cheerful merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a

pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and

the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant

cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement

of the entire population. It was very much the same sort of place

that it had been for three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van

Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the old

houses still as he hadknown them, the same trades a little improved

and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more

carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient

familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled traffic would have

struck him as the most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the

swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the

protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish church,-

both from the material point of view very little things. A Rip van

Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater

changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of

the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses,

the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed

him, and suchlike details. The place would have had the same

boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still

itself in the way that a man is stillhimself after he has "filled

out" a little andgrown a longer beard and changed his clothes.

But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was

destined to alter the scale of every human affair.

That something was machinery and a vague energeticdisposition to

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