iety became a mere jumble of people who
suspected and hated and thought to rob each other. It is horrible,
even at this distance of time, to think of those rapacious beings who
forgot literature, art, friendship, and family affection for the sake
of high play. One weary, witty debauchee said, "Play wastes time,
health, money, and friendship;" yet he went on pitting his skill
against that of unsexed women and polished rogues.

The morality of the fair gamblers was more than loose. It was taken
for granted in the whole set that every female member of it must
inevitably be divorced, if the catastrophe had not occurred already;
and one man asked Walpole, "Who's your proctor?" just as he would have
asked, "Who's your tailor?" An unspeakable society--a hollow,
heartless, callous, wicked brood. Compare that crew of furious
money-grabbers with our modern gentlemen and ladies! We have our
faults--crime and vice flourish; but, from the Court down to the
simplest middle-class society in our provincial towns, the spread of
seemliness and purity is distinctly marked. Some insatiable grumblers
will have it that our girls and women are deteriorating, and we are
informed that the taste for objectionable literature is keener than it
used to be. It is a distinct libel. No one save a historian would now
read the corrupting works of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and yet it is a fact
that those novels were read aloud among companies of ladies. A man
winces now if he is obliged to turn to them; the girls in the "good
old times" heard them with never a blush. Wherever we turn we find the
same steady advance. Can any creature be more dainty, more sweet, more
pure, than the ordinary English girl of our day? Will any one bring
evidence to show that the girls of the last century, or of any other,
were superior to our own maidens? No evidence has been produced from
literature, from journals, from family correspondence, and I am pretty
certain that no evidence exists. Practically speaking, the complaints
of the decline of morality are merely uttered as a mode of showing the
talker's own superiority.

XVI.

"RAISING THE LEVEL OF AMUSEMENTS."

It is really most kind on the part of certain good people to
reorganise the amusements of the people; but, as each reorganiser
fancies himself to be the only man who has the right notion, it
follows that matters are becoming more and more complicated. For
example, to begin with literature, a simple person who h