d shrunken man opposite
him was drawing figures in the spilt beer with his pipestem,
and discoursing of the glorious times before the great war,
'when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work
than there hands.' 'Poor human nature,' thought Lancelot, as he
tried to follow one of those unintelligible discussions about
the relative prices of the loaf and the bushel of flour, which
ended, as usual, in more swearing and more quarreling, and more
beer to make it up: 'poor human nature! always looking back, as
the German sage says, to some fancied golden age, never looking
forward to the real one which is coming."

The descriptive powers of the author are illustrated in many fine
passages, of which this delineation of an English day in March will
serve as a specimen:

"A silent, dim, distanceless, steaming, rotting day in March.
The last brown oak-leaf, which had stood out the winter's
frost, spun and quivered plump down, and then lay, as if
ashamed to have broken for a moment the ghastly stillness, like
an awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of
wind just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side
of all faces. The spiders, having been weather-be-witched the
night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and
brier with gossamer-cradles, and never a fly to be caught in
them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the
markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of
the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and nostrils of the
shivering horses, and clung with clammy paws to frosted hats
and dripping boughs. A soulless, skyless, catarrhal day, as if
that bustling dowager, old mother Earth--what with
match-making in spring, and _fetes champetres_ in summer, and
dinner-giving in autumn--was fairly worn out, and put to bed
with the influenza, under wet blankets and the cold-water
cure."

"Yeast," says the _Spectator_, "may be looked at as a series of
sketches, loosely strung together, descriptive of palpable social evils
in the mass, and of metaphysical broodings among the more thoughtful
youth; a struggle which perhaps is always taking place, and which is no
further distinctive of the present age than the form that is given by
our intellectual and religious activity. The origin of evil, its
presence in the