"We have fallen a pretty
deal of timber & drawn some by Goodman Rogers's team, but unless your
worship have a good team of your own & a man to go with them, I shall be
much distracted for _help_ ... & when our business is most in haste we
shall be most to seek." Again, writing at harvest, as appears both by the
date and by an elaborate pun,--"I received the _sithes_ you sent but in
that there came not also yourself, it maketh me to _sigth_,"--he says:
"_Help_ is scarce and hard to get, difficult to please, uncertain, &c.
Means runneth out & wages on & I cannot make choice of my _help_."
It may be some consolation to know that the complaint of a decline in the
quality of servants is no modern thing. Shakespeare makes Orlando say to
Adam:
"O, good old man, how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for meed!
Thou art not of the fashion of these times,
When none will sweat but for promotion."
When the faithful old servant is brought upon the stage, we may be sure
he was getting rare. A century later, we have explicit testimony that
things were as bad in this respect as they are now. Don Manuel Gonzales,
who travelled in England in 1730, says of London servants: "As to common
menial servants, they have great wages, are well kept and cloathed, but
are notwithstanding the plague of almost every house in town.
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