Portrait of the Pedagogue in Eighteenth Century England

The age which was not only that of Dr. Johnson but also that of Pope, Addison, Gay, Goldsmith, Fielding, Lord Chesterfield, Gibbon, Horace Walpole, Gainsborough, and Garrick is surely to be reckoned among brilliant periods of English history. And, as William Sydney notes, these great figures lived, moved, and had their being against a strange, quaint, frivolous, and corrupt English background in which beaux strutted about Pall Mall displaying all their finery such as embroidered velvet coats, cocked hats, lace cravats, and ten guinea clouded canes; when belles, accompanied by black boys and curly lap-dogs, promenaded in St. James's Park, attracting attention by beauty patches stuck on their faces, by pyramidical headdresses, by hooped petticoats, and by oversized decorated fans; when people of quality, so-called, repaired to their pleasure haunts in sedan chairs and gilded chariots; when travelers quailed at the thought and prospect of traveling after nightfall because of armed and mounted desperadoes on highways

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