ondon. You
can give us the old-fashioned Parson, as in all essentials he may yet be
found--but before you had to drag him out of the great Tractarian bog;
and, for the rest, I really think that while, as I am told, many popular
writers are doing their best, especially in France, and perhaps a little
in England, to set class against class, and pick up every stone in the
kennel to shy at a gentleman with a good coat on his back, something
useful might be done by a few good-humoured sketches of those innocent
criminals a little better off than their neighbours, whom, however we
dislike them, I take it for granted we shall have to endure, in one
shape or another, as long as civilization exists; and they seem, on the
whole, as good in their present shape as we are likely to get, shake the
dice-box of society how we will."

PISISTRATUS.--"Very well said, sir; but this rural country gentleman
life is not so new as you think. There's Washington Irving--"

MR. CAXTON.--"Charming; but rather the manners of the last century than
this. You may as well cite Addison and Sir Roger de Coverley."

PISISTRATUS.--"'Tremaine' and 'De Vere.'"

MR. CAXTON.--"Nothing can be more graceful, nor more unlike what I mean.
The Pales and Terminus I wish you to put up in the fields are familiar
images, that you may cut out of an oak tree,--not beautiful marble
statues, on porphyry pedestals, twenty feet high."

PISISTRATUS.--"Miss Austen; Mrs. Gore, in her masterpiece of 'Mrs.
Armytage;' Mrs. Marsh, too; and then (for Scottish manners) Miss
Ferrier!"

MR. CAXTON (growing cross).--"Oh, if you cannot treat on bucolics but
what you must hear some Virgil or other cry 'Stop thief,' you deserve
to be tossed by one of your own 'short-horns.'" (Still more
contemptuously)--"I am sure I don't know why we spend so much money
on sending our sons to school to learn Latin, when that Anachronism
of yours, Mrs. Caxton, can't even construe a line and a half of
Phaedrus,--Phaedrus, Mrs. Caxton, a book which is in Latin what Goody
Two-Shoes is in the vernacular!"

MRS. CAXTON (alarmed and indignant).--"Fie! Austin I I am sure you can
construe Phaedrus, dear!"

Pisistratus prudently preserves silence.

MR. CAXTON.--"I'll try him--

"'Sua cuique quum sit animi cogitatio
Colurque proprius.'

"What does that mean?"

PISISTRATITS (smiling)--"That every man has some colouring matter within
him, to give his own tinge to--"

"His own novel," in