effect of driving the surplus agricultural population into the
great towns. But the social history of this whole period is as
yet obscure, and I have no right to give an opinion on it.
Another element, and a more potent one, is to be found in the
discharged soldiers who came home from foreign war, and the
sailors who returned from our voyages of discovery, and from our
raids against the Spaniards, too often crippled by scurvy, or by
Tropic fevers, with perhaps a little prize money, which was as
hastily spent as it had been hastily gained. The later years of
Elizabeth, and the whole of James the First's reign, disclose to
us an ugly state of society in the low streets of all our sea-port
towns; and Bristol, as one of the great starting-points of West
Indian adventure, was probably, during the seventeenth century, as
bad as any city in England. According to Ben Jonson, and the
playwriters of his time, the beggars become a regular fourth-
estate, with their own laws, and even their own language--of which
we may remark, that the thieves' Latin of those days is full of
German words, indicating that its inventors had been employed in
the Continental wars of the time. How that class sprung up, we
may see, I suppose, pretty plainly, from Shakespeare's "Henry the
Fifth." Whether Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph, Doll and Mrs. Quickly,
existed in the reign of Henry the Fifth, they certainly existed in
the reign of Elizabeth. They are probably sketches from life of
people whom Shakespeare had seen in Alsatia and the Mint.

To these merely rascal elements, male and female, we must add, I
fear, those whom mere penury, from sickness, failure, want of
employment drove into dwellings of the lowest order. Such people,
though not criminal themselves, are but too likely to become the
parents of criminals. I am not blaming them, poor souls; God