It is not true, then, that for us the future is more fraught with anxiety than hope. The theory is denied by fact. It is not true commercially, nor is it true morally. Our progress in morals and manners is, at least, equal to our progress in trade. The coarse manners—the brutal intoxication—the want of all faith in spiritual realities, held not merely by the laity but by the clergy as well of the last century, now no longer exists. Reverend Deans do not now write to ladies as did the bitter Dean of St. Patrick’s to his Stella. Sure are we that Victoria cannot speak of her bishops as, according to Lord Hervey, George II. did, and justly, speak of his. No Prime Minister now would dare to insult the good feeling of the nation by handing his paramour to her carriage from the Opera in the presence of Majesty. Fielding’s novels graphically display a state of things which happily now no longer exists. The gossip of our times reveals enough—alas!—too much—of human weakness and immorality; but the gossip of our times is as far superior to that which Horace Walpole has so faithfully preserved, or to that which Mrs. Manley in her “New Atlantis” sullied her woman’s name by retailing, or to that which Count Grammont thought it no disgrace to record, as light to darkness or as dross to gold. Macaulay thus describes the country squire of the seventeenth century:—“His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field-sports, and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and his pronunciation were such as we should now only expect to hear from ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jokes, and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accents of his province.” The country squire of the nineteenth century is surely some improvement upon this; nor has the improvement been confined to him—it has extended to all classes. We still hear much, for instance, of drunkenness, but drunkenness does not prevail as it did when publicans wrote on their signs, as Smollett tells us they did,—“You may here get drunk for one penny, dead drunk for two pence, and clean straw for nothing.”