though the scandal of the Parc aux Cerfs is true,
whatever M. Capefigue may say to the contrary,
every story of revolutionary excess and fury is
a calumny, which makes him pale with bitterness
and wrath to hear. His young daughter of
seventeen refuses to sing the National Anthem,
but would trill out the Marseillaise willingly
enough, if her voice would carry her so far; and
his young son, yet in his teens—the one being
about as wise as the other—desires to see a
republic in Russia, and a free press in Turkey,
popular representation in China, and a return to
the Commonwealth in England; and all together
think me a recreant to the cause of human
progress because I do not join them in their
aspirations. And when I meekly insinuate that I
think freedom and self-government, like everything
else of value, matters of steady growth,
and not of eccentric bounds, and that the nations
which thus endeavour after perfectness by leaps,
and not by slow and sure climbing, often miss
their footing midway, and fall back to a lower
platform than before, I am set down as one of
the lukewarm abhorred, good only for burning in
the sacred fire of liberty, and to be made into
bone-dust for the advancement of the human
species.

Another, whom I call my ascetic friend, an
admirable fellow in the main, is rich in many
kinds of prejudice. He repudiates all things
new and unusual, and rails against every
fashion until obsolete, when, his eye having
become accustomed, he mistakes use for liking,
and declares that nothing was ever so
becoming, and asks why cannot people be content
with good forms when they have got them?
He has a prejudice against dancing, as utter
foolishness; against low necks in women,
as sinful and dishonest; against theatres, as
mere tinselled gewgaws, nowise useful to the
soul or instructive to the brain; he disclaims
the need of pleasure for man, and despises the
lovers of enjoyment; but specially is he
prejudiced against all matters of taste and artistry,
if different from his own teaching, honestly
convinced that nothing which he himself does not
practise can be right, for he attained the ultimate
possible of his generation twenty years ago.
The consequence of all which is, that my ascetic
friend is notorious for about the stoutest
prejudices a man can wear, and is famous for
wearing them in their most aggressive shapes
and unbecoming mode. But this is a reputation
which he rather likes than not.

Then there are people who care only for what
is old and bygone—for old times, old pictures,
old lace, old china, old manners—and who will
not admit that the newer day has run the
slightest thread of gold through her fustian;
who even uphold the ancient persecutions and
cruelties, as evidence of more earnest thought
and more firm faith than we degenerate
moderns possess; and who, not content to deny
that the present has made an inch of real
progress, sturdily affirm that we have gone back
and not forward, and that if the millennium is to
come by mail's walking, it will come in the way
of the crabs—that is, by diverging angles.
Sometimes these bigots of the past meet with their
antipodes in the violently self-satisfied moderns,
who see no good whatever blossoming on the
graves of a generation siace, and who despise
all old things, no matter what; who assert that
Parian is more beautiful than Sèvres, and a
Royal Academy Exhibition worth all the churches
and galleries in Italy; to whom Raphael is a
muff, and Claude a dauber; to whom the Greeks
are barbarians, and the Romans uncivilised; to
whom, in a word, the whole world before their
personal advent, was in a state of darkness and
disaster. These are the people to whom their
own fathers are obsolete, and their grandfathers
unworthy of discussion, who measure both
value and liking by their own familiarity, and
because a thing is past or unaccustomed,
condemn it as, in consequence, unworthy and of no
account. When these two sections meet, there
is rare fun for bystanders; but I never found
much good in arguing with either. It seems
strange to me that they cannot see the good, and
accept it too, of both sides; but then my ascetic
friend tells me that laxity is looseness, and
latitudinarianism the land lying without the pale
of salvation; and that I am eminently unprincipled,
and that I sail over the sea of lijfe without
rudder, ballast, or a pole star. It may be so;
but yet I prefer my freer steering.

"Who is without prejudice of some shape or
other? There are some who have a prejudice
against all writers as a class, but against the
newspaper press and Our Own Correspondents
in hostile supremacy; others have a prejudice
against all people without a family pedigree, and
cannot be brought to believe in virtue which has
not blood to cement it. There are some who
abjure cold water as the bane of human health
and strength, and others who cannot believe in
either under any other system than the
hydropathic; some people put an almost religious
reverence in homoeopathic globules, and others
bind up their salvation (and your destruction)
with spiritualism and revivals. Some men
deride the volunteer movement as a piece of
national fanfaronade, supported by vanity and
ostentation; others question a man's manliness
and courage unless he is enrolled; some
believe the priesthood to be the centre of all
virtue, others hold a man capable of every
vice if he has put Reverend before his name. I
know a whole family, of very decided, but some-
what ferocious Christian conversation (so they
call it, but I don't), who scout the idea of any
uncommon morality, and who believe that if a
person is specially virtuous in any direction—as,
for instance, if more than ordinarily kind, or
generous, or considerate—it is all from selfish
calculation, and unseen purpose in the depths,
and who lately insulted a lady because she had
been kind and considerate to their child, and
who wanted to know what she meant by it, and
whether she did not think their affection enough?
There are many people of this stamp, but they
are not comfortable animals to deal with.

What can be done with such disastrous