"A judicious reformer," said Sir John, "will accommodate his remedy to an existing and not an imaginary evil. When the old romances, the grand Cyruses, the Clelias, the Calprenedes, and the Cassandras, had turned all the young heads in Europe; or when the fury of knight-errantry demanded the powerful rein of Cervantes to check it--it was a duty to attempt to lower the public delirium. When, in our own age and country, Sterne wrote his corrupt, but too popular lesser work, he became the mischievous founder of the school of sentiment. A hundred writers communicated, a hundred thousand readers caught, the infection. Sentimentality was the disease which then required to be expelled. The reign of Sterne is past. Sensibility is discarded, and with it the softness which it must be confessed belonged to it. Romance is vanished, and with it the heroic, though somewhat unnatural, elevation which accompanied it. We have little to regret in the loss of either; nor have we much cause to rejoice in what we have gained by the exchange. A pervading and substantial selfishness, the striking characteristic of our day, is no great improvement on the wildness of the old romance, or the vapid puling of the sentimental school." "Surely," said I (L'Almanac des Gourmands at that instant darting across my mind), "it is as honorable for a gentleman to excel in critical as in culinary skill. It is as noble to cultivate the intellectual taste, as that of the palate. It is at least as creditable to discuss the comparative merits of Sophocles and Shakspeare, as the rival ingredients of a soup or a sauce. I will even venture to affirm that it is as dignified an amusement to run a tilt in favor of Virgil or Tasso against their assailants, as to run a barouche against a score of rival barouches; and though I own that, in Gulliver's land of the Houyhnhnms, the keeping up the breed of horses might have been the nobler patriotism, yet in Great Britain it is hitherto, at least, no contemptible exertion of skill and industry 'to keep up the breed of gentlemen.'" CHAPTER XXIX. I strolled out alone, intending to call at the Rectory, but was prevented by meeting the worthy Dr. Barlow, who was coming to the Grove. I could not lose so fair an opportunity of introducing a subject that was seldom absent from my thoughts. I found it was a subject on which I had no new discoveries to impart. He told me he had seen and rejoiced in the election my heart had made. I was surprised at his penetration. He smiled, and told me he "took no great credit for his sagacity in perceiving what was obvious to spectators far more indifferent than himself; that I resembled those animals who, by hiding their heads in the earth, fancied nobody could see them."