e girls are
sent to tip-top boarding-schools, where amongst other trash they read
_Rokeby_, and are taught to sing snatches from that high-flying ditty,
the "Cavalier"--

'Would you match the base Skippon, and Massey, and Brown,
With the barons of England, who fight for the crown?--

he! he! their own names. Whilst the lads are sent to those hotbeds of
pride and folly--colleges, whence they return with a greater contempt for
everything "low," and especially for their own pedigree, than they went
with. I tell you, friend, the children of Dissenters, if not their
parents, are going over to the Church, as you call it, and the Church is
going over to Rome.'

'I do not see the justice of that latter assertion at all,' said I; 'some
of the Dissenters' children may be coming over to the Church of England,
and yet the Church of England be very far from going over to Rome.'

'In the high road for it, I assure you,' said the man in black; 'part of
it is going to abandon, the rest to lose their prerogative, and when a
Church no longer retains its prerogative, it speedily loses its own
respect, and that of others.'

'Well,' said I, 'if the higher classes have all the vices and follies
which you represent, on which point I can say nothing, as I have never
mixed with them; and even supposing the middle classes are the foolish
beings you would fain make them, and which I do not believe them as a
body to be, you would still find some resistance amongst the lower
classes: I have a considerable respect for their good sense and
independence of character; but pray let me hear your opinion of them.'

'As for the lower classes,' said the man in black, 'I believe them to be
the most brutal wretches in the world, the most addicted to foul feeding,
foul language, and foul vices of every kind; wretches who have neither
love for country, religion, nor anything save their own vile selves. You
surely do not think that they would oppose a change of religion! why,
there is not one of them but would hurrah for the Pope, or Mahomet, for
the sake of a hearty gorge and a drunken bout, like those which they are
treated with at election contests.'

'Has your church any followers amongst them?' said I.

'Wherever there happens to be a Romish family of considerable
possessions,' said the man in black, 'our church is sure to have
followers of the lower class, who have come over in the hope of getting
something in the shape of dole or donatio