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AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE, 3
the mauufacturing 5nd more thickly populated districts of the
kingdom where puro and mtional recreation for tho poorer
classes can hardly be said to exist at all. The richer classes
do not suffer much from this lack of locsl amusement. They
take car0 to enjoy thelnsclvos in periodic visits to London, in
tours abroad, or iu residence at matoring-places, wlloro sntertainrnents
aro provided. Their amusements on their own
estates chiefly consist in shooting, nnd other fo:.ms of sport’, in
the prosecution of which they arc led t,o excltldo the mass of
tho people, even from tho natural enjoymeuts of tho air and
the sun. It is hardly too much to my that the right to dwell
freely in a grimy street, to drink freely in tho neigllbouring
public-housc, and to walk freely between tho high-walled
parks and the jcalonsly preserved estates of our lnudowucra,
is all that tho just and equal laws of England secure to the
mass of the popul a t‘ ton.
England is trndition:dly called ‘I Mcrrio England ;” but
them has always seemed to me to bo something absurdly
incongruous in tho name at prcsent. It is a case of
anachronism, if not of sarcasm. England may have been
merry in tho days when tho village green and tho neighbouring
common werc still unenclosed; when the Blaypole was sot
up, and the village fiddler and the old English sports were
really existing institutions. But all that sort of thing is a
matter of history. Popular festivals, fairs, wakes, and the like,
have fallen into disuse or disrapute, and have to a great extent
bren suppressed by the magistrates, on the ground of the riotous
and ricious assemblages which they occasioned.* There is no
difficulty in seeing that there is a tendency, in England at
least, to the progressive degradation of popular amusements.
* The fairs of London were for centuries places of popular enjoyment
such as it was, but hare been all long suppressed, on account, ot
the riotous and dissolnte proceedings which they occasioned. May
rair, now known only by the name of the fashionable spot where it
existed, was suppressed in 1708; Bartholomew Fair, in spite of being
occaeioually presented by the pnd j my as R. nuisance, ‘‘ next only to
that of the pla-yhonses,” lingered on until it died out about fifty yeam
afP, being gradually suppressed by the Corporation, who bought up
the pmperty.
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