o appeal to the common process of litigious
argumentation against these fair despots of society; but we doubt whether
we should be acting even in the true spirit of gallantry, if we recognised
any such prerogative in the domain of literature. It is open to any writer
who thinks fit so to do, to disparage the present age by comparing it with
olden times. It is also open to him, if he should be so minded, to show
that these olden times, so much vaunted, were in fact far more culpable
than ourselves, even in those points where we are guilty. But to none is
it open--in the same book--to do both the one and the other; to disparage
the present by comparison with the past, and then prove the past to have
been ten times worse than the present. This is more than can reasonably
fall to the share of any one author, or authoress. He cannot have it both
ways. He cannot have the pleasure of putting the present age to shame by a
contrast with the past, and the pleasure, almost as great, of exposing in
their true colours the vices of a past that has been too indulgently
surveyed.

But something of this license Mrs Sinnett seems disposed to take. At p. 37
we have to submit, with the rest of our contemporaries, to the following
rebuke:--"When we hear it publicly proclaimed that it is a great thing for
a young nobleman to postpone '_his pleasures_' for a week or two for the
sake of performing a service to his country, we cannot but begin to doubt
whether, in the education of our privileged classes, we have really
improved much on the system of the 'dark ages.' _Then, at least, it was
not thought that any class had a right to make 'its pleasures' its chief
consideration._"

Indeed! Yet we are told in other parts that the landlords of those times
not only made their pleasures their chief consideration, but wrung by
violence the last groschen from the peasant's hand in order to procure
them. At p. 55, vol. ii., after an account of the pleasures of the kings
and nobles, we have the following description of the peasant:--"And what,
then, was the condition of the people all this while? 'Look here upon this
picture and on this!' All taxes and imposts fell, as a matter of course,
on the lower orders; the humble citizen, the laborious peasant, had to
toil and earn by the sweat of his brow, not his own daily bread, but the
means of luxurious indulgence to his insolent masters; yet if the wild
boar came tearing up his fields and vineyards, and the k