practical, every-day life the spirit of Christianity, and has given to the words mercy and charity, the signification of real and existing virtues.  Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth century.  To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty.  If he opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form or other.  It is not only in such novels as those of Fielding and Smollett, which are intended to describe the lower classes of society, and in which blackened eyes and broken heads are relished forms of wit, that the modern reader is offended by the continual infliction of pain.  Goldsmith gives Squire Thornhill perfect impunity from the law and from public opinion in his crimes.  Mackenzie does not think of visiting any legal retribution on his “Man of the World.”  Godwin wrote “Caleb Williams” to show with what impunity man preyed on man, how powerless the tenant and the dependent woman lay before the violence or the intrigue of the rich.  And it is not only that a crime should be committed with perfect security which would now receive a severe sentence at the hands of an ordinary judge and jury which surprises the reader of to-day, but that scenes which would now shock any person of common humanity or taste, were, in the last century, especially intended to amuse.  In Miss Burney’s “Evelina,” Captain Mirvan continually insults and maltreats Mme. Duval, the grandmother of the heroine, in a manner which would not only be inconceivable in a gentleman tolerated in society, but in a blackguard, not entirely bereft of feelings of decency or good-nature.  While she is a guest in his own house, he torments her with false accounts of the sufferings of a friend; sends her on a futile errand to relieve those sufferings in a carriage of his own, and then, disguised as a highwayman, he assaults her with the collusion of his servants, tears her clothes, and leaves her half dead with terror, tied with ropes, at the bottom of a ditch.  When Mme. Duval relates her ill-treatment to her granddaughter, Evelina could only find occasion to say:  “Though this narrative almost compelled me to laugh, yet I was really irritated with the captain, for carrying his love of tormenting—­sport, he calls it to such harshness and unjustifiable extremes.”  And Miss Burney expected, no doubt with reason, that her reader would be amused by all this.

In the same work a nobleman and a fashionable commoner are described as settling a bet by a race between two decrepit women over eighty years of age.  “When the signal was given for them to set off, the poor creatures, feeble and frightened, ran against each other:  and neither of them being able to support the shock, they both fell on the ground. * * * Again they set off, and hobbled along, nearly even