The morality of the fair gamblers was more than loose.  It was taken for granted in the whole set that every female member of it must inevitably be divorced, if the catastrophe had not occurred already; and one man asked Walpole, “Who’s your proctor?” just as he would have asked, “Who’s your tailor?” An unspeakable society—­a hollow, heartless, callous, wicked brood.  Compare that crew of furious money-grabbers with our modern gentlemen and ladies!  We have our faults—­crime and vice flourish; but, from the Court down to the simplest middle-class society in our provincial towns, the spread of seemliness and purity is distinctly marked.  Some insatiable grumblers will have it that our girls and women are deteriorating, and we are informed that the taste for objectionable literature is keener than it used to be.  It is a distinct libel.  No one save a historian would now read the corrupting works of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and yet it is a fact that those novels were read aloud among companies of ladies.  A man winces now if he is obliged to turn to them; the girls in the “good old times” heard them with never a blush.  Wherever we turn we find the same steady advance.  Can any creature be more dainty, more sweet, more pure, than the ordinary English girl of our day?  Will any one bring evidence to show that the girls of the last century, or of any other, were superior to our own maidens?  No evidence has been produced from literature, from journals, from family correspondence, and I am pretty certain that no evidence exists.  Practically speaking, the complaints of the decline of morality are merely uttered as a mode of showing the talker’s own superiority.

XVI.

“RAISING THE LEVEL OF AMUSEMENTS.”

It is really most kind on the part of certain good people to reorganise the amusements of the people; but, as each reorganiser fancies himself to be the only man who has the right notion, it follows that matters are becoming more and more complicated.  For example, to begin with literature, a simple person who has no taste for profundities likes to read the old sort of stories about love’s pretty fever; the simple person wants to hear about the trials and crosses of true lovers, the defeat of villains—­to enjoy the kindly finish where faith and virtue are rewarded, and where the unambitious imagination may picture the coming of a long life of homely toil and homely pleasure.  Perhaps the simple personage has a taste for dukes—­I know of one young person aged thirteen who will not write a romance of her own without putting her hero at the very summit of the peerage—­or wicked baronets, or marble halls.  These tastes are by no means confined to women; sailors in far-away seas most persistently beguile their scanty leisure by studying tales of sentiment, and soldiers are, if possible, more eager than seamen for that sort of reading.  The righteous organiser comes on the scene, and says, “We must