(iii) Ichabod ?
DAWN DEFERRED
represent his advice to London pedestrians never to squabble with street ruffians for the welcome shelter of the wall, but rather to let them have it.
As late as 1751, Horace Walpole, writing in rather lurid style to Sir Horace Mann, complains :
One is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one were going to battle."
(iii) Ichabod ?
But along with ignorance, lawlessness, barbarism and godlessness went also superstition.
That tyrant, King Quack, surrounded by his innumerable votaries, many of whom were
dealers in Destiny's dark counsel," reigned over no small percentage of the subjects both of George I and George II ; and the fact that many of these dupes mouthed pretty phrases about Deism, Nature Worship, Natural Religion, Natural Philosophy, Freedom, Reason, Rationality, Self-expression and Syncretism, made them no less his slaves.
W. C. Sydney, writing of this period, says : '' The capital and provinces literally teemed with men and women who gained a livelihood by telling fortunes and casting nativities, and by the extensive sale of their ridiculous inventions called ' sigils,' the possession of which was vulgarly supposed to avert evil and destruction from life and property."+ Among the socially élite, current superstitions normally gravitated toward the astrologer, the magician, the palmist, the Nature Doctor and the ever-present army of foreign
Professors"? of weird and wondrous "' Natural Sciences" :? among the working masses, whom the élite commonly designated
" the vile and brutish part of mankind," or briefly "' the brutes,"'* superstition naturally assumed crasser forms.
One of its most humorous manifestations is seen in the fact that many rural cockers took endless pains to have their game fowls' eggs hatched in a magpie's nest ; for the magpie being the " special protégé of Satan," it followed that gamecocks so hatched would be
devilish good fighters."'* Sir Robert Walpole, with bluff humour but grim truth, was wont to boast that he '' controlled George I by bad Latin and good punch."
His observation is characteristic not only of the man but of his era.
The country was " controlled' by a 1 England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, I, p. 264.
2 See Ibid., chaps. viii and ix.
F ks ° Henry Fielding's Foseph Andrews (1742) makes this prevailing custom abundantly plain.
4 See E.D. Cuming, '' Sports and Games " (Fohnson's England, I, p. 374)