his green old
England, cursed by the spume of wordy demagogues, and hounded on to
envenomed hatreds and causeless discontents, that the professional
politician may fatten on her woes.

What will Boom live to see?

It will be a sorry day for the country when her wooded parks and stately
houses are numbered with the things that are no more.

Brandolin puts his arm over the boy's shoulder, and walks away with him
a little way under the deep boughs of yew.

"Look here, Boom," he says to him, "you won't care to be like those
fellows, but you don't know how hard it is to get out of the fashion of
one's set, to avoid going with the stream of one's contemporaries.
Nobody can say what will be the style of the 'best men' when you're of
age, but I'm much afraid it will still be the Masher. The Masher is not
very vicious, he is often cultured, he is a more harmless animal than he
tries to appear, but he is weak; and we are coming on times, or times
are coming on us, when an English gentleman will want to be very strong
if he is to hold his own and save his country from shame in her old age.
Don't be conventional. Scores of people who would be ashamed to seem
virtuous haven't courage to resist appearing vicious. Don't talk all
that odious slang which is ruining English. Don't get into that stupid
way of counting the days and seasons by steeple-chases,
coursing-meetings, flat-races, and the various different things to be
shot at. Sport is all very well in its place, but Squire Allworthy
beating the turnips with a brace of setters is a different figure to
Lord Newgold sending his hampers of pheasants to Leadenhall. Certainly,
Mr. Bradlaugh has no more right to make a misdemeanor of our
covert-shooting, and put the axe to our home woods, than we have to make
a misdemeanor of his shoes and stockings, or put an axe to his head. But
I think if of our own accord we centred our minds and spent our guineas
less on our preserves, we might be wiser, and if we grudged our woods
less to the hawk and the woodpecker and the owl and the jay, and all the
rest of their native population, we should be wiser still. I never see a
beast or a bird caught or dead in a keeper's trap but that I think to
myself that after all, if we ourselves are caught in the end between the
grinning jaws of anarchy, it will really be only partial justice on our
injustice. Only I fear that it won't better the birds and beasts very
much, even when we all go to prison for