it incongruous in a minister of the Gospel to play at cards, follow the hounds, or drink deep. What London society had become Hogarth's prints reveal. One has only to look over a few of them to feel heartsick at the dissoluteness, the hardness, the cruelty, into which all classes seem to have fallen.
Corrupt as society was in London, it professed itself shocked at the barbarism of other parts of England. Ever since the war with France, in the early part of the century, heavy protective duties had been enacted to cripple the enemy's commerce. The result had been the demoralization of the dwellers on the south-east coast. Respect for laws divine and human was rapidly losing ground, not only among them, but far into the interior. Smuggling was organized on so vast a scale that large capitalists entered into it. The whole population gradually got mixed up in the traffic, until they began to see no wrong in it. In the wilder inland districts, such as the Weald and the New Forest, storehouses were established, and lines of transit organized to the metropolis. Daring spirits found it a far more profitable and an infinitely more exciting employment than honest labour. Honest labourers felt no scruple in adding to their miserable incomes by acting as guides to the illicit convoys over the Downs, through the miry lanes of the Weald, or the leafy shades of the New Forest. The lawlessness was frightful, The coastguard had a terrible time of it. Fights were common. Drunkenness, licentiousness, idleness, infected the whole population. From smuggling to highway robbery was a short cut. These were the days of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, of Jonathan Wild and Claude Duval.
In the very centre of the district thus demoralized, in a state of society thus verging on dissolution, William Huntington was born. Under what circumstances he came into the world, and in what a miserable manner he passed his childhood, he thus relates:—
"The place of my nativity is Cranbrook, in the Weald of Kent. The house in which I was born lies between Goudhurst and Cranbrook. If a person walks from Goudhurst to Cranbrook on the main road he comes to a little green. About a quarter of a mile from that green, on the high road, is a place called the Four Wents, where four roads or ways meet. At that place are three
