STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685 .

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lie very heavy on the nation. The tax on chimneys, thoughless productive, raised far louder murmurs. The discontentexcited by direct imposts is, indeed, almost always out ofpro-portion to the quantity of money which they bring into theExchequer; and the tax on chimneys was, even among directimposts, peculiarly odious: for it could be levied onlybymeansof domiciliary visits; and of such visits the English have alwaysbeen impatient to a degree which the people of other countriescan but faintly conceive. The poorer householders were fre-quently unable to pay their hearth money to the day. Whenthis happened, their furniture was distrained without mercy:for the tax was farmed; and a farmer of taxes is, of all credi-tors, proverbially the most rapacious. The collectors wereloudly accused of performing their unpopular duty with harsh-ness and insolence. It was said that, as soon as they appearedat the threshold of a cottage, the children began to wail, andthe old women ran to hide their earthenware. Nay, the singlebed of a poor family had sometimes been carried away andsold. The net annual receipt from this tax was two hundredthousand pounds. * *

* There are in the Pepysian Library, some ballads of that age on thechimney money. I will give a specimen or two: —

“The good old dames, whenever they the chimney man espied,

Unto their nooks they haste away, their pots and pipkins hide.

There is not one old dame in ten, and search the nation through,But, if you talk of chimney men, will spare a curse or two.”

Again,

“Like plundering soldiers they’d enter the door,

And make a distress on the goods of the poor,

While frighted poor children distractedly cried:

This nothing abated their insolent pride.”

In the British Museum there are doggrel verses composed on thesame subject and in the same spirit:

“ Or, if through poverty it be not paid,

For cruelty to tear away the single bed,

On which the poor man rests his weary head,

At once deprives him of his rest and bread.”

1 lake this opportunity, the first which occurs, of acknowledgingmost gratefully the kind and liberal manner in which the Master andVicemaster of Magdalene College, Cambridge, gave me access to thevaluable collections of Pepys.

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iii.