the dying the monk and his crucifix. The aim was to
smooth the sufferer's passage to the next world, not to save him for
this. Sanitary provisions there were none except the paternoster and the
ave. In the cities the pestilence walked unstayed, its triumphs numbered
by the sounds of the death-crier in the streets or the knell for the
soul that was passing away.

Our estimate of the influence of the system under which men were thus
living as a regulator of their passions may at this point derive much
exactness from incidents such as those offered by the history of
syphilis and the usages of war. For this purpose we may for a moment
glance at the Continent.

[Sidenote: Moral state indicated by the spread of syphilis,] The
attention of all Europe was suddenly arrested by a disease which broke
out soon after the discovery of America. It raged with particular
violence in the French army commanded by Charles VIII. at the siege of
Naples, A.D. 1495, and spread almost like an epidemic. It was syphilis.
Though there have been medical authors who supposed that it was only an
exacerbation of a malady known from antiquity, that opinion cannot be
maintained after the learned researches of Astruc. That it was some