and with them merriment and love, and sweet fear, from off the earth—­that twenty wheedling, flattering Autolycuses did not do half the hurt to morals or manners that one grim-visaged justice did—­the curmudgeon, you called him, Eusebius, that would, were they now on earth, and sleeping all lovely with their pearly arms together, locked in leafy bower, have Cupid and Psyche taken up under the Vagrant Act, or have them lodged in a “Union House” to be disunited.  You thought the superstition of the world as it was, far above the knowledge it now brags of.  You admired the Saxons and Danes in their veneration of the predictions of old women, whom the after ungallantry of a hard age would have burned for witches.  Marriage act and poor act have, as you believe, extinguished the holy light of Hymen’s torch, and re-lighted it with Lucifer matches in Register offices; and out it soon goes, leaving worse than Egyptian darkness in the dwellings of the poor—­the smell of its brimstone indicative of its origin, and ominous of its ending.

I verily believe, Eusebius, you would have spared Don Quixote’s whole library, and have preferred committing the curate to the flames.  Your dreams, even your day-dreams, have hurried you ever far off and away from the beaten turnpike-road of life, through forests of enchantment, to rescue beauty which you never saw, from knight-begirt and dragon-guarded castles; and little thankful have you been when you have opened your eyes awake in peace to the cold light of our misnamed utilitarian day, and found all your enchantment broken, the knights discomfited, the dragon killed, the drawbridge broken down, and the ladies free—­all without your help; and then, when you have gone forth, and in lieu of some rescued paragon of her sex, you have met but the squire’s daughter, in her trim bonnet, tripping with her trumpery to set up her fancy-shop in Vanity-Fair, for fops to stare at through their glasses, your imagination has felt the shock, and incredulous of the improvement in manners and morals, and overlooking all advancement of knowledge, all the advantages of their real liberty, momentarily have you wished them all shut up in castles, or in nunneries, to be the more adored till they may chance to be rescued.  But soon would the fit go off—­and the first sweet, innocent, lovely smile that greeted you, restored your gentleness, and added to your stock of love.  And once, when some parish shame was talked of, you never would believe it common, and blamed the Overseer for bringing it to light—­and vindicated the sex by quoting from Pennant, how St Werberg lived immaculate with her husband Astardus, copying her aunt, the great Ethelreda, who lived for three years with not less purity with her good man Tonberetus, and for twelve with her second husband the pious Prince Egfrid:  and the churchwarden left the vestry, lifting up his hands, and saying—­“Poor gentleman!”—­and you laughed as if you had never laughed before, when you heard it, and