law; round ports, for the sake of commerce; round coal mines, for
the sake of manufacture. Before the existence of railroads,
penny-posts, electric telegraphs, men were compelled to be as
close as possible to each other, in order to work together.

When the population was small, and commerce feeble, the cities
grew to no very great size, and the bad effects of this crowding
were not felt. The cities of England in the Middle Age were too
small to keep their inhabitants week after week, month after
month, in one deadly vapour-bath of foul gas; and though the
mortality among infants was probably excessive, yet we should have
seen among the adult survivors few or none of those stunted and
etiolated figures so common now in England, as well as on the
Continent. The green fields were close outside the walls, where
lads and lasses went a-maying, and children gathered flowers, and
sober burghers with their wives took the evening walk; there were
the butts, too, close outside, where stalwart prentice-lads ran
and wrestled, and pitched the bar, and played backsword, and
practised with the long-bow; and sometimes, in stormy times,
turned out for a few months as ready-trained soldiers, and, like
Ulysses of old,


Drank delight of battle with their peers,


and then returned again to the workshop and the loom. The very
mayor and alderman went forth, at five o'clock on the summer's
morning, with hawk and leaping-pole, after a duck and heron; or
hunted the hare in state, probably in the full glory of furred