g youth, delighting in rough short coats, monkey
jackets, regatta shirts, big cigars, funny walking-canes, the smallest of
boots, the most angular of hats, the most Brobdignagian of ties--rejoicing
in a thinly-sown mustache or imperial, addicted to brandy-and-water and
casinos, going out with the "afternoon delivery," and coming in with the
milk. This is true so far as it goes. Ascend a step, and there is the
representative of the class which has run to seed in the mediaeval
direction--fond of, and learned in, all the symbols of ancient priestly
power and rank--steeped in black-letter and illuminated missal philosophy
and theology--erudite in all the variations which spiritual dominance has
assumed--in short, the resuscitator of the "good old times" ecclesiastical.

Again, we come to the type of the chief, and perhaps the finest
class--many-hued and many-sided, difficult to define, more difficult to
estimate. He is a chaos of misty beliefs and dubious doubtings--a striver
after theories which would exercise a spell over mind and matter of almost
alchemic potency--an open receiver for every new and quackish nostrum--a
shallow scholar, with the pedantry and conceit of a ripe one--a denier of
other men's attainments, without stopping to inquire whether he will ever
be able to equal them--apt to give dogmatic advice, and slow to take
any--lastly, and worst, he is sometimes a rash and unphilosophic would-be
analyzer of the grounds of our most sacred belief. He may be--indeed,
frequently is--of a genuine and earnest spirit, which he knows neither how
to direct nor bound.

In judging of the frame of mind which generates and elaborates, or
receives such impressions, it is necessary to remember and make due
allowance for the rapid and _real_ advances which we have made in the
sifting of old and the ascertainment of new truth, within an almost
infinitesimal portion of time. Men now think and act vehemently--with
appliances at their elbow which, to those who know their power, are a true
Aladdin's lamp, giving the key to thoughts and deeds, and the clew to
facts, which erst had been deemed miraculous. When we now speak of the
"rising generation," it is seriously. We discard the class whose dress is
apish, whose life is an inanity, whose thoughts are vapid, if not
something fouler and worse. We would think of, and give credit for
earnestness, to that large class whose ready reception and striving after
the establishment of all thing