CHAPTER II.

AMUSEMENTS and creature comforts were dearer to the literary courtiers than even Ovid. Such having been the case, we propose to consider a few of them; but any reader who may think them unworthy of notice will do well to skip this chapter.

First as to music! For music was to the courtiers rather an amusement and a creature comfort, a mere accompaniment or stimulant to dancing, than a fine art. There was the mandoline to accompany a love song and that was about all it was good for. There was the fiddle, which was then a comparatively modern instrument; nor had it in this country become the violin; although the Amati were then living at Cremona and Stradivarius was to be born before the death of Rochester. There was the harp: but as a rule the harps of that period were very poor instruments. It was some little time after the Restoration that the guitar was introduced, and then it became so fashionable at court, that, as Grammont tells us, "every person played on it, well or ill, and you were as sure to see it on a lady's toilet, as rouge or patches". One of the best amateur performers on this instrument at the court was the Duke of York,

who will presently take his place among our literary

rakes.

The sports of those times were much on a par with the music. So little of the country was enclosed that hunting did not try the courage and test the riding of the seventeenth-century squire as it does those of the hunting men of the twentieth. Reference to county maps of the reign of Charles II. would probably surprise most people by the evidence they would find of large tracts of woodland forest in places where the country is now cultivated or laid down in permanent pasture; and, except on the large commons, there were few places where a long run in the open could have been obtained with hounds. There was coursing to be had and hawking; but neither of those sports demanded the accuracy of sight, steadiness of hand, and development of skill required by shooting, a form of sport then unknown, so far as small game was concerned. There was racing, and of a kind probably less unwholesome than that of our times; but it cannot have afforded anything like the same exercise to the mind and the memory as the modern turf, with its large number of horses, its numerous stakes, and its intricate handicaps. Racing, Racing, as will appear by-andby, was the only sport in which there is any record of Rochester's having taken part.

At a time when there were few books, and intellectual pleasures were scanty, it might be thought that sports would have occupied a far more important

position than they do at present. The exact contrary was the case. Sports were nothing like so good then as they are now; the opportunities of enjoying them were fewer, and they do not appear to have been so much thought of. Still, some of them were in considerable repute, as will be observed when we deal with Newmarket.

As to indoor amusements, chess, of course, was already a very ancient game, and its students had the venerable Game and Playe of the Chesse, printed by Caxton, as an authority; but the trump and whisk and ronfa, as well as the other games of cards then in vogue, can have been nothing like such "mindsharpeners" as their highly developed descendants, whist, ecarté and piquet, to say nothing of bridge. Games of pure luck were at that time most appreciated, and there was much heavy gambling. Billiards existed, but upon the most primitive of tables, with what we should call impossible cues, and it can scarcely have then been a very scientific game. The tennis of the time was much on a par with the billiards.

If the sports of the reign of Charles II. were inferior to ours, there was in those days one popular sport, if sport it could be called, which we do not enjoy; and before judging our literary rakes too severely, it may be well to consider the probable influence of such pastimes. The courtiers of Whitehall had neither a Hurlingham nor a Ranelagh, nor a Prince's; but they had, what was much more to

their taste, a Bear Garden. This particular garden was not restricted to its original purpose, the baiting of bears, for this so-called Bear Garden was also used for fights between other animals, including men.

Pepys writes: "After dinner with my wife to the Bear Garden; where . . . I saw some good sport of the bulls tossing of the dogs". A few months later he was there again, to witness a prize fight between a butcher and waterman. The house was so full that he had to go "into the pit, where the bears are baited; and upon a stool to see them fight; which they did furiously, a butcher and a waterman". The waterman was worsted in the combat—the details are disagreeable—and his friends suspected unfair measures.

"But Lord! to see how in a minute the whole stage was full of watermen to revenge the foul play, and the butchers to defend their fellow, though most blamed him; and there they all fell to it, knocking down and cutting many on each side. It was pleasant to see," says the unselfish Pepys, "but that I stood in the pit, and feared that in the tumult I might get some hurt."

The more refined Evelyn also went, though somewhat reluctantly, to the same place of amusement. "I went with some friends to the Bear Garden, where was cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bear and bull-baiting, it being a famous day for all these butcherly sports, or rather barbarous cruelty. The bulls did exceedingly well. One of the bulls tossed

a dog full into a lady's lap, as she sat in one of the boxes at a considerable height from the arena." Both Evelyn and Pepys make mention of the attendance of ladies at the Bear Garden.

Let not the reader fear that this book is to consist of a mere réchauffé of Pepys and Evelyn's diaries. But they are very important and valuable witnesses to the surroundings of the literary rakes of the court of Charles II., and especially to the matters dealt with in the opening chapters of this work.

In 1683 an attempt was made to introduce bullfighting into England. It failed: not because the cruelty of the entertainment shocked the spectators: quite the contrary; but because the bull did not hurt anybody.' “Out then springs a nimble Portuguese, who on foot attacks the bull, vaults upon his back and bestrides him, and the bull could no sooner acquit himself of him than he was up again; and this indeed gave some diversion: but this was not the thing the people looked for; they thought to have seen at least a horse or a man killed outright. But being bereft of their expectation, as having not mischief enough for their money, they pulled down the scaffoldings surrounding the arena, and carried away the bull, and so the show ended.”

But above all other sports, pastimes and pleasures in those times, the entertainment most appreciated was an execution. Even fifty years ago, when

1 Old News-letter, See Cavalier and Puritan, pp. 233-34.