y rest in peace.

_Mrs. Opimian._ Surely, doctor, you do not think this Agapemone right?

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I only say I do not know whether it is right
or wrong. It is nothing new. Three centuries ago there was a Family of
Love, on which Middleton wrote a comedy. Queen Elizabeth persecuted this
family; Middleton made it ridiculous; but it outlived them both, and
there may have been no harm in it after all.

_Mrs. Opimian._ Perhaps, doctor, the world is too good to see any
novelty except in something wrong.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Perhaps it is only wrong that arrests attention,
because right is common, and wrong is rare. Of the many thousand persons
who walk daily through a street you only hear of one who has been robbed
or knocked down. If ever Hamlet's news--'that the world has grown
honest'--should prove true, there would be an end of our newspaper. For,
let us see, what is the epitome of a newspaper? In the first place,
specimens of all the deadly sins, and infinite varieties of violence and
fraud; a great quantity of talk, called by courtesy legislative wisdom,
of which the result is 'an incoherent and undigested mass of law, shot
down, as from a rubbish-cart, on the heads of the people ';{1} lawyers
barking at each other in that peculiar style of dylactic delivery which
is called forensic eloquence, and of which the first and most
distinguished practitioner was Cerberus;{2} bear-garden meetings of
mismanaged companies, in which directors and shareholders abuse each
other in choice terms, not all to be found even in Rabelais; burstings
of bank bubbles, which, like a touch of harlequin's wand, strip off
their masks and dominoes from 'highly respectable' gentlemen, and leave
them in their true figures of cheats and pickpockets; societies of all
sorts, for teaching everybody everything, meddling with everybody's
business, and mending everybody's morals; mountebank advertisements
promising the beauty of Helen in a bottle of cosmetic, and the age of
Old Parr in a box of pills; folly all alive in things called reunions;
announcements that some exceedingly stupid fellow has been
'entertaining' a select company; matters, however multiform,
multifarious, and multitudinous, all brought into family likeness by the
varnish of false pretension with which they are all overlaid.

1 Jeremy Bentham.

2 Cerberus forensis erat causidicus.--Petronius Arbiter.

_Mrs. Opimian._ I did not like to interrupt you, d