STUART LIFE AND MANNERS:I-
MR. RYAN writes in a lively and picturesque way, and the idea of his new book is a distinctly good one. By telling again, in careful detail, the life-stories of some of the leading English figures of the seventeenth century he does much to make us realize the world they lived in. But his book would have been still more valuable, though not perhaps quite so sure to please the public, had, he given us less of the romances everybody knows, such as those of Buckingham, of Strafford, of Henrietta Duchess of Orleans, of Monmouth. of Louise de Querouaille, Nell Gwyn, and other ladies of their kind, and more of such original figures as William Kemp the dancer, Forty-Jim Tears of My We (17'40 to ISIS). By the Princess Louise of Prussia (Princess Anton Radsiwill). Edited by Princess Radziwill, ass Custellama, and translated by A. R. Allinson, M.A. Illustrated. Land= Eveleigh Nash. pls. net.]
t Stuart Life and Hawners. By P. P. William Ryan. With 12 Illustrations, London Methuen and Co. [lOs. 6d. net].
Simon Forman the wizard, or even Mr. Edwards, keeper of the Crown jewels, who, with his son and daughter, made such a gallant defence and finally baffled Colonel Blood and his gang. Such people as these find little room in those histories which always include the rest, but they, with many more who might be mentioned, throw precious sidelights on the ordinary life of England in country and town. We know almost enough of life in the Stuart period, as lived by the Stuart princes and princesses themselves, with their ministers, courtiers and favourites, good and bad. Even the lives of country gentlemen and of distinguished citizens are familiar, thanks to Evelyn and Pepys. But the daily life of the countryside or of villages and small towns is a rich field that has not yet perhaps been thoroughly explored.
From this point of view Mr. Ryan's chapters which deal less with the great of the earth and their fashionable sins, however amusing, and more with the humbler matters of the high roads and hedges, the small streets and their trades, the
games and feasts on the village green which Elizabethan Puritanism had already discouraged, and which both James I. and Charles 1, by means of 27i,e Book of Sports, strove to
bring back into use while guarding against abuse, are the chapters which those who are curious as to the real aspect of the time will find most interesting. How few of us know that the post-office began to exist in the year 1635! Special messengers and the common carrier were till then the only means of communication. After that date a horse-post carried letters along the great roads into the different parts of England, those who lived near these reads hurrying out at the sound of the postman's horn. And the remote byways were not neglected.
"If one desired to send a letter to some remote town in York- shire, one went to Ludgate, then to the Bell Savage Inn close by, and there entrusted it to the carrier for the county in question. . . The messenger from London would not penetrate into byways. Each county had its system of foot-posts, which linked the out- lying districts with its chief towns and with the great high roads. The London courier, pressing on to his terminus, was relieved of packets for remote regions by the local postman, who in turn passed them on from hand to hand to their destination. In some- what similar fashion, though less regularly and smoothly, letters intended for Wales or Scotland or Ireland were carried over the long and tedious journey to the hands for which they were laboriously indited. Worcester and Chester were centres whence the Welsh post started, while Berwick was the natural centre of distribution for North Britain?'
We take leave to think that such details as these are more romantic, more suggestive, more instructive as to the England of three centuries ago than any number of Court scandals
and stories of famous crimes. But Mr. Ryan gives us both, if in unequal measure. Therefore we must not be ungrateful for his entertaining book.
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