“It does! and you ought to be ashamed. If you want a low order of mind, why desert our own circle?” “My friends are only low in station; they have rather lofty minds, some of them.” “Well, amuse yourself with these lofty minds. Amusement is the end of being, you know, and the aim of all the men of this day.” “We imitate the ladies,” said he, slyly. “You do,” answered she, very dryly; and so the dialogue went on, and Lord Ipsden found the pleasure of being with his cousin compensate him fully for the difference of their opinions; in fact, he found it simply amusing that so keen a wit as his cousins s could be entrapped into the humor of decrying the time one happens to live in, and admiring any epoch one knows next to nothing about, and entrapped by the notion of its originality, above all things; the idea being the stale commonplace of asses in every age, and the manner of conveying the idea being a mere imitation of the German writers, not the good ones, _bien entendu,_ but the quill-drivers, the snobs of the Teutonic pen. But he was to learn that follies are not always laughable, that _eadem sentire_ is a bond, and that, when a clever and pretty woman chooses to be a fool, her lover, if he is wise, will be a greater--if he can. The next time they met, Lord Ipsden found Lady Barbara occupied with a gentleman whose first sentence proclaimed him a pupil of Mr. Thomas Carlyle, and he had the mortification to find that she had neither an ear nor an eye for him. Human opinion has so many shades that it is rare to find two people agree. But two people may agree wonderfully, if they will but let a third think for them both. Thus it was that these two ran so smoothly in couples. Antiquity, they agreed, was the time when the world was old, its hair gray, its head wise. Every one that said, “Lord, Lord!” two hundred years ago was a Christian. There were no earnest men now; Williams, the missionary, who lived and died for the Gospel, was not earnest in religion; but Cromwell, who packed a jury, and so murdered his prisoner--Cromwell, in whose mouth was heaven, and in his heart temporal sovereignty--was the pattern of earnest religion, or, at all events, second in sincerity to Mahomet alone, in the absence of details respecting Satan, of whom we know only that his mouth is a Scripture concordance, and his hands the hands of Mr. Carlyle's saints. Then they went back a century or two, and were eloquent about the great antique heart, and the beauty of an age whose samples were Abbot Sampson and Joan of Arc. Lord Ipsden hated argument; but jealousy is a brass spur, it made even this man fluent for once. He suggested “that five hundred years added to a world's life made it just five hundred years older, not younger--and if older, grayer--and if grayer, wiser.