_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I am afraid I see more harm in many things than I like to see. But one reason for not seeing harm in this Agapêmonâ matter is, that I hear so little about it The world is ready enough to promulgate scandal; but that which is quietly right may rest in peace. _Mrs. Opimian._ Surely, doctor, you do not think this Agapemone right? _The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I only say I do not know whether it is right or wrong. It is nothing new. Three centuries ago there was a Family of Love, on which Middleton wrote a comedy. Queen Elizabeth persecuted this family; Middleton made it ridiculous; but it outlived them both, and there may have been no harm in it after all. _Mrs. Opimian._ Perhaps, doctor, the world is too good to see any novelty except in something wrong. _The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Perhaps it is only wrong that arrests attention, because right is common, and wrong is rare. Of the many thousand persons who walk daily through a street you only hear of one who has been robbed or knocked down. If ever Hamlet's news--'that the world has grown honest'--should prove true, there would be an end of our newspaper. For, let us see, what is the epitome of a newspaper? In the first place, specimens of all the deadly sins, and infinite varieties of violence and fraud; a great quantity of talk, called by courtesy legislative wisdom, of which the result is 'an incoherent and undigested mass of law, shot down, as from a rubbish-cart, on the heads of the people ';{1} lawyers barking at each other in that peculiar style of dylactic delivery which is called forensic eloquence, and of which the first and most distinguished practitioner was Cerberus;{2} bear-garden meetings of mismanaged companies, in which directors and shareholders abuse each other in choice terms, not all to be found even in Rabelais; burstings of bank bubbles, which, like a touch of harlequin's wand, strip off their masks and dominoes from 'highly respectable' gentlemen, and leave them in their true figures of cheats and pickpockets; societies of all sorts, for teaching everybody everything, meddling with everybody's business, and mending everybody's morals; mountebank advertisements promising the beauty of Helen in a bottle of cosmetic, and the age of Old Parr in a box of pills; folly all alive in things called réunions; announcements that some exceedingly stupid fellow has been 'entertaining' a select company; matters, however multiform, multifarious, and multitudinous, all brought into family likeness by the varnish of false pretension with which they are all overlaid. 1 Jeremy Bentham. 2 Cerberus forensis erat causidicus.--Petronius Arbiter. _Mrs. Opimian._ I did not like to interrupt you, doctor; but it struck me, while you were speaking, that in reading the newspaper you do not hear the bark of the lawyers. _The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ True; but no one who has once heard the wow-wow can fail to reproduce it in imagination.