ONE:The charity schools throughout the country were discovered, by the operation of Henry Brougham's Commission, to be monopolised by the landlords of the different parishes and the clergy, and the ample revenues for education embezzled by them. In some such schools there was not a single scholar; in others, as at Pocklington, in Yorkshire, the free grammar school, with an endowment of one thousand pounds a year, had only one scholar. This state of physical and moral destitution was made the more dreary by the equally low state of religion. The Dissenters were on the increase, and, chiefly in towns, were exerting themselves to disperse the Egyptian darkness of this Georgian era, and Methodism was now making rapid progress amongst the working classes, both in town and country. But the preachers of Methodism met with a reception from the country squirearchy and clergy which has no parallel since the days of Popish persecution. They were dragged out of the houses where they preached, kicked and buffeted, hauled through horse-ponds, pelted with mud and stones; and the clergy and magistracy, so far from restraining, hounded on the mob in these outrages. The lives of these preachers, and the volumes of the Wesleyan Magazine, abound in recitals of such brutalities, which, if they had not been recorded there, would not now be credited. What John Wesley and his brother Charles, and George Whitefield suffered, especially in Devonshire and Cornwall, reads like a wild romance.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit.
ONE:At the Church of St. Anne, Shandon, under a kind of shed attached to a guard-house, lay huddled up in their filthy fetid rags about forty human creaturesmen, women, children, and infants of the tenderest agestarving and fever-stricken, most of them in a dying state, some dead, and all gaunt, yellow, hideous from the combined effects of famine and disease. Under this open shed they had remained during the night, and until that hourabout ten in the morningwhen the funeral procession was passing by, and their indescribable misery was beheld by the leading citizens of Cork, including the mayor, and several members of the board of guardians. The odour which proceeded from that huddled-up heap of human beings was of itself enough to generate a plague.[See larger version]
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing.
ONE:THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO: FRENCH CUIRASSIERS CHARGING A BRITISH SQUARE.Fox saw the growing change with alarm. He saw that all their resolutions and addresses produced no effect on the Ministerial party; and he did not dare to go further and pass a Bill, either legislative or declaratory, for he felt that the Lords would throw it out; and to stop the supplies, or delay the Mutiny Bill would probably disgust and annihilate the very majority on which he depended. In these circumstances, he probably saw with satisfaction an attempt at coalition. Mr. Grosvenor, the member for Chester, during the three days of the adjournment, called a meeting of members of both parties for the purpose of seeing whether a coalition could not be formed, and thus put an end to this violent contest. About seventy members met, and an address to the Duke of Portland and Mr. Pitt was signed by fifty-four. Pitt expressed his readiness to co-operate in such a plan, but the Duke of Portland declared that the first indispensable step towards such a measure must be the resignation of Ministers. This put an end to all hope of success.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing.
