ploy
To gain the riches he can ne'er enjoy,

we can only reply that we have heard something like it before. In fact,
we cannot place ourselves in the position of men at the time when modern
society was first definitely emerging from the feudal state, and
everybody was sufficiently employed in gossiping about his neighbours.
We are perplexed by the extreme interest with which they dwell upon the
little series of obvious remarks which have been worked to death by
later writers. Pope, for example, is still wondering over the first
appearance of one of the most familiar of modern inventions. He
exclaims,

Blest paper credit! last and best supply!
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!

He points out, with an odd superfluity of illustration, that bank-notes
enable a man to be bribed much more easily than of old. There is no
danger, he says, that a patriot will be exposed by a guinea dropping out
of his pocket at the end of an interview with the minister; and he shows
how awkward it would be if a statesman had to take his bribes in kind,
and his servants should proclaim,

Sir, Spain has sent a thousand jars of oil;
Huge bales of British cloth blockade the door;
A hundred oxen at your levees roar.

This, however, was natural enough when the South Sea scheme was for the
first time illustrating the powers and the dangers of extended credit.
To us, who are beginning to fit our experience of commercial panics into
a scientific theory, the wonder expressed by Pope sounds like the
exclamations of a savage over a Tower musket. And in the sphere of
morals it is pretty much the same. All those reflections about the
little obvious vanities and frivolities of social life which supplied
two generations of British essayists, from the 'Tatler' to the
'Lounger,' with an inexhaustible fund of mild satire, have lost their
freshness. Our own modes of life have become so complex by comparison,
that we pass over these mere elements to plunge at once into more
refined speculations. A modern essayist starts where Addison or Johnson
left off. He assumes that his readers know that procrastination is an
evil, and tries to gain a little piquancy by paradoxically pointing out
the objections to punctuality. Character, of course, becomes more
complex, and requires more delicate modes of analysis. Compare, for
example, the most delicate of Pope's delineations with one of Mr.
Browning's elaborate psychological studies. Re