it is
more customary for females in the middle rank of life to visit Italy than
it was for them in your days to move twenty miles from home.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Is this a salutary or an injurious fashion?

_Montesinos_.--According to the subject, and to the old school maxim
_quicquid recipitur_, _recipitur in modum recipientis_. The wise come
back wiser, the well-informed with richer stores of knowledge, the empty
and the vain return as they went, and there are some who bring home
foreign vanities and vices in addition to their own.

_Sir Thomas More_.--And what has been imported by such travellers for the
good of their country?

_Montesinos_.--Coffee in the seventeenth century, inoculation in that
which followed; since which we have had now and then a new dance and a
new game at cards, curry and mullagatawny soup from the East Indies,
turtle from the West, and that earthly nectar to which the East
contributes its arrack, and the West its limes and its rum. In the
language of men it is called Punch; I know not what may be its name in
the Olympian speech. But tell not the Englishmen of George the Second's
age, lest they should be troubled for the degeneracy of their
grandchildren, that the punchbowl is now become a relic of antiquity, and
their beloved beverage almost as obsolete as metheglin, hippocras, chary,
or morat!

_Sir Thomas More_.--It is well for thee that thou art not a young beagle
instead of a grey-headed bookman, or that rambling vein of thine would
often bring thee under the lash of the whipper-in! Off thou art and away
in pursuit of the smallest game that rises before thee.

_Montesinos_.--Good Ghost, there was once a wise Lord Chancellor, who in
a dialogue upon weighty matters thought it not unbecoming to amuse
himself with discursive merriment concerning St. Appollonia and St.
Uncumber.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Good Flesh and Blood, that was a nipping reply! And
happy man is his dole who retains in grave years, and even to grey hairs,
enough of green youth's redundant spirits for such excursiveness! He who
never relaxes into sportiveness is a wearisome companion, but beware of
him who jests at everything! Such men disparage by some ludicrous
association all objects which are presented to their thoughts, and
thereby render themselves incapable of any emotion which can either
elevate or soften them, they bring upon their moral being an influence
more withering than the blast of the desert. A