it was too primitively abominable to bear description.  Sir Robert Rawlinson, the sanitary expert, who was called in to inspect Windsor Castle after the Prince Consort’s death, reported that, within the Queen’s reign, “cesspools full of putrid refuse and drains of the worst description existed beneath the basements....  Twenty of these cesspools were removed from the upper ward, and twenty-eight from the middle and lower wards....  Means of ventilation by windows in Windsor Castle were very defective.  Even in the royal apartments the upper portions of the windows were fixed.  Lower casements alone could be opened, so that by far the largest amount of air-spaces in the rooms contained vitiated air, comparatively stagnant.”  When this was the condition of royal abodes, no wonder that the typhoid-germ, like Solomon’s spider, “took hold with her hands, and was in kings’ palaces.”  And well might Sir George Trevelyan, in his ardent youth, exclaim:—­

  “We much revere our sires; they were a famous race of men. 
  For every glass of port we drink, they nothing thought of ten. 
  They lived above the foulest drains, they breathed the closest air,
  They had their yearly twinge of gout, but little seemed to care. 
  But, though they burned their coals at home, nor fetched their ice
     from Wenham,
  They played the man before Quebec and stormed the lines at Blenheim. 
  When sailors lived on mouldy bread and lumps of rusty pork,
  No Frenchman dared to show his nose between the Downs and Cork. 
  But now that Jack gets beef and greens and next his skin wears flannel,
  The Standard says we’ve not a ship in plight to hold the Channel.”

So much for Social Amelioration.

FOOTNOTES: 

[10] For a lively description of Andover School in the eighteenth century, see the Memoirs of “Orator Hunt.’”

X.

POLITICS.

I now approach the political condition at the turn of the century, and that was to a great extent the product of the French Revolution.  Some historians, indeed, when dealing with that inexhaustible theme, have wrought cause and effect into a circular chain, and have reckoned among the circumstances which prepared the way for the French Revolution the fact that Voltaire in his youth spent three years in England, and mastered the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the Deism of the English Freethinkers, and the English theory of political liberty.  That these doctrines, recommended by Voltaire’s mordant genius and matchless style, and circulating in a community prepared by tyranny to receive them, acted as a powerful solvent on the intellectual basis of French society, is indeed likely enough.  But to pursue the theme would carry us too far back into the eighteenth century.  In dealing with the recollections of persons whom one’s self has known we must dismiss from view the causes of the French Revolution.  Our business is with its effect on political thought and action in England.