rmed principles, has its upper forms crowded
with the genteel youth of Milby. The gentlemen there fall into no other
excess at dinner-parties than the perfectly well-bred and virtuous excess
of stupidity; and though the ladies are still said sometimes to take too
much upon themselves, they are never known to take too much in any other
way. The conversation is sometimes quite literary, for there is a
flourishing book-club, and many of the younger ladies have carried their
studies so far as to have forgotten a little German. In short, Milby is
now a refined, moral, and enlightened town; no more resembling the Milby
of former days than the huge, long-skirted, drab great-coat that
embarrassed the ankles of our grandfathers resembled the light paletot in
which we tread jauntily through the muddiest streets, or than the
bottle-nosed Britons, rejoicing over a tankard, in the old sign of the
Two Travellers at Milby, resembled the severe-looking gentleman in straps
and high collars whom a modern artist has represented as sipping the
imaginary port of that well-known commercial house.

But pray, reader, dismiss from your mind all the refined and fashionable
ideas associated with this advanced state of things, and transport your
imagination to a time when Milby had no gas-lights; when the mail drove
up dusty or bespattered to the door of the Red Lion; when old Mr. Crewe,
the curate, in a brown Brutus wig, delivered inaudible sermons on a
Sunday, and on a week-day imparted the education of a gentleman--that is
to say, an arduous inacquaintance with Latin through the medium of the
Eton Grammar--to three pupils in the upper grammar-school.

If you had passed through Milby on the coach at that time, you would have
had no idea what important people lived there, and how very high a sense
of rank was prevalent among them. It was a dingy-looking town, with a
strong smell of tanning up one street and a great shaking of hand-looms
up another; and even in that focus of aristocracy, Friar's Gate, the
houses would not have seemed very imposing to the hasty and superficial
glance of a passenger. You might still less have suspected that the
figure in light fustian and large grey whiskers, leaning against the
grocer's door-post in High Street, was no less a person than Mr. Lowme,
one of the most aristocratic men in Milby, said to have been 'brought up
a gentleman', and to have had the gay habits accordant with that station,
keeping his harriers a