like a cautious official man, he does not want to enter into small details, which have always an air of ridicule? He is not prepared to pledge himself to cricket, golf, foot-ball, or prisoner's bars: but in his heart he is manifestly a young Englander-without the white waistcoat. Nothing would please him better than to see in large letters on one of those advertising vans, 'Great match! Victoria Park!! Eleven of Fleet-street against the eleven of Saffron-hill!!!'

MILVERTON. Well, there is a great deal in the spirit of young England that I like very much, indeed that I respect.

ELLESMERE. I should like the Young England party better myself if I were quite sure there was no connexion between them and a clan of sour, pity-mongering people, who wash one away with eternal talk about the contrast between riches and poverty; with whom a poor man is always virtuous; and who would, if they could, make him as envious and as discontented as possible.

MILVERTON. Nothing can be more strikingly in contrast with such thinkers than young England. Young Englanders, according to the best of their theories, ought to be men of warm sympathy with all classes. There is no doubt of this, that very seldom does any good thing arise,

but there comes an ugly phantom of a caricature of it, which sidles up against the reality, mouths its favourite words as a third-rate actor does a great part, under-mimics its wisdom, over-acts its folly, is by half the world taken for it, goes some way to suppress it in its own time, and, perhaps, lives for it in history.

ELLESMERE. Well brought out that metaphor, but I don't know that it means more than, that the followers of a system do in general a good deal to corrupt it, or that when a great principle is worked into human affairs, a considerable accretion of human folly and falseness mostly grows round it: which things some of us had a suspicion of before.

DUNSFORD. To go back to the subject. What would you do for country amusements, Milverton? That is what concerns me, you know.

MILVERTON. Athletic amusements go on naturally here: do not require so much fostering as in towns. The commons must be carefully kept: I have quite a Cobbettian fear of their being taken away from us under some plausible pretext or other. Well, then, it strikes me that a great deal might be done to promote the more refined pleasures of life amongst our rural population. I hope we shall live to see many of

this way.

Hullah's pupils playing an important part in Of course, the foundation for these things may best be laid at schools; and is being laid in some places, I am happy to say.

ELLESMERE. Humph, music, sing-song!

MILVERTON. Don't you observe, Dunsford, that when Ellesmere wants to attack us, and does not exactly see how, he mutters to himself sarcastically, sneering himself up as it were to the attack?

ELLESMERE. You and Dunsford are both wild for music, from barrel-organs upwards.

MILVERTON. I confess to liking the humblest attempts at melody.

DUNSFORD. I feel as Sir Thomas Browne tells us he felt, that 'even that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the first composer. There is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and creatures of God: such a melody to the ear, as the whole world well understood, would afford the understanding.'

MILVERTON. A propos of music in country places, when I was going about last year in the

mances.

neighbouring county, I saw such a pretty scene at one of the towns. They had got up a band which played once a week in the evening. It was a beautiful summer evening, and the window of my room at the inn overlooked the open space they had chosen for their perforThere was the great man of the neighhourhood in his carriage, looking as if he came partly on duty, as well as for pleasure. Then there were burly tradesmen, with an air of quiet satisfaction, sauntering about, or leaning against railings. Some were no doubt critical-thought that Will Miller did not play as well as usual this evening. Will's young wife, who had come out to look again at him in his band dress, (for the band had a uniform) thought differently. Little boys broke out into imaginary polkas, having some distant reference to the music: not without grace though. The sweep was pre-eminent; as if he would say, 'Dirty and sooty as I am, I have a great deal of fun in me. Indeed what would May-day be but for me!' Studious little boys of the free school, all green, grasshopper-looking, walked about as boys knowing something of Latin. Here and there went a couple of them in childish loving way, with their arms about each other's necks. Matrons and shy

young maidens sat upon the door steps near. Many a merry laugh filled up the interludes of music. And when evening came softly down upon us, the band finished with God save the Queen,' the little circle of those who would hear the last note moved off, there was a clattering of shutters, a shining of lights through casementwindows, and soon the only sound to be heard was the rough voice of some villager, who would have been too timid to adventure anything by daylight, but now sang boldly out as he went homewards.

ELLESMERE. Very pretty, but it sounds to me somewhat fabulous.

MILVERTON. I assure you

ELLESMERE. Yes, you were tired, had a good dinner, read a speech for, or against, the cornlaws, fell asleep of course, and had this ingenious dream, which, to this day, you believe to have been a reality. I understand it all.

MILVERTON. I wish I could have many more

such dreams.