"As you entered at the gate gravity fell on you; and decorum wrapped you in a garment of starch. The butcher boy who galloped his horse and cart madly about the adjoining lanes and commons, whistled wild melodies (caught up in abominable play-house galleries) and joked with a hundred cook-maids,--on passing that lodge fell into an undertaker's pace, and delivered his joints and sweetbreads silently at the servant's entrance. The rooks in the elms cawed sermons at morning and evening: the peacocks walked demurely on the terraces; and the guinea-fowls looked more quaker-like than those savoury birds usually do. The lodge-keeper was serious, and a clerk at a neighbouring chapel. The pastors who entered at that gate, and greeted his comely wife and children, fed the little lambkins with tracts. The head-gardener was a Scotch Calvinist, after the strictest order, only occupying himself with the melons and pines provisionally, and until the end of the world, which event, he could prove by infallible calculations was to come off in two or three years at farthest." In one place, a collision is represented between the old and young schools of criticism: "The Colonel heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him; he heard that Byron was no great poet, though a very clever man; he heard that there had been a wicked persecution against Mr. Pope's memory and fame, and that it was time to reinstate him; that his favourite, Dr. Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English; that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael; and that a young gentleman of Cambridge, who had lately published two volumes of verses, might take rank with the greatest poets of all. Dr. Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr. Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr. Keats, and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chiefs of modern poetic literature? What were these new dicta which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff of tobacco smoke, to which Mr. Honeyman blandly assented, and Clive listened with pleasure?... With Newcome, the admiration for the literature of the last century was an article of belief, and the incredulity of the young men seemed rank blasphemy. 'You will be sneering at Shakespeare next,' he said, and was silenced, though not better pleased, when his youthful guests told him that Dr. Goldsmith sneered at him too; that Dr. Johnson did not understand him, and that Congreve in his own day, and afterwards, was considered to be, in some points, Shakespeare's superior." In the next he relapses into his stronger sarcasm--