y handing his paramour to her carriage from
the Opera in the presence of Majesty. Fielding's novels graphically
display a state of things which happily now no longer exists. The gossip
of our times reveals enough--alas!--too much--of human weakness and
immorality; but the gossip of our times is as far superior to that which
Horace Walpole has so faithfully preserved, or to that which Mrs. Manley
in her "New Atlantis" sullied her woman's name by retailing, or to that
which Count Grammont thought it no disgrace to record, as light to
darkness or as dross to gold. Macaulay thus describes the country squire
of the seventeenth century:--"His chief pleasures were commonly derived
from field-sports, and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and
his pronunciation were such as we should now only expect to hear from
ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jokes, and scurrilous terms of abuse
were uttered with the broadest accents of his province." The country
squire of the nineteenth century is surely some improvement upon this;
nor has the improvement been confined to him--it has extended to all
classes. We still hear much, for instance, of drunkenness, but
drunkenness does not prevail as it did when publicans wrote on their
signs, as Smollett tells us they did,--"You may here get drunk for one
penny, dead drunk for two pence, and clean straw for nothing."

After all, then, we lay down our pen in hope. We have undergone
struggles deep and severe, and such struggles we may still continue to
have. With a debt of eight hundred millions like a millstone round our
neck--with a population increasing at the rate of a thousand a day--with
Ireland's ills not yet remedied--with half the landed property of the
country in the hands of the lawyer or the Jew--with discordant colonies
in all parts of the globe--with large masses in our midst degraded by woe
and want--barbarians in the midst of civilization--heathens in the full
blaze of Christian light--no man can deny that there are breakers ahead.
Rather from what we see around us we may conclude that we shall have
storms to weather, severe as any that have awakened the energy and
heroism of our countrymen in days gone by. But the history of the past
teaches us how those storms will be met and overcome. Not by accident is
modern history so rich in the possession of the new creed and the new
blood, for the want of which the glory of Athens and Corinth, and of her
"who was named eter