Winter and brownie-hills shall have a charm for thee."
Such was your talk, Eusebius, passing off your discontent of things that are, into your inward ideal, rejoicing in things unreal, breaking out into your wildest paradox—"What is the world the better for all its boasted truth! It has belied man's better nature. Faith, trust, belief, is the better part of him, the spiritual of man; and who shall dare to say that its creations, visible, or invisible, all felt, acknowledged as vital things, are not realities?" All this—in your contempt for beadles and tip-staves, even overseers and churchwardens, and all subdividing machinery of country government, that, when it came in and fairly established itself, drove away the "good people," and with them merriment and love, and sweet fear, from off the earth—that twenty wheedling, flattering Autolycuses did not do half the hurt to morals or manners that one grim-visaged justice did—the curmudgeon, you called him, Eusebius, that would, were they now on earth, and sleeping all lovely with their pearly arms together, locked in leafy bower, have Cupid and Psychè taken up under the Vagrant Act, or have them lodged in a "Union House" to be disunited. You thought the superstition of the world as it was, far above the knowledge it now brags of. You admired the Saxons and Danes in their veneration of the predictions of old women, whom the after ungallantry of a hard age would have burned for witches. Marriage act and poor act have, as you believe, extinguished the holy light of Hymen's torch, and re-lighted it with Lucifer matches in Register offices; and out it soon goes, leaving worse than Egyptian darkness in the dwellings of the poor—the smell of its brimstone indicative of its origin, and ominous of its ending.
I verily believe, Eusebius, you would have spared Don Quixote's whole library, and have preferred committing the curate to the flames. Your dreams, even your day-dreams, have hurried you ever far off and away from the beaten turnpike-road of life, through forests of enchantment, to rescue beauty which you never saw, from knight-begirt and dragon-guarded castles; and little thankful have you been when you have opened your eyes awake in peace to the cold light of our misnamed utilitarian day, and found all your enchantment broken, the knights discomfited, the dragon killed, the drawbridge broken down, and the ladies free—all without your help; and then, when you have gone forth, and in lieu of some rescued paragon of her sex, you have met but the squire's daughter, in her trim bonnet, tripping with her trumpery to set up her fancy-shop in Vanity-Fair, for fops to stare at through their glasses, your imagination has felt the shock, and incredulous of the improvement in manners and morals, and overlooking all advancement of knowledge, all the advantages of their real liberty, momentarily have you wished them all shut up in castles, or in nunneries, to be the more adored till they may chance to be rescued. But soon would the fit go off—and the first sweet, innocent, lovely smile that greeted you, restored your gentleness, and added to your stock of love. And once, when some parish shame was talked of, you never would believe it common, and blamed the Overseer for bringing it to light—and vindicated the sex by quoting from Pennant, how St Werberg lived immaculate with her husband Astardus, copying her aunt, the great Ethelreda, who lived for three years with not less purity with her good man Tonberetus, and for twelve with her second husband the pious Prince Egfrid: and the churchwarden left the vestry, lifting up his hands, and saying—"Poor gentleman!"—and you laughed as if you had never laughed before, when you heard it, and heartily shook him by the hand to convince him you were in your senses; which action he nevertheless put to the credit of the soundness of your heart, and not a bit to that of your head. You saw it—and immediately, with a trifling flaw in the application quite worthy yourself, reminded me of a passage in a letter from Lord Bolingbroke to Swift, that "The truest reflection, and at the same time the bitterest satire, which can be made on the present age, is this, that to think as you think, will make a man pass for romantic. Sincerity, constancy, tenderness, are rarely to be found. They are so much out of use, that the man of mode imagines them to be out of nature." So insane and romantic, you added, are synonymous terms to this incredulous, this matter-of-fact world, that, like the unbelieving Thomas, trusts in, believes in nothing that it does not touch and handle. Your partiality for days of chivalry blinds you a little. The men were splendid—women shone with their reflected splendour—you see them through an illuminated haze, and, as you were not behind the curtain, imagine their minds as cultivated as their beauty was believed to be great. The mantle of chivalry hid all the wrongs, but the particular ones from which they rescued them. If the men are worse, our women are far better—more like those noble Roman ladies, intellectual and high-minded, whom you have ever esteemed the worthiest of history. Then women were valued. Valerius Maximus gives the reason why women had the upper-hand. After the mother of Coriolanus and other Roman women had preserved their country, how could the senate reward them?—"Sanxit uti foeminis semitâ viri cederent—permisit quoque his purpureâ veste et aureis uti segmentis." It was sanctioned by the senate, you perceive, that men should yield the wall to the sex, in honour, and that they should be allowed the distinction of purple vests and golden borders—privileges the female world still enjoy. Yet in times you love to applaud, the paltry interference of men would have curtailed one of these privileges. For a mandate was issued by the papal legate in Germany in the 14th century, decreeing, that "the apparel of women, which ought to be consistent with modesty, but now, through their foolishness, is degenerated into wantonness and extravagance, more particularly the immoderate length of their petticoats, with which they sweep the ground, be restrained to a moderate fashion, agreeably to the decency of the sex, under pain of the sentence of excommunication." "Velamina etiam mulierum, quæ ad verecundiam designandam eis sunt concessa, sed nunc, per insipientiam earum, in lasciviam et luxuriam excreverunt, it immoderata longitudo superpelliccorum quibus pulverem trahunt, ad moderatum usum, sicut decet verecundiam sexus, per excommunicationis sententiam cohibeantur."
Excommunication, indeed! Not even the church could have carried on that war long. Every word of this marks the degradation to which those monkish times would have made the sex submit, "velamina concessa insipientiam earum!" and pretty well for men of the cloth of that day's make, to speak of women's "lasciviam et luxuriam," when, perhaps, the hypocritical mandate arose from nothing but a desire in the coelibatists themselves to get a sly peep at the neatly turned feet and ankles of the women. One would almost think the old nursery song of
—"The beggar whose name was Stout,
He cut her petticoats all round about,
He cut her petticoats far above her knee, &c.,"
was written to perpetuate the mandate. Certainly a "Stout beggar was the Papal church." "Consistent with modesty," "sicut decet verecundiam sexus;" nothing can beat that bare-faced hypocrisy. So when afterwards the sex shortened their petticoats, other Simon Pures start up and put them in the stocks for immodesty. Poor women! Here was a wrong, Eusebius. Long or short, they were equally immodest. Immodest, indeed! Nature has clad them with modesty and temperance—their natural habit—other garment is conventional. I admire what Oelian says of Phocion's wife.
"[Greek: Aempeicheto de protae tae sophrosunae
deuterois ge maen tois parosi.]"