235. We are apt to talk in a very unceremonious style of our _rude_ ancestors, of their _gross_ habits, their _want of delicacy_ in their language. No man shall ever make me believe, that those, who reared the cathedral of ELY (which I saw the other day), were _rude_, either in their manners or in their minds and words. No man shall make me believe, that our ancestors were a rude and beggarly race, when I read in an act of parliament, passed in the reign of Edward the Fourth, regulating the dresses of the different ranks of the people, and forbidding the LABOURERS to wear coats of cloth that cost _more_ than _two shillings a yard_ (equal to _forty shillings_ of our present money), and forbidding their wives and daughters to wear sashes, or girdles, _trimmed with gold or silver_. No man shall make me believe that this was a _rude_ and beggarly race, compared with those who now shirk and shiver about in canvass frocks and rotten cottons. Nor shall any man persuade me that that was a _rude_ and beggarly state of things, in which (reign of Edward the Third) an act was passed regulating the wages of labour, and ordering that a woman, for _weeding in the corn_, should receive a penny a day, while a _quart of red wine_ was sold for _a penny_, and a pair of men's shoes for _two-pence_. No man shall make me believe that _agriculture_ was in a _rude_ state, when an act like this was passed, or that our ancestors of that day were _rude_ in their minds, or in their thoughts. Indeed, there are a thousand proofs, that, whether in regard to domestic or foreign affairs, whether in regard to internal freedom and happiness, or to weight in the world, England was at her zenith about the reign of Edward the Third. The _Reformation_, as it is called, gave her a complete pull down. She revived again in the reigns of the Stuarts, as far as related to internal affairs; but the '_Glorious Revolution_' and its debt and its taxes, have, amidst the false glare of new palaces, roads, and canals, brought her down until she is become the land of domestic misery and of foreign impotence and contempt; and, until she, amidst all her boasted improvements and refinements, tremblingly awaits her fall.