t
on what his wife can worm out of the good nature of the rich. Why,
sir, they growl as insolently now at the parson or the squire's wife
if they don't get as much money as their neighbours, as they used to
at the parish vestrymen under the old law. Look at that Lord
Vieuxbois, sir, as sweet a gentleman as ever God made. It used to
do me good to walk behind him when he came over here shooting, just
to hear the gentle kind-hearted way in which he used to speak to
every old soul he met. He spends his whole life and time about the
poor, I hear. But, sir, as sure as you live he's making his people
slaves and humbugs. He doesn't see, sir, that they want to be
raised bodily out of this miserable hand-to-mouth state, to be
brought nearer up to him, and set on a footing where they can shift
for themselves. Without meaning it, sir, all his boundless
charities are keeping the people down, and telling them they must
stay down, and not help themselves, but wait for what he gives them.
He fats prize-labourers, sir, just as Lord Minchampstead fats prize-
oxen and pigs.'

Lancelot could not help thinking of that amusingly inconsistent,
however well-meant, scene in Coningsby, in which Mr. Lyle is
represented as trying to restore 'the independent order of
peasantry,' by making them the receivers of public alms at his own
gate, as if they had been middle-age serfs or vagabonds, and not
citizens of modern England.

'It may suit the Mr. Lyles of this age,' thought Lancelot, 'to make
the people constantly and visibly comprehend that property is their
protector and their friend, but I question whether it will suit the
people themselves, unless they can make property understand that it
owes them something more definite than protection.'

Saddened by this conversation, which had helped to give another
shake to the easy-going complacency with which Lancelot had been
used to contemplate the world below him, and look on its evils as
necessaries, ancient and fixed as the universe, he entered the
village fair, and was a little disappointed at his first glimpse of
the village-green. Certainly his expectations had not been very
exalted; but there had run through them a hope of something
melodramatic, dreams of May-pole dancing and athletic games,
somewhat of village-belle rivalry, of the Corin and Sylvia school;
or, failing that, a few Touchstones and Audreys, some genial earnest
buffo humour here and