bag
was carried on horseback at about five miles an hour. A penny-post had
been established in the city, but with much difficulty, for many
long-headed men, who knew very well what they were saying, had denounced
it as an insidious "popish contrivance."

Only a few years before the period under consideration Parliament had
resolved that "all pictures in the royal collection which contained
representations of Jesus or the Virgin Mother should be burnt; Greek
statues were delivered over to Puritan stone-masons to be made decent."
[Sidenote: Lewis Muggleton; his doctrines.] A little earlier, Lewis
Muggleton had given himself out as the last and greatest of the
prophets, having power to save or damn whom he pleased. It had been
revealed to him that God is only six feet high, and the sun only four
miles off. The country beyond the Trent was still in a state of
barbarism, and near the sources of the Tyne there were people scarcely
less savage than American Indians, their "half-naked women chanting a
wild measure, while the men, with brandished dirks, danced a war-dance."

[Sidenote: Printing-presses and private libraries.] At the beginning of
the eighteenth century there were thirty-four counties without a
printer. The only press in England north of the Trent was at York. As to
private libraries, there were none deserving the name. "An esquire
passed for a great scholar if 'Hudibras,' 'Baker's Chronicle,'
'Tarleton's Jests,' and the 'Seven Champions of Christendom' lay in his
hall-window." It might be expected that the women were ignorant enough
when very few men knew how to write correctly or even intelligibly, and
it had become unnecessary for clergymen to read the Scriptures in the
original tongues.

[Sidenote: Social discipline; its barbarity.] Social discipline was very
far from being of that kind which we call moral. The master whipped his
apprentice, the pedagogue his scholar, the husband his wife. Public
punishments partook of the general brutality. It was a day for the
rabble when a culprit was set in the pillory to be pelted with
brickbats, rotten eggs, and dead cats; when women were fastened by the
legs in the stocks at the market-place, or a pilferer flogged through
the town at the cart-tail, a clamour not unfrequently arising unless the
lash were laid on hard enough "to make him howl." In punishments of
higher offenders these whippings were perfectly horrible; thus Titus
Oates, after standing twice in the pill