wickedness.  It was unsafe to travel or walk in the streets.’ ’1731.  Profligacy among the people continued to an amazing degree.’[683] These extracts, taken almost at haphazard from the pages of a contemporary, are confirmed by abundance of testimony from all quarters.  The middle classes were confessedly better than those either above or below them.[684] Nevertheless, there are not wanting indications that the standard of morality was not high among them.  For example, it is the middle class rather than those above or below them who set the fashion of popular amusements.  What, then, was the character of the amusements of the period?  The stage, if it was a little improved since the wild days of the Restoration, was yet so bad that even a lax moralist like Lord Hervey was obliged to own in 1737, ’The present great licentiousness of the stage did call for some restraint and regulation.’[685] Such brutal pastimes as cock-fighting and bull-baiting were everywhere popular.  Drunkenness was then, as now, a national vice, but it was less disreputable among the middle classes than it happily is at present.[686] What was the state of literature?  Notwithstanding the improvement which such writers as Addison and Steele had effected, it was still very impure.  Let us take the evidence of the kindly and well-informed Sir Walter Scott.  ’We should do great injustice to the present day by comparing our manners with those of the reign of George I. The writings even of the most esteemed poets of that period contain passages which now would be accounted to deserve the pillory.  Nor was the tone of conversation more pure than that of composition; for the taint of Charles II.’s reign continued to infect society until the present reign [George III.], when, if not more moral, we are at least more decent.’[687] What was the state of the law?  The criminal law was simply barbarous.  Any theft of more than 40_s._ was punishable by death.  Objects of horror, such as the heads of the rebel chiefs fixed on Temple Bar in 1746, were exposed in the vain hope that they might act as a ’terriculum.’[688] Prisons teemed with cruel abuses.  The Roman Catholics were still suffering most unjustly, and if the laws had been rigorously enforced they would have suffered more cruelly still.  A more tolerant spirit was happily gaining ground in the hearts of the nation, but so far as the laws were concerned there were few if any traces of it.  The Act of 1779, for the relief of Dissenters, is affirmed to be ’the first statute in the direction of enlarged toleration which had been passed for ninety years.’[689] It was about the middle of the century when irreligion and immorality reached their climax.  In 1753, Sir J. Barnard said publicly, ’At present it really seems to be the fashion for a man to declare himself of no religion.’[690] In the same year Secker declared that immorality and irreligion were grown almost beyond ecclesiastical power.