ity, quiet habits
and homely disingenuousness, and she more than once expresses a doubt if
much has been gained by the introduction of machinery, suffrage and
culture. She regrets that--

Human advancement has no moments when conservative reforming intellect
takes a nap, while imagination does a little toryism by the sly,
revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesque
inefficiency is everywhere giving place to sick-and-span, new-painted,
new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans,
elevations and sections; but, alas! no picture. Mine, I fear, is
not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old
abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal
clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades
of vulgar errors. [Footnote: Amos Barton, chapter I.]

In _Adam Bede_, when describing a leisurely walk home from church in the
good old days, she bursts out again into enthusiastic praise of the time
before there was so much advancement and culture.

Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through
the fields from "afternoon church"--as such walks used to be in those
old leisurely times when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal,
was the newest locomotive wonder; when Sunday books had most of them
old brown leather covers, and opened with a remarkable precision always
in one place. Leisure is gone--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone,
and the pack-horses and the slow wagons and the pedlers who brought
bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell
you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create
leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for
eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now--eager for
amusement; prone to excursion trains, art museums, periodical
literature and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and
cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different
personage; he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was
free from that "periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He
was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion--of
quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis, happy in his inability to
know the causes of things, preferring the things thems