"I will not be tempted any more to grave discussions, my dear sir," said Burrel laughing, and looking towards Mrs. Darlington; "yet I cannot help adding, that the new-fashioned education of children is just as ill adapted to children as the instruction forced upon mechanics is unfitted for them. Lord deliver us from the little pragmatical race of half-learned pedants that are springing up! I understand that they have been obliged to dissolve one infant school in London, because it was divided into two such furious parties of Neptunists and Vulcanists; and the son of a cousin of my own talked to me upon reform the other day so like Lord John Russell, that I asked when the little legislator was to be breeched." The conversation soon became more general, though the party consisted of ten, that most inconvenient of all numbers; and Burrel soon regained that middle strain, half playful half serious, which was calculated to be more generally pleasing. This continued till the ladies rose; and the few minutes that ensued ere the gentlemen followed them, were passed by Burrel and Dr. Wilton in calling up remembrances of old times, when they had lived together as pupil and preceptor. "Well, my dear doctor," said Burrel, "I always thought that your head was fitted for a mitre; and I doubt not that we shall see it so adorned erelong." "Not for a world!" cried Dr. Wilton; "and you, my dear boy, do nothing towards it, I insist. I would not change my present state, with all the blessed sufficiency that attends it--its opportunities of doing some good to my fellow-creatures in quiet and unassailed obscurity--for the painful, anxious, ill-requited life of a bishop, whom every rude, unprincipled, and vulgar churl dares to attack, solely because he knows that the churchman can neither rail again, nor chastise him as other men would do. I would not change it, I say, on any account whatever. I am happy as I am here in the country, and I want nothing more." "Now I could understand that, Dr. Wilton," said the young fox-hunter, "if you ever mounted a red coat and followed the hounds. But you never hunt nor shoot; and, unless your magisterial capacity afford you some amusement, I cannot conceive how you can like the country, which, without hunting or shooting, is dull enough." "Never dull to me!" replied Dr. Wilton; "never dull, and always tranquil; and in it shall I be well contented to pass my life away, saying with Seneca, 'Sic cum transiêrint mei Nullo cum strepitu dies Plebeius moriar senex!'" A Latin quotation was of course enough to put an end to the session, and the whole party rose.