During the latter part of the seventeenth century the people of Cheshire began to repair the damage done to the churches, mansions, and public buildings during the Civil Wars. It was hardly to be expected that the art of the builder could flourish during that stormy period. Gothic architecture had reached its greatest glory under the Plantagenet and Tudor kings, and when the builders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took up their work again they cast aside the aims and ideals of the Gothic craftsmen and turned to new models and new sources for their inspiration.

The changes which were now made were one of the results of the Renaissance or Great Awakening of the sixteenth century. The men who visited Italy and brought back with them copies of the works of the old Greek and Roman writers, which they printed and gave to the world, brought also the ideas of Italian architects and plans of Italian buildings, which had been copied from those of ancient Athens and Rome. Englishmen of the eighteenth century took these as their models. Like the Roman workmen, they found it easier to copy than to invent.

If you turn back to Chapter VI you will find that the chief feature of the Roman, which we will now call the Italian or Classic style, are the rows of pillars ranged along the front and sides of a building. The Town Hall of Macclesfield, and the group of buildings which now form the Castle of Chester, are good examples of the style of architecture which prevailed during the eighteenth century. The windows are sometimes round-headed, but more often they are rectangular, with low triangles above them.

Unfortunately many ancient buildings, which we would gladly have with us now, disappeared at this time. Some of them, no doubt, were in such a ruinous state that it was impossible to repair them, but, generally speaking, little or no pains were taken to restore them to their former appearance. The people preferred to pull down and destroy and rebuild in the new Classic style, which rapidly became a craze.

The greatest loss was that of the mediaeval castle of Chester, which, with the exception of 'Caesar's Tower', was pulled down in 1788. The front entrance to the new castle is in the Doric style. Round the courtyard are barracks and an armoury, the county gaol and the shire hall with colonnades of Ionic pillars.

Many fine Elizabethan halls were destroyed to make way for mansions in the Classic style. Hooton Hall was built on the site of an old 'black and white' timber house. Poynton, Tabley, Tatton, Ince, and Doddington Halls were built about the same time. Other houses were altered or enlarged. The beauty of Adlington Hall was spoilt by the stone front with its Corinthian columns, which Charles and Hester Legh built. The appearance of Lyme Hall was completely changed by an Italian architect named Giacomo Leoni. His work is adorned with figures of the gods of heathen Rome, Neptune and Venus and Pan. The Leghs of Lyme brought many treasures from Italy. The stained glass in the east window of Disley Church was brought by them.

The roundheaded 'Italian' windows in the tower of Rostherne Church tell us that they are the work of eighteenth-century builders and 'restorers'. The ugly tower cuts a sorry figure when compared with the beautiful perpendicular towers of Mobberley, Cheadle, Budworth, Witton, Alderley, Middlewich, and others in the neighbourhood. The tower of Great Barrow Church, with urns in the place of pinnacles, and the porch of Frodsham, are out of keeping with the Gothic character of the rest of the buildings.

The eighteenth-century restorers had little taste or sense of beauty. Within the churches ugly wooden galleries were placed over the aisles, and the walls, pillars, and pews coated with layers of paint or whitewash. Even the carved woodwork of the choir stalls of Chester Cathedral was painted. The open timber roof of Alderley Old Church was hidden by a flat ceiling of lath and plaster. A portion of the old timber church at Warburton was repaired with common bricks, and sometimes whole churches were rebuilt with the same material.

In place of the handsome Decorated altar tombs, with their effigies of knights and dames, great tablets of marble brought from Italy were fixed on the walls. On them were carved skulls and cross-bones, sometimes an entire skeleton, with funeral urns like those in which the Romans placed the ashes of their dead. Scrolls with long rambling inscriptions told of the virtues of the dead. These were often written in Latin, as if the homely English of the mother tongue was not good enough for the purpose.

The poets of the eighteenth century imitated the style of the poets of ancient Rome. Their poems are full of the wit and satire found in Horace and Juvenal. Man, not Nature, was nearly always the subject of their poems. Two lines of Alexander Pope, the greatest of the eighteenth-century poets, are carved on the tombstone of Sir John Chesshyre in Runcorn Church:—

Sir John Chesshyre was a lawyer, and built the little library near Halton Castle in 1733 for the books which he left for the use of Cheshire scholars and students.

Clubs were formed by the poets and wits and 'men of fashion' of the eighteenth century. They met in the taverns and coffee-houses of the towns, and scratched their smart sayings on the window-panes with their diamond rings. They rather prided themselves on their eccentric habits and their superiority over other men, who had neither the time nor the money to waste on frivolous amusements.

In a little wood near Gawsworth is a lonely grave with a plain flat stone, beneath which,

The grave is that of Samuel Johnson, a dancing master, 'afterwards ennobled with the grander title of Lord Flame,' as the inscription tells us, who was buried here at his own desire.

Neston and Parkgate, twin towns on the southern shore of Wirral, were visited by many fashionable people in the eighteenth century. They spent the summer here for the bathing and the fresh breezes that blow from the Irish Sea and the hills of Wales. It is to be feared that Parkgate was also the resort of less respectable folk, for in some of the old houses you may still see the huge holes in which smugglers stored their unlawful cargoes. It was dangerous work, for the 'King's Yacht', as the revenue cutter was called, patrolled the waters of the Dee, and the officers had orders to shoot down all whom they caught in this illegal traffic. It is from this boat that the 'Yacht Inn' at Chester takes its name.

Neston and Parkgate were the starting-points for the Irish mails. The coaches from London and Liverpool put down their passengers here for Dublin. One of the most beautiful poems in the English language, the 'Lycidas' of John Milton, was written in memory of Edward King, a friend of the poet, who was shipwrecked on his way from Ireland to Parkgate. The London coaches that brought travellers to Chester and Parkgate frequently got into difficulties in the low-lying parts near the River Dee. The roads were very bad, and the coach often had to be hauled out of the mud by a team of horses borrowed from some neighbouring farm.

The passengers sometimes found themselves without their purses and their jewels at the end of their journey. The roads were frequented by highwaymen—'gentlemen of the road', they called themselves—who held up the coach and demanded money. With pistols levelled at their heads, the travellers were generally glad to escape with their lives.

One of the most famous of these highwaymen was Dick Turpin, whose escapades, I imagine, are known to most Cheshire boys, though I hope they have no wish to follow the career of this rascally thief.

The robbery spoken of in these lines was committed on the high-road between Altrincham and Knutsford, and Turpin rode so fast to the inn at Hoo Green, where he showed his watch to some Cheshire squires, that he was never suspected of the crime. This and many other stories of Turpin are told by Harrison Ainsworth, the novelist, whose father lived at Rostherne.

Knutsford claimed a highwayman of its own, one Higgins, who lived on Knutsford Heath as an ordinary gentleman of means, and was very friendly with the sporting squires of the neighbourhood. His favourite amusement was to waylay the ladies who went to the county balls and 'assemblies' at the George Hotel, and rob them of their diamonds. But he, like most others of his profession, was found out at last, and paid with his life the penalty of his crimes.