“When I was a boy, things hadn’t come to this pass.”
“The world gets wickeder and wickeder.”
Since the builders of Babel were scattered, these thoughts have been voiced in every tongue. From the very discontent and fantasticalness of his nature, man looks backward at the lost Paradise of another age. He affects to snuff the odour of its fruits and flowers, and with a melancholy shaking of the head, sees, or thinks he sees, the flashing of the fiery swords that guard them. And then, in the restlessness of his heart, in the peevishness and discontent of his soul, he says all sorts of bitter things of the generations he has fallen among; and, from the vanished glory of the past, predicts increasing darkness for the future. Happily, the prophesying cannot be true; and happily, too, for the condition of the prophet, he knows it will not. But then there is a sort of comfort in the waywardness of discontent; at times, a soothing music to the restlessness of the soul in the deep bass of hearty grumbling.
The ingratitude of the act is entirely forgotten in the pleasure. “Ha! those were the merry days—the golden times of England they were!” May not this be heard from the tradesman, the mechanic, as he is borne past Tilbury Fort, and the thoughts of Queen Elizabeth, of her “golden days,” ring in his brain; and living only in the nineteenth century, he has some vague, perplexing notion that he has missed an Eden, only by a hundred years or two? He thinks not—why should he?—of the luxury he now purchases for a shilling; a luxury, not compassable in those golden days by all the power and wealth of all the combining sovereigns of the earth, for he is a passenger of a Gravesend steamboat, the fare twelvepence.
We would not forget that wonder of Elizabeth’s navy, the Great Harry. No; we would especially remember it, to compare the marvel, with all its terrors, to the agent of our day, which, wrought and directed from a few gallons of water, makes the winged ship but as a log—a dead leviathan upon the deep; which, in the certainty and intensity of its power of destruction must, in the fulness of time, make blood-spilling war bankrupt, preaching peace with all men, even from “the cannon’s mouth.”
We are, however, a degenerate race. In our maudlin sensibility, we have taken under our protection the very brutes of the earth—the fowls of the air—the fish of the sea. We have cast the majesty of the law around the asses of the reign of Victoria—have assured to live geese a property in their own feathers—have, with a touch of tenderness, denounced the wood-plugged claws of the lobsters of Billingsgate. We have a society, whose motto, spiritually, is—
“Never to link our pleasure or our pride
With suffering of the meanest thing that lives.”
Very different, indeed, was the spirit of the English people, when their good and gracious Queen Elizabeth smiled sweetly upon bull dogs, and found national music in the growl, the roar, and the yell of a bear-garden; whereto, in all the courtesy of a nobler and more virtuous age, the sovereign led the French ambassador; that, as chroniclers tell us, Monsieur might arrive at a sort of comparative knowledge of English bravery, judging the courage of the people by the stubborn daring of their dogs.
Then we had no Epsom, with its high moralities—no Ascot, with its splendour and wealth. Great, indeed, was the distance—deep the abyss—between the sovereign and the sovereign people.