I think you have done well in avoiding the topic altogether; but between ourselves, do you really think that the refinement of manner, the censorious, hypocritical, verbal scrupulosity, which is carried so far in this "picked age" of ours, is a true sign of superior refinement of taste, and purity of morals? Is it not rather a whiting of the sepulchre? I will not even allude to individual instances whom we both know, but does it not remind you, on the whole, of the tone of French manners previous to the revolution--that "decence," which Horace Walpole so admired,[2] veiling the moral degradation, the inconceivable profligacy of the higher classes?--Stay--I have not yet done--not to you, but _for_ you, I will add thus much;--our modern idea of delicacy apparently attaches more importance to words than to things--to manners than to morals. You will hear people inveigh against the improprieties of Shakspeare, with Don Juan, or one of those infernal French novels--I beg your pardon--lying on their toilet table. Lady Florence is shocked at the sallies of Beatrice, and Beatrice would certainly stand aghast to see Lady Florence dressed for Almack's; so you see that in both cases the fashion makes the indecorum. Let her ladyship new model her gowns! ALDA. Well, well, leave Lady Florence--I would rather hear you defend Shakspeare. MEDON. I think it is Coleridge who so finely observes that Shakspeare ever kept the high road of human life, whereon all travel, that he did not pick out by-paths of feeling and sentiment; in him we have no moral highwaymen, and sentimental thieves and rat-catchers, and interesting villains, and amiable, elegant adulteresses--_a-la-mode Germanorum_--no delicate entanglements of situation, in which the grossest images are presented to the mind disguised under the superficial attraction of style and sentiment. He flattered no bad passion, disguised no vice in the garb of virtue, trifled with with no just and generous principle. He can make us laugh at folly, and shudder at crime, yet still preserve our love for our fellow-beings, and our reverence for ourselves. He has a lofty and a fearless trust in his own powers, and in the beauty and excellence of virtue; and with his eye fixed on the lode-star of truth, steers us triumphantly among shoals and quicksands, where with any other pilot we had been wrecked:--for instance, who but himself would have dared to bring into close contact two such characters as Iago and Desdemona? Had the colors in which he has arrayed Desdemona been one atom less transparently bright and pure, the charm had been lost; she could not have borne the approximation: some shadow from the overpowering blackness of _his_ character must have passed over the sun-bright purity of _hers_. For observe that Iago's disbelief in the virtue of Desdemona is not pretended, it is real. It arises from his total want of faith in all virtue; he is no more capable of conceiving