It was not he, it was another Tory Squire that called out “Hurray for old England!  Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Sussex.”  But it was Western that talked of “One Acton, that the Story Book says was turned into a Hare, and his own Dogs kill’d ’un, and eat ’un.”  And have you forgotten the popular discussion (during the Forty-five) of the affairs of the Nation, which, as Squire Western said, “all of us understand”?  Said the Puppet-Man, “I don’t care what Religion comes, provided the Presbyterians are not uppermost, for they are enemies to Puppet-Shows.”  But the Puppet-Man had no vote in 1745.  Now, to our comfort, he can and does exercise the glorious privilege of the franchise.

There is no room in this epistle for Fielding’s glorious gallery of characters—­for Lady Bellaston, who remains a lady in her debaucheries, and is therefore so unlike our modern representative of her class, Lady Betty, in Miss Broughton’s “Doctor Cupid;” for Square, and Thwackum, and Trulliber, and the jealous spite of Lady Booby, and Honour, that undying lady’s maid, and Partridge, and Captain Blifil and Amelia, the fair and kind and good!

It is like the whole world of that old England—­the maids of the Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen, the hosts of the taverns, the beaux, the starveling authors—­all alive; all (save the authors) full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, every man ready for a brotherly bout at fisticuffs.  What has become of it, the lusty old militant world?  What will become of us, and why do we prefer to Fielding—­a number of meritorious moderns?  Who knows?  But do not let us prefer anything to our English follower of Cervantes, our wise, merry, learned Sancho, trudging on English roads, like Don Quixote on the paths of Spain.

But I cannot convert you.  You will turn to some story about store-clerks and summer visitors.  Such is his fate who argues with the fair.

LONGFELLOW

To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.

My dear Mainwaring,—­You are very good to ask me to come up and listen to a discussion, by the College Browning Society, of the minor characters in “Sordello;” but I think it would suit me better, if you didn’t mind, to come up when the May races are on.  I am not deeply concerned about the minor characters in “Sordello,” and have long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pass through this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello’s story told in an intelligible manner.  Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about my bookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here and there.