y,' said Vieuxbois, 'that
pictures and music are the books of the unlearned. I do not think
that we have any right in the nineteenth century to contest an
opinion which the fathers of the Church gave in the fourth.'

'At all events,' said Lancelot, 'it is by pictures and music, by art
and song, and symbolic representations, that all nations have been
educated in their adolescence! and as the youth of the individual is
exactly analogous to the youth of the collective race, we should
employ the same means of instruction with our children which
succeeded in the early ages with the whole world.'

Lancelot might as well have held his tongue--nobody understood him
but Vieuxbois, and he had been taught to scent German neology in
everything, as some folks are taught to scent Jesuitry, especially
when it involved an inductive law, and not a mere red-tape
precedent, and, therefore, could not see that Lancelot was arguing
for him. 'All very fine, Smith,' said the squire; 'it's a pity you
won't leave off puzzling your head with books, and stick to fox-
hunting. All you young gentlemen will do is to turn the heads of
the poor with your cursed education.' The national oath followed,
of course. 'Pictures and chanting! Why, when I was a boy, a good
honest labouring man wanted to see nothing better than a halfpenny
ballad, with a wood-cut at the top, and they worked very well then,
and wanted for nothing.'

'Oh, we shall give them the halfpenny ballads in time!' said
Vieuxbois, smiling.

'You will do a very good deed, then,' said mine host. 'But I am
sorry to say that, as far as I can find from my agents, when the
upper classes write cheap publications, the lower classes will not
read them.'

'Too true,' said Vieuxbois.

'Is not the cause,' asked Lancelot, 'just that the upper classes do
write them?'

'The writings of working men, certainly,' said Lord Minchampstead,
'have an enormous sale among their own class.'

'Just because they express the feelings of that class, of which I am
beginning to fear that we know very little. Look again, what a
noble literature of people's songs and hymns Germany has. Some of
Lord Vieuxbois's friends, I know, are busy translating many of
them.'

'As many of them, that is to say,' said Vieuxbois, 'as are
compatible with a real Church spirit.'

'Be it so; but who wrote them? Not the German aristocracy for the
people, but the German people for themselv