_Mr. Forester._ The picturesque tourists will owe me no goodwill for the metamorphosis, though I have endeavoured to leave them as much mould, mildew, and weather-stain as possible. _Mr. Fax._ The exterior has suffered little; it still retains a truly venerable monastic character. [Illustration: _Mr. Fax._] _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Something monastic in the interior too.—Very orthodox old wine in the cellar, I can tell you. And the Reverend Father Abbot there, as determined a bachelor as the Pope. _Mr. Forester._ If I am so, it is because, like the Squire of Dames, I seek and cannot find. I see in my mind’s eye the woman I would choose, but I very much fear that is the only mode of optics in which she will ever be visible. _Mr. Fax._ No matter. Bachelors and spinsters I decidedly venerate. The world is overstocked with featherless bipeds. More men than corn is a fearful pre-eminence, the sole and fruitful cause of penury, disease, and war, plague, pestilence, and famine. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ I hope you will not long have cause to venerate me. What is life without love? A rosebush in winter, all thorns, and no flowers. _Mr. Fax._ And what is it with love? A double-blossomed cherry, flowers without fruit; if the blossoms last a month, it is as much as can be expected: they fall, and what comes in their place? Vanity, and vexation of spirit. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Better vexation than stagnation: marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond. _Mr. Fax._ Rather a calm clear river—— _Mr. Forester._ Flowing through a desert, where it moves in loneliness, and reflects no forms of beauty. _Mr. Fax._ That is not the way to consider the case. Feelings and poetical images are equally out of place in a calm philosophical view of human society. Some must marry, that the world may be peopled: many must abstain, that it may not be overstocked. _Little and good_ is very applicable in this case. It is better that the world should have a smaller number of peaceable and rational inhabitants, living in universal harmony and social intercourse, than the disproportionate mass of fools, slaves, coxcombs, thieves, rascals, liars, and cutthroats, with which its surface is at present encumbered. It is in vain to declaim about the preponderance of physical and moral evil, and attribute it, with the Manicheans, to a mythological principle, or, with some modern philosophers, to the physical constitution of the globe. The cause of all the evils of human society is single, obvious, reducible to the most exact mathematical calculation; and of course susceptible not only of remedy but even of utter annihilation. The cause is the tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence. The remedy is an universal social compact, binding both sexes to equally rigid celibacy, till the prospect of maintaining the average number of six children be as clear as the arithmetic of futurity can make it.