of James with Buckingham, while it adds one more mortifying instance of “the follies of the wise,” must be attributed to this cause.[A] Are not most of the dramatic works of that day frequently unreadable from this circumstance?  As an historian, it would be my duty to show how incredibly gross were the domestic language and the domestic familiarities of kings, queens, lords, and ladies, which were much like the lowest of our populace.  We may felicitate ourselves on having escaped the grossness, without, however, extending too far these self-congratulations.

[Footnote A:  Our wonder and surmises have been often raised at the strange subscriptions of Buckingham to the king,—­“Your dog,” and James as ingenuously calling him “dog Steenie.”  But this was not peculiar to Buckingham; James also called the grave Cecil his “little beagle.”  The Earl of Worcester, writing to Cecil, who had succeeded in his search after one Bywater, the earl says, “If the king’s beagle can hunt by land as well as he hath done by water, we will leave capping of Jowler, and cap the beagle.”  The queen, writing to Buckingham to intercede with the king for Rawleigh’s life, addresses Buckingham by “My kind Dog.”  James appears to have been always playing on some whimsical appellative by which he characterised his ministers and favourites, analogous to the notions of a huntsman.  Many of our writers, among them Sir Walter Scott, have strangely misconceived these playful appellatives, unconscious of the origin of this familiar humour.  The age was used to the coarseness.  We did not then excel all Europe, as Addison set the model, in the delicacy of humour; indeed, even so late as Congreve’s time, they were discussing its essential distinction from wit.]

The men were dissolved in all the indolence of life and its wantonness; they prided themselves in traducing their own innocence rather than suffer a lady’s name to pass unblemished.[B] The marriage-tie lost its sacredness amid these disorders of social life.  The luxurious idlers of that day were polluted with infamous vices; and Drayton, in the “Moon-calf,” has elaborately drawn full-length pictures of the lady and the gentleman of that day, which seem scarcely to have required the darkening tints of satire to be hideous—­in one line the Muse describes “the most prodigious birth”—­

  He’s too much woman and She’s too much man.

[Footnote B. The expression of one of these gallants, as preserved by Wilson, cannot be decently given, but is more expressive, p. 147.]

The trades of foppery, in Spanish fashions, suddenly sprung up in this reign, and exhibited new names and new things.  Now silk and gold-lace shops first adorned Cheapside, which the continuator of Stowe calls “the beauty of London;” the extraordinary rise in price of these fashionable articles forms a curious contrast with those of the preceding reign.  Scarfs, in Elizabeth’s time, of thirty shillings