One of Aubrey's friends--old Thomas Tyndale (whom he put into his comedy, _The Country Revel_, as Sir Eubule Nestor)--reminds me of Mr. Dabney. Tyndale survived long into the Stuart age from that of Elizabeth, and he was for ever looking fondly back. Aubrey quotes some of his lamentations:--"Our gentry forsooth in these dayes are so effeminated that they know not how to ride on horseback.--Tho when the gentry mett, it was not at a poor blind sordid alehouse, to drinke up a barrell of drinke and lie drunke there two or three days together; fall together by the eares. They mett tho in the fields, well-appointed, with their hounds or their hawkes; kept up good hospitality; and kept a good retinue, that would venture that bloud and spirit that filled their vaines which their masters' tables nourisht; kept their tenants in due respect of them. We had no depopulacion in those dayes. "You see in me the ruines of time. The day is almost at end with me, and truly I am glad of it: I desire not to live in this corrupt age. I foresawe and foretold the late changes, and now easily foresee what will follow after. Alas! O' God's will! It was not so in Queen Elizabeth's time: then youth had respect to old age." And so forth. I suppose there have always been such deplorers of the present, from the days of Cain. I have always had a warm feeling for the author of "The Farewell to the Fairies," certain lines of which recur so exquisitely again and again, like a refrain in music, in Mr. Kipling's _Puck of Pook's Hill_:-- "Farewell, rewards and fairies, Good housewives now may say, For now foul sluts in dairies Do fare as well as they; And though they sweep their hearths no less Than maids are wont to do, Yet who of late for cleanliness Finds sixpence in her shoe?" Dan and Una knew it all by heart:-- "At morning and at evening both, You merry were and glad, So little care of sleep and sloth These pretty ladies had. When Tom came home from labour, Or Ciss to milking rose, Then merrily went their tabor, And nimbly went their toes." "Witness these rings and roundelays Of theirs which still remain, Were footed in Queen Mary's days, On many a grassy plain, But since of late Elizabeth, And later James, came in, They never dance on any hearth As when the time hath bin." Isn't it charming? Could it ever have been done better, before or since? "By which we note the fairies Were of the old profession, Their songs were Ave Mary's, Their dances a procession; But now, alas, they all are dead, Or gone beyond the seas, Or farther for religion fled, Or else they'd take their ease."