Those writers who complain of the "levelling" tone of society, and the "fast" manners of our young ladies, scarcely reflect upon the improved morality of the age. Our girls--all the outcry about fastness and selling themselves for money notwithstanding--are as good and as domestic as when formed under the literary auspices of Mrs. Chapone; and--granting the existence of Casinos and Anonymas--our young men are infinitely more wholesome than the class for whose instruction Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, penned his delicious letters. So Mr. Charles Potts, glowing with newly-awakened ideas of respectability, began to think that, after all, the _vie de Bohême_ was perhaps a mistake, and not equal, in the average amount of happiness derived from it, to the _vie de_ Camden Town. He began to think that to pay rent and taxes and tradesmen's bills was very likely no dearer, and certainly more satisfactory, than to invest in pensions for cast-off mistresses and provisions for illegitimate children. He began to think, in fact, that a snug little house in the suburbs, with his own Lares and Penates about him, and Miss Matilda Ludlow, now looking over his shoulder and encouraging him at his work, now confronting him at the domestic dinner-table, was about the pleasantest thing which his fancy could conjure up in his then frame of mind. Thinking all this, devoutly hoping it might so fall out, and being, like most converts, infinitely more rabid in the cause of Virtue than those who had served her with tolerable fidelity for a series of years, Mr. Charley Potts heard with a dreadful amount of alarm and amazement of Geoffrey Ludlow's close connection with a person whose antecedents were not comeatable and siftable by a local committee of Grundys. A year ago, and Charley would have laughed the whole business to scorn; insisted that every man had a right to do as he liked; slashed at the doubters; mocked their shaking heads and raised shoulders and taken no heed of any thing that might have been sad. But matters were different now. Not merely was Charley a recruit in the Grundy ranks, having pinned the Grundy colours in his coat, and subscribed to the Grundy oath; but the person about to be brought before the Grundy _Fehmgericht_, or court-marshal, was one in whom, should his hopes be realised, he would have the greatest interest. Though he had never dared to express his hopes, though he had not the smallest actual foundation for his little air-castle, Charles Potts naturally and honestly regarded Matilda Ludlow as the purest and most honourable of her sex--as does every young fellow regard the girl he loves; and the idea that she should be associated, or intimately connected, with any one under a moral taint, was to him terrible and loathsome.