e all, in common belief, creatures feminine, hence
deservedly called "good people,"--that they made the country merry, and
kept clowns in awe, and were better for the people's morals than a justice
of the peace. They tamed the savage, and made him yield, and bow before
feminine feet. Sweet were they that hallowed the brown hills, and left
tokens of their visits, blessing all seasons to the rustic's ear,
whispering therein softly at nightfall--

"Go, take a wife unto thy arms, and see
Winter and brownie-hills shall have a charm for thee."

Such was your talk, Eusebius, passing off your discontent of things that
are, into your inward ideal, rejoicing in things unreal, breaking out into
your wildest paradox--"What is the world the better for all its boasted
truth! It has belied man's better nature. Faith, trust, belief, is the
better part of him, the spiritual of man; and who shall dare to say that
its creations, visible, or invisible, all felt, acknowledged as vital
things, are not realities?" All this--in your contempt for beadles and
tip-staves, even overseers and churchwardens, and all subdividing
machinery of country government, that, when it came in and fairly
established itself, drove away the "good people," 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 y