“It is of some importance at what period a man is born.  A young man, alive at this period, hardly knows to what improvements of human life he has been introduced; and I would bring before his notice the following eighteen changes which have taken place in England since I first began to breathe in it the breath of life—­a period amounting now to nearly seventy-three years.

“Gas was unknown:  I groped about the streets of London in all but the utter darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species of depredation and insult.

“I have been nine hours in sailing from Dover to Calais before the invention of steam.  It took me nine hours to go from Taunton to Bath, before the invention of railroads, and I now go in six hours from Taunton to London!  In going from Taunton to Bath, I suffered between 10,000 and 12,000 severe contusions, before stone-breaking Macadam was born.

“I paid L15 in a single year for repairs of carriage-springs on the pavement of London; and I now glide without noise or fracture, on wooden pavements.

“I can walk, by the assistance of the police, from one end of London to the other, without molestation; or, if tired, get into a cheap and active cab, instead of those cottages on wheels, which the hackney coaches were at the beginning of my life.

“I had no umbrella!  They were little used, and very dear.  There were no waterproof hats, and my hat has often been reduced by rains into its primitive pulp.

“I could not keep my smallclothes in their proper place, for braces were unknown.  If I had the gout, there was no colchicum.  If I was bilious, there was no calomel.  If I was attacked by ague, there was no quinine.  There were filthy coffee-houses instead of elegant clubs.  Game could not be bought.  Quarrels about Uncommuted Tithes were endless.  The corruptions of Parliament, before Reform, infamous.  There were no banks to receive the savings of the poor.  The Poor Laws were gradually sapping the vitals of the country; and, whatever miseries I suffered, I had no post to whisk my complaints for a single penny to the remotest corners of the empire; and yet, in spite of all these privations, I lived on quietly, and am now ashamed that I was not more discontented, and utterly surprised that all these changes and inventions did not occur two centuries ago.

“I forgot to add that, as the basket of stage-coaches, in which luggage was then carried, had no springs, your clothes were rubbed all to pieces; and that even in the best society one third of the gentlemen at least were always drunk.”—­“Modern Changes” in the Collected Works.

APPENDIX D

“The longer I live, the more I am convinced that the apothecary is of more importance than Seneca; and that half the unhappiness in the world proceeds from little stoppages, from a duct choked up, from food pressing in the wrong place, from a vext duodenum, or an agitated pylorus.