_Mr. Forester._ It is, perhaps, happy for yourself, Mr. Feathernest, that you can treat with so much levity a subject that fills me with the deepest grief. Man under the influence of civilisation has fearfully diminished in size and deteriorated in strength. The intellectual are confessedly nourished at the expense of the physical faculties. Air, the great source and fountain of health and life, can scarcely find access to civilised man, muffled as he is in clothes, pent in houses, smoke-dried in cities, half-roasted by artificial fire, and parboiled in the hydrogen of crowded apartments. Diseases multiply upon him in compound proportion. Even if the prosperous among us enjoy some comforts unknown to the natural man, yet what is the poverty of the savage, compared with that of the lowest classes of civilised nations? The specious aspect of luxury and abundance in one is counterbalanced by the abject penury and circumscription of hundreds. Commercial prosperity is a golden surface, but all beneath it is rags and wretchedness. It is not in the splendid bustle of our principal streets—in the villas and mansions that sprinkle our valleys—for those who enjoy these things (even if they did enjoy them—even if they had health and happiness—and the rich have seldom either) bear but a small proportion to the whole population:—but it is in the mud hovel of the labourer—in the cellar of the artisan—in our crowded prisons—our swarming hospitals—our overcharged workhouses—in those narrow districts of our overgrown cities which the affluent never see—where thousands and thousands of families are compressed within limits not sufficient for the pleasure-ground of a simple squire,—that we must study the true mechanism of political society. When the philosopher turns away in despair from this dreadful accumulation of moral and physical evil, where is he to look for consolation, if not in the progress of science, in the enlargement of mind, in the diffusion of philosophical truth? But if truth is a chimaera—if virtue is a name—if science is not the handmaid of moral improvement, but the obsequious minister of recondite luxury, the specious appendage of vanity and power—then indeed, _that man has fallen never to rise again_,[46] is as much the cry of nature as the dream of superstition. _The Rev. Mr. Portpipe._ Man has fallen, certainly, by the fruit of the tree of knowledge: which shows that human learning is vanity and a great evil, and therefore very properly discountenanced by all bishops, priests, and deacons.