rom
the door of Newgate to the gallows, because it was a drizzling morning,
and he was apt to take cold.

The virtue which the world wants is a healthful virtue, not a
valetudinarian virtue, a virtue which can expose itself to the risks
inseparable from all spirited exertion, not a virtue which keeps out of
the common air for fear of infection, and eschews the common food as too
stimulating. It would be indeed absurd to attempt to keep men from
acquiring those qualifications which fit them to play their part in life
with honor to themselves and advantage to their country, for the sake of
preserving a delicacy which cannot be preserved, a delicacy which a walk
from Westminster to the Temple is sufficient to destroy.

But we should be justly chargeable with gross inconsistency if, while we
defend the policy which invites the youth of our country to study such
writers as Theocritus and Catullus, we were to set up a cry against a
new edition of the Country Wife or the Way of the World. The immoral
English writers of the seventeenth century are indeed much less
excusable than those of Greece and Rome. But the worst English writings
of the seventeenth century are decent, compared with much that has been
bequeathed to us by Greece and Rome. Plato, we have little doubt, was a
much better man than Sir George Etherege. But Plato has written things
at which Sir George Etherege would have shuddered. Buckhurst and Sedley,
even in those wild orgies at the Cock in Bow Street for which they were
pelted by the rabble and fined by the Court of King's Bench, would never
have dared to hold such discourse as passed between Socrates and Phaedrus
on that fine summer day under the plane tree, while the fountain warbled
at their feet, and the cicadas chirped overhead. If it be, as we think
it is, desirable that an English gentleman should be well informed
touching the government and the manners of little commonwealths which
both in place and time are far removed from us, whose independence has
been more than two thousand years extinguished, whose language has not
been spoken for ages, and whose ancient magnificence is attested only by
a few broken columns and friezes, much more must it be desirable that he
should be intimately acquainted with the history of the public mind of
his own country, and with the causes, the nature, and the extent of
those revolutions of opinion and feeling which, during the last two
centuries, have alternately raised