night and his
followers dashed after him with a troop of horsemen dogs, he had no
redress, and dared not even kill the beast, lest he should interfere with
the pleasures of his lord.... New methods and pretences for extorting
money from the people were devised every day."

It would be easy to multiply similar quotations. The landlords of ancient
times, with whom it was plainly intimated we could bear no flattering
comparison, are held up, we see, to complete reprobation.

The difference between the bad landlord of ancient and of modern times,
(for we presume the good and the bad, the wheat and the tares, were sown
together then as now,) we believe to be this. The modern bad landlord
takes his rent--a rent obtained often by a ruinous competition for the
soil--and thinks no more of the matter; thinks nothing of the tenant,
whether he has offered a higher rent than he can well pay, or of the
labourer, whether the wages he receives are sufficient to support him in
health. The ancient bad landlord was a positive extortioner; he _did_ look
after his tenants or his serfs--to see if there was any thing more he
could take from them; he looked into the roost for the last hen, and
behind the barn-door for the last egg. When we censure the modern landlord
for being an absentee, reckless of his tenantry, we in fact tacitly demand
from him a higher strain of virtue than we exact from other wealthy
classes, who are allowed to receive without inquiry, and expend without
control, the utmost income which fortune and the laws have given them. He
is at worst the "sluggard king," indifferent to a world of which he knows
nothing, and absorbed only in the pursuit of his own pleasures. But the
bad landlord of feudal times had the active vices of the robber and the
tyrant.

Let no one study the middle ages in the hope--which some seem to
entertain--of extracting from _them_ the lesson peculiarly applicable to
ourselves. The feudal times are utterly past. Some of their forms, or some
shadow of their forms, may still linger amongst us; but their spirit is as
utterly past as that which animated an Athenian democracy, or the court of
the Great King. We must study our duty as citizens, as Christians, in the
circumstances around us, in the eternal Writing before us: we shall gain
nothing by the fantastic gloss, with its grotesque illuminations, which
the middle ages supply. This turning and struggling towards the past is
but the backward looking of