friends Smith and Jones, who are confessedly behind the age--I should shrink from trying that experiment at any house of my acquaintance. I should expect to be dropped out again pretty quickly, and thankful if it were not out of a two pair of stairs window. I did that kind of thing once, I remember, in the days of my comparative youth and simplicity, in the case of the Rev. Byron, who had been good enough to say he should be "always glad to see me." I rode over there about the uncanonical hour of one, with a view to a possible lunch, let me say, as I am about my confessions. The confidential servant was struggling into his coat as he opened the door for me, and was startled into a confession that he believed "master was in his study;" he would see. So I was ushered into a very cold drawingroom, and, after giving me time to get exceedingly uncomfortable, my reverend friend made his appearance. We were both, of course, full of apologies-I for my unseasonable interruption, he for having unavoidably detained me. He gave me to understand, of course in the most delicate manner, that he was always much engaged in the morning. Now I happen, since those days, to have learned the interpretation of this mystery. At the time, of course, I thought he might be editing a new edition of the Fathers, or an original explanation of the Articles-most of my clerical_friends were, in those days. But Brown's confidential servant happens to be a lover of my cook's. If you want to have all your private habits known, keep one of these modern confidentials," by all means. Brown buys all his sermons cheap-lithographed in MS. That's the last fashion. Perhaps, in his case, it's just as well for his hearers. It don't take many of his mornings, at all events, to "prepare for his duties," as Mrs Byron terms it. But Brown's morning of study is pretty much as follows: Breakfast, 9 to 10; Times newspaper, 10 to 11; yawn; look out of window; cast up yesterday's accounts; write two notes (twice over), and three school - reward tickets. That carries us on till half-past twelve. Try the Times again, per

haps; clerk calls about a wedding or a funeral; chat with him about the family affairs of the parties concerned till the luncheon-bell breaks up the conference. And Brown has been "very busy he tells Mrs Brown so, and he thinks so. Such a man ought not to be interrupted. I knew a man who wrote his sermons on horseback (certainly they were not like Brown's MS.), and another who wrote a Roman History, or, I might say, the Roman History, in his drawing-room, surrounded by his children at play; but then they were not studious characters, like my reverend friend. Then, again, Mrs Brown is "sorry she sees so little of Mrs Smith;" she would so much like to be better neighbours; but her time is so fully occupied with the "dear children." "A most devoted wife and mother," so I am told. I am heartily glad she stands in neither relation to me. Those "dear children never looked half so pretty, half so innocent, or half so attractive, as I saw them one day, escaped from Mamma's and Mademoiselle's surveillance, galloping round Smith's paddock on his old rough pony, and Madeleine (the Countess's godchild) dancing wild with delight at old Ponto's grave face under her best bonnet. Poor child! it was very naughty, no doubt--quite against all the rules of her "bringings up;" it was very incautious to have left her for a moment under the protection of that notoriously rude Tom Smith; and she won't be taken out again with mamma in a hurry to call on those kind of people: one can't be too particular, as she very properly says, with whom one's children associate. So my pretty little Madeleine will grow up drilled according to rule under mamma's own inspection, and come out in due time with her manners perfectly formed, trained, and pruned, till there is not an inch of natural growth about her, according to the precise pattern of twenty other young ladies of my acquaintance girls who might have been jewels, but are now little centres of vapid self-sufficiency set in crinoline. The rouge, and the powder, and the stiff curls, by which our grandmothers disfigured nature, were bad enough;

66

but "rouged cheeks and curled hair," as Lord Bacon has it, are better than rouged and curled manners.' One of the great social evils of this age is admitted to be the reluctance of our young men to early marriages; they won't marry now, we are told, as they used to do, and ought to do, on three hundred a-year. Depend upon it, in many and many a case it is not the odd hundred or two that is wanting-it's the attraction. We have lost that joyous and familiar intercourse between neighbours' families, where young people's individualities had space and opportunity to develop themselves, and heart met heart. Our modish Cupid has over-strung his bow-his arrows don't hit home. Young ladies hide away the key of their hearts so carefully, that nobody thinks it worth looking for. Who is to choose "the one" out of a bevy of proper-behaved damsels like a row of hollyhocks, differing only in height, and shape, and colour? They all look alike, dress alike, talk alike, and walk alike; and for anything that appears to the contrary, think alike and feel alike. Why, such a choice is an act of deliberate intentionmatrimony prepense; few men have the nerve to venture upon it. No wonder they calculate the probable butchers' and bakers' bills before they take such a plunge as that. Don't fancy that I talk like a cynical old bird, not to be caught with chaff. I take as the exponent of what my own feelings would be if I were young, and open as I once was to the conviction of bright eyes, my nephew, Jack Hawthorne, not long home from the Crimea, six feet one, independent, hairy as a Skye terrier, brave as a lion (clasps for Alma and Balaklava), gentle as a greyhound, and I should say impressible, decidedly. "What I missed most," said he, in his openhearted, unabashed simplicity, "was the sight of a woman's face." Whereupon I spoke : "I wonder, Jack, you don't marry; it would make you a happier man than living half your days in the smoking-room of the Army and Navy.' Why not pick up a nice girl, and set up the family name again at the old manor ?" Well, so I would," said Jack, inter

แ

jectively between the puffs of his cutty, "but there are no girls now— they're all young ladies: catch me marrying a young lady! Jack has mortally offended, I fear, a whole circle of previous admirers, mammas and daughters, by a very innocent and well-intentioned little speech he made at one of his last public appearances. His hostess was begging him to dance. Jack" didn't seem to care about dancing." But prayto oblige her-there were so many nice girls sitting down, and the men were so stupid!" Jack would have danced with a she-bear sooner than be really rude or ill-natured, so he consented. The patroness was charmed and grateful. And now, which would he like her to introduce him to? "Miss A. sweet girl! Miss B. very sweet girl-clever, only so quiet. The two Miss C'.s? both darlings! Miss D. ?" (in a whisper), "twenty thousand, and not engaged!" "Thankye," said Jack, after casting his eye along the line as if he were on parade, "they all look very much alike. As I am to do it," continued he, without moving a muscle of his countenance, for he was in earnest, "I may as well do it handsomely; so I'll take the tallest and the stiffest, with a shade of red in her hair."

Seriously, I do not think the clubs alone have to answer for the decrease in early marriages. Other modern improvements in society must bear their share of blame. I would back the hearts-I mean the girls-against the clubs any day, only give them fair-play. The great god Pan is dead, but Eros is immortal. "Naturam expellas furcâ"-but rather let me translate freely, or my fairer readers (and if they once open this page, they are sure to read it) will think there is something wicked under the Latin-"you may pitchfork poor 'human nature' out of a three-pair front, and it will creep in again, wagging its tail, at the backdoor." Woman against the world! Man is her willing slave, if she be true to herself. But no sensible man of moderate means-no man who has to work, and is willing to work, for his livelihood-I might, perhaps, say no sensible man in any position

picks his wife out of a ball-room or an opera-box, however much he may like to see her there. A true woman has much more chance-we all know it-of winning any love that is worth her winning, in her own home, in her undress, in her little nameless everyday unstudied graces, sitting on a stile, loitering by a brook, rattling in a railway carriage, or busy and unconscious amidst common household duties, than in what the sex choose to consider the especial scenes of their glories and their triumphs. I have read somewhere, or have been told, that any woman, three removes from a Gorgon in personal attraetions, can make any man propose to her if she has the chance of living in the same house with him for a month. I am inclined, with some modification, to believe it, humiliating as it may seem to us noble animals. Jack, to whom I quote it, shakes his head with an air of superior cunning; but I see in him, at all events, a ready victim. A real woman, with a good figure and a kind heart, might hook him easily in a fortnight. At all events, there was much more chance of early marriages, and happy ones too, when neighbours of that large class who have children at their desire, but little substance to leave them, met as neighbours ; when personal intercourse was more unrestrained; when a lad could grow up in intimacy with another family, and learn to call the girls by their Christian names, without any fear of being asked his intentions; when there were such things as fishing-parties, and lounging in gardens, and country rides and rambles on long summer mornings, and family dinners and round games on winter's nights; not to speak of extempore dances, to which no one minded going and returning eight or ten miles, packed into any kind of conveyance, six inside, or, well wrapped up, three in a gig" the more the merrier." Those were the days, not exactly when we were young, for they were rather before our time, but of which our fathers have told us; those were the days to live in! when it was not considered "ungenteel "-that was the old word-or incorrect to walk home, if need were, two or three miles on a

clear frosty night; or if the roads were muddy, it was only a splashed ankle there were ankles then; flounces had not yet grown down to the toes. Men fell in love in those days-they couldn't help themselves; walking into it deliberately, after debate duly held pro and con, is a much slower process. Suppose there was

a stolen kiss now and then: bless us, don't be shocked, my dear young ladies-it hurt nobody: it was not a whit more improper, and much more pleasant, you may take my word for it, than your present waltz and polka, which we, remember, not so many years ago either, felt our propriety shocked at. Oh! if you only knew the golden opportunities of those patriarchal times, you would be the first to head a ladies' crusade, in which I thus volunteer the part of Peter the Hermit, to rescue youth at least out of the grasp of these infidel conventionalities, whose god is Form, and Fashion his prophet!

But it is not only the young who are thus letting slip from them their heritage of innocent enjoyment. Has everybody read Cranford? that admirable life-like picture, drawn as it must have been from the life itself, of what old ladies used to be in quiet country towns. If you have not read it, you have yet to read one of the truest descriptions ever written of a phase of society humble enough, but not without its share of the humorous and pathetic. But you have read it, perhaps, and sneer in your heart at the good old souls, and their humdrum ways, and innocent make-believes. Yet, to my mind, it seems a pleasant and a cheerful picture: and the authoress, while she indulges to the full your taste for the ludicrous, evidently tells you so, in an aside, all the way through. If you ever live to be old maids, my dears (such a thing is really possible in these times), and have few to care for you, and no great anxieties or absorbing objects in life, you might be very glad to make a fourth at quadrille at Cranford. But I doubt whether such a refuge will be open to you, unless times mend-by which I mean, retrograde a little. I doubt whether there will be any such thing as quadrille left, or even those very

slight, but social, suppers. Even the St James's Chronicle survives but in name; nothing of Cranford life will remain for you-except Dr Johnson. Old ladies of all descriptions are forbidden to be merry, and recommended to make themselves useful. You have a choice of employments set before you, according to your special predilections: you can wear a remarkably ill-made dress, of sombre hue, up to your throat, and call yourself a sister;" or you can go about distributing Anti-popery tracts to bewildered cottagers (in this case colours may be worn); you can make garments of all kinds that never fit, or soup which a Spartan could not stomach; you may be secretary to all manner of Ladies' Associations; you may lecture on the rights of women; you may talk scandal, and quarrel with your neighbours; you may read, you may write, you may wear-anything you please; but you must not enjoy yourself, as those poor old dowagers tried to do. Eyes more terrible than Mr Mulliner's are upon you. Are we not intellectual? are we not rational? are we not virtuous? no more cakes and ale.

Even the old ladies of Cranford were a relic of the past. The pleasant society that used to cheer many an old country town was departed, even in their day. Gentlemen of good family and small independencies used to find or form there a little circle, into which even a rich plebeian hardly won his way. The professional man, if he were gentle in character and manners, found a seat there as in right of his calling. And it is the breaking-up of these kindly brotherhoods which has driven all but the successful physician, who still holds his ground, into that society which is exclusively commercial; to their gain, and, as I must think, to his and our loss. In some few old towns, chiefly cathedral cities, there remains still, from local advantages, a little nucleus of what we call, and fairly call, "good society," round which others are glad to gather; and a new and valuable attraction, from which I hope we may yet see good fruits, has sprung up of late in many places by the extension of the foundation in many of our Public Schools.

But go and walk through any town you knew even in your own boyhood, and look at every house in which you laughed and danced of old with those who had

"Fair mien, discourses, civil exercises,

And all the blazon of a gentleman,"

and say whether it does not make you sick at heart to see the hosiery displayed in the new windows, or, at the best, the new surgeon's brass plate upon the door. And where are the representatives of that old family -poor, perhaps, but of unblemished descent and undimmed honourwhose arms, carved in stone, still look down in grim mockery over the old well-known portal, though now only the grocer's gay daughters pass in and out thereat-where are they? Not dead; not ruined: those fates, sad and common as they are, have the dignity of sorrow; no, they have fled, as if there were a pestilence in its streets, from a place where they might have lived happy and honoured, and have shut themselves in an ill-built villa in the country, or mix in the crowd at some cheap watering-place, where few know and none respect them.

Heaven help my wits! am I living in this grand age of development, of social progress, of intellectual light, and commercial activity, and bewailing myself after the narrow world of an old provincial town, or the coarse rusticity of old country merry-makings? Am I so insensible to the privileges of my generation? Am I like the little boy in Miss Edgeworth's story, "No- Eyes" walking through modern elegance and refinement, and seeing nothing to admire, and grumbling all the way at the dulness of the road? I don't know how it is. I don't object to the arts and sciences personally, though I was born, as another great. man says, in the "prescientific age myself. I am very glad to believe that we are making very considerable progress in them. But there is an old art called the Art of Happiness, and in this I doubt our proficiency; nay, I am afraid we are losing it very fast-I mean that large proportion of us who cannot afford to pay a very high figure for the

:

secret. I think an old writer calls it the "master-science," implying that others are subservient to it (his name, I remember, was Aristotle; but it's a very old book, and probably an exploded theory). Is it not true, even in a lower sense than it was written, that "there is a wisdom which multiplieth bitterness?" We are a very scientific age, a very reading age, a very inquiring age-no doubt of it; but are we the happier for it? I don't ask, Are we the better for it that is not the question before the present court; we leave that to graver judges. A reading age we are pre-eminently. Of the multitude of books there is verily no end. "Mudie's" has become a national institution. "I do believe," says a delightful writer, slyly putting his sentiments into the mouth of a street philosopher, "there's some folks as reads themselves stupid." ""* An inquiring age we are, undoubtedly we take very little upon trust; we investigate everything in heaven and earth, within and beyond our comprehension, and believe as little as we can help. That may be a step towards happiness-I leave that question again to wiser heads. We deal largely in general knowledge- an excellent article, no doubt; but one may have too much of it. Sometimes ignorance is really bliss. It has not added to my personal comfort to know to a decimal fraction what proportion of red earth I may expect to find in my cocoa every morning; to have become knowingly conscious that my coffee is mixed with ground liver and litmus, instead of honest chicory; and that bisulphuret of mercury forms the basis of my cayenne. It was once my fate to have a friend staying in my house who was one of these minute philosophers. He used to amuse himself after breakfast by a careful analysis and diagnosis of the contents of the teapot, laid out as a kind of hortus siccus on his plate. "This leaf, now," he would say, "is fuchsia; observe the serrated edges that's no tea-leafpositively poisonous. This, now, again, is blackthorn, or privet-yes, privet; you may know it by the

divisions in the panicles: that's no tea-leaf." A most uncomfortable guest he was; and though not a bad companion in many respects, I felt my appetite improved the first time I sat down to dinner without him. It won't do to look into all your meals with a microscope. Of course there is a medium between these over-curious investigations and an implicit faith in everything that is set before you. One likes in the main, though perhaps it betrays a weakness, to know what one is eating. Hear, on the other side the question, a recent traveller in China: "Salted earthworms," quoth he, "which fortunately we did not know until we had eaten them!" That was a true philosopher; but we cannot all be expected to attain to the sublime.

In fact, I am a poor creature, who could have been well contented, and perhaps happier, in a lower element. I feel like an owl in the broad daylight of intelligence round me, and want to go back to my darkness. I am oppressed with a wealth of all that is elevating and improving"the burden of an honour unto which I was not born." There are so many things in this age for which I feel myself so unfit. If I go to the Crystal Palace, I am told I go there (or ought to) in order to be edified and instructed; to have my taste refined, my history rubbed up, my mind ex panded; to learn the mysteries of form, colour, and proportion; to recognise the grand, and to worship the beautiful; but I don't. I have been there several times, but I go to be amused. I come away with a more confused idea than ever of the Kings and Queens of England; they seem to me to have altered the succession. As to the dates of Architecture and Chronology, about which I never was very learned, I now labour under a confusion of persons and places which I should hardly like to confess. Out of the Alhambra I come plump upon Rameses the Great, and passing under the chancel arch of Tuam Cathedral, and then through the door of Romsey Abbey, I find myself in the Church of Santa Maria at Cologne. I gave the guide-book