And his supreme delight, a country fair,'
shall learn to rule not only himself, but his own village. You remember your Dryden, Sir Roger?"
"Humph!" groaned the Knight, "too well, too well!
'A judge erected from a country clown'
might do well enough in poetry, but may mean ruin in practice. My misguided and stubborn friend, Sir Andrew Freeport, should have lived to see this day, and acknowledge the prescience of the testy old Tory he was wont to deride."
"Tilly-vally, my dear Sir Roger," returned the host, cheerily; "trouble not thine honest soul with such gruesome forebodings. 'The old order changeth, yieldeth place to new.' But 'tis 'lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' Cymon, with a vote, will not capsize the Commonwealth, any more than the British workman hath done, despite the prognostications of Bob Lowe and other cocksure clever ones. I'll see that the 'Good Old Times' are not banished, save to give place to Better New Ones! The New Village, Dr. Syntax, may not be quite as picturesque—in the old artistically dilapidated, damp, dirty, disease-gendering sense—as the old one. As you yourself said—
'Though 'twill to hunger give relief,
There's nothing picturesque in beef.'
No, nor are cleanliness, sanitation, education, fair wage, an independent spirit, and the capacity for self-government. These things, dear Doctor, make the Man, not the Picture, and Man-making is—or should be—the aim of modern statesmanship."