hed to
them in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apology
for their peculiar forms of illbreeding. It is quite curious how often
the catastrophe, or the leading interest, of a modern novel, turns upon
the want, both in maid and bachelor, of the common self-command which
was taught to their grandmothers and grandfathers as the first element
of ordinarily decent behaviour. Rashly inquiring the other day the plot
of a modern story from a female friend, I elicited, after some
hesitation, that it hinged mainly on the young people's 'forgetting
themselves in a boat;' and I perceive it to be accepted as nearly an
axiom in the code of modern civic chivalry that the strength of amiable
sentiment is proved by our incapacity on proper occasions to express,
and on improper ones to control it. The pride of a gentleman of the old
school used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent
when he ought, (not to speak of the higher nobleness which bestowed love
where it was honourable, and reverence where it was due); but the
automatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledge
little further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or the
effervescence of a chemical mixture.

There is a pretty little story of Alfred de Musset's,--_La Mouche_,
which, if the reader cares to glance at it, will save me further trouble
in explaining the disciplinarian authority of mere old-fashioned
politeness, as in some sort protective of higher things. It describes,
with much grace and precision, a state of society by no means
pre-eminently virtuous, or enthusiastically heroic; in which many people
do extremely wrong, and none sublimely right. But as there are heights
of which the achievement is unattempted, there are abysses to which fall
is barred; neither accident nor temptation will make any of the
principal personages swerve from an adopted resolution, or violate an
accepted principle of honour; people are expected as a matter of course
to speak with propriety on occasion, and to wait with patience when they
are bid: those who do wrong, admit it; those who do right don't boast of
it; everybody knows his own mind, and everybody has good manners.

Nor must it be forgotten that in the worst days of the self-indulgence
which destroyed the aristocracies of Europe, their vices, however
licentious, were never, in the fatal modern sense, 'unprincipled.' The
vainest believed in virtue; the viles