n and Miss Burney (I am
not even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas!
Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up to
from novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to my
puzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merely
conventional, like those of postal districts; or, as I suggested above,
are there real chains of mountains, chasms, nay, deep oceans, breaking
up its surface; and do we not belong, we people of the nineteenth
century, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Past
which, much to its astonishment (I should think), produced us?

There are other puzzles about the Past, far more intimate in nature and
less grandiose, but, on the whole, far less easy to answer. One of these
is difficult even to word, but every reader will identify it in
connection with some of the most delightful experiences he has been
admitted to. Roughly, it may be expressed as follows:--Were old people
ever young? Was there a period in the world's history (and not so far
back) when everybody was enchantingly mixed of primness and romance, had
little graces of manner, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, with a
tendency every now and then to employ language rather stronger than the
occasion warranted? Did youths and maidens wander about with faint moral
odours of pot-pourri and quaint creases of character, as of
superannuated garments long folded in a drawer! Or are these qualities
taken on by each generation in turn, in which case will the Hilda
Wangels and Dodos of to-day delight the twentieth century as possible
inmates of Cranford?

Having worked my way to so marvellous a puzzle as this, I had better
remove the strain by hastily suggesting another question, which will
satisfactorily get rid of the others, to wit, whether the Past did
really ever exist?

On the whole, I am tempted to believe that it did not. I can even prove
it by a logical stroke worthy of the very greatest philosophers. Granted
that the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only the
Present could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannot
co-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, we
call in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease by
a fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present and
the Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the same
thing at bottom.

This is coge