[7]. See “His Majesty’s Speech concerning the Gunpowder Plot,” etc., in the Harleian Miscellany.
Guy Fawkes is, in our baby thoughts, a mysterious vision, one of the shadows of evil advancing on the path of childhood. We grow older, and the substances of evil come close upon us—we see their dark lantern, and snuff the brimstone.
ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
Every generation compared to the age it immediately succeeds is but a further lapse from Paradise. Every grandfather is of necessity a wiser, kinder, nobler being that the grandson doomed to follow him—every grandmother chaster, gentler, more self-denying, more devoted to the beauty of goodness, than the giddy, vain, thoughtless creature, who in her time is sentenced to be grandmother to somebody, whose still increased defects will only serve to bring out the little lustre of the gentlewoman who preceded her. Man, undoubtedly, had at the first a fixed amount of goodness bestowed upon him; but this goodness, by being passed from generation to generation, has, like a very handsome piece of coin, with arms and legend in bold relief, become so worn by continual transit, that it demands the greatest activity of faith to believe that which is now current in the world, to be any portion of the identical goodness with which the human race was originally endowed. Hapless creatures are we! Moral paupers of the nineteenth century, turning a shining cheek upon one another, and by the potent force of swagger, passing off our thin, worn, illegible pieces of coin—how often, no thicker, no weightier than a spangle on a player’s robe!—when our glorious ancestors, in the grandeur of their goodness, could ring down musical shekels! Nay, as we go back, we find the coin of excellence so heavy, so abounding, that how any man—Samson perhaps excepted—had strength enough to carry his own virtues about him, puzzles the effeminacy of present thought. Folks then were doubtless made grave, majestic in their movements by the very weight of their excellence. Whilst we, poor anatomies—skipjacks of the nineteenth century—we carry all our ready virtue in either corner of our waistcoat pocket, and from its very lightness, are unhappily enabled to act all sorts of unhallowed capers—to forget the true majesty of man in the antics of the mountebank. Forlorn degradation of the human race!
But the tears of the reader—for if he have a heart of flesh, it is by this time melting in his eyes—are not confidently demanded for only the one generation whereof (seeing he is our reader) he is certainly not the worst unit: but we here require of him to weep for posterity; yes, to subscribe a rivulet of tears for the generations to come. The coinage of the virtues at present in circulation among us is so thin, so defaced, so battered, so clipt, that it appears to us wholly impossible that any portion of the currency can descend a couple of generations lower. What, then, is to become of our grandchildren? Without one particle of golden truth and goodness left to them, for we cannot take into account the two or three pieces hoarded—as old ladies have hoarded silver pennies—what remains, what alternative for our descendants but to become a generation of coiners? Can any man withstand the terror of this picture, wherein all the world are shown as so many passers of pocket-pieces, lacquered over with something that seems like gold and silver, but which, indeed, is only seeming? A picture wherein he who is the ablest hypocrite—passing off the greatest amount of false coin upon his neighbor—shall appear the most virtuous person! Is not this an appalling scene to contemplate? Yet, if there be any truth in a common theory, if there be any veracity in the words written in a thousand pages, uttered at every fireside, dropt in the casual meeting of man and man at door-steps, in by-lanes, highways, and market-places—the picture we have shadowed forth must become an iron present.
“We shall never see such times again!”
“The world isn’t what it used to be.”