SEVENTY-FIVE TEARS AGO.

Otago Witness, Issue 1824, 5 November 1886, Page 34

SEVENTY-FIVE TEARS AGO.

We had been (in 1811) seven years continuously at war with Napoleon the Great, and the manners of the age everywhere, albeit, heroically bellicose, were certainly brutal. While they were ramming the dead body of the suicide into the hole where the roads crossed, and driving the stake through his heart, prize-fighters were mauling each other in the presence of a highly aristocratic addience at the Haymarket Tennis Court.

Cockfighting, bull and badger baiting, dog and duck hunting, ratting, were in cheerful progress in and about the metropolis. A merry mob was pelting with rotten eggs and mud some luckless caitiff standing high in the pillory at Charing Cross or in Seven Dials ; detected pickpockets were being dragged through horseponds or were undergoing the discipline of the pump ; women were shrieking under the lash in the yards of Bridewell; perhaps that very morning eight men had been hanged all in a row before the debtors' door at Newgate for such dire offences as uttering one-pound notes, clipping guineas, stealing a horse, or forging stamps.

And this was only seventy-five years ago. Such hideous barbarism, such ruffianly brutality, were considered quite a matter of course in the days when George, the Prince Regent, was earning the title of the First Gentleman in Europe, and Leigh Hunt was sent to gaol for calling his Royal Highness a fat Adonis of 50. It was a rough, a coarse, and a brutal age, yet in many respects a most polished, a lettered, and cultured one. Hoop petticoats were still worn at the Queen's drawing-room ; The balls and banquets at Carlton House were sumptuous ; Thomas Campbell was lecturing on poetry, and Mr Soane on architecture ; the purchase of the Elgin Marbles had been mooted ; the Italian opera was largely patronised by the patrician classes ; Mr Charles Young as Cassius, and Mr Charles Kemble as Marc Antony in •• Julius 0»s«," had made a profound, im-

pression at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden ; and the premature tragedian Master Betty, grown up and classically educated, had made his reappearance as an adult with but scant success. Yes, we repeat, it was at once a savage, an uncouth, and a courtly and refined age. — Home paper.