We are quite aware that it might be said that Squire Forester was not a model for imitation; and it might be replied that no man ever was, altogether, even for men of his own time, much less for those of one or two generations removed, always excepting Him whose name should never be uttered lightly, and in whom the human and divine were combined. He had sufficient inherent good qualities, however, to make half a dozen ordinary modern country gentlemen popular; still his one failing, shared among the same number, might no less damn them in the eyes of society. Some would, no doubt, have liked Dibdin’s heroes better if he had been less truthful, by making the language more agreeable to the ear, by substituting, as one writer has said, “dear me” for “damme,” and lemonade for grog; but such critics are what Dibdin himself called “lubbers” and “swabs.” In the same way, some would be for toning down the characters of Squire Forester and Parson Stephens; but this would be a mistake: an artist might as well smooth over with vegetation every out-cropping rock he finds in his foreground. We might say a great deal more about the old Squire, and the Willey Rector too, but there is no reason why we should say less. If we err, we err with the best and gravest writers of history, who, without fear or favour, wrote of things as they found them; and those who are familiar with the writings of men of the past—such as the Sixth Satire of Juvenal, will admit that men like Squire Forester were examples of modesty. Men of all grades, every day, are brought in contact with much that might more strongly be objected to in the public Press; and there is no reason why the veil should not be raised in order that we may view the past as it really was. The fact is, the Squire found the atmosphere of the times congenial to his temperament. A very popular Shropshire rake and play writer, Wycherley, had done much to lower the tone of morality by representing peccadilloes, not as something which the violence of passion may excuse, but as accomplishments worthy of gentlemen,—his “Country Wife” and “Plain Dealer” being examples. Congreve followed in his wake, with his “Old Bachelor,” which may be judged by its apothegm:— “What rugged ways attend the noon of life; Our sun declines, and with what anxious strife, What pain, we tug that galling load—a wife!” A fair estimate of the looseness of the time may be formed from another representation:— “The miracle to-day is, that we find A lover true, not that a woman’s kind;” and from the fact that even Pope, in his “Epistle to a Lady,” out of his mature experience could write— “Men some to business, some to pleasure take, But every woman is at heart a rake.” The Squire had been jilted, and breathing such an atmosphere, no wonder he cast lingering looks to the time “Ere one to one was cursedly confined,”