with their bulbous calves and hectic noses; ghastly realism,
but in the medium of Hogarth Gin Lane and The Rake's
Progress; the girl of today who can see life only in terms of
the cinema had her counterpart in the eighteenth century,
and she spoke in the accents of Lydia Languish. Could there
be drawn a more vivid, a more compendious comparison?

That there was no cheap, sophisticated entertainment for
the masses was part of a state of things in which thousands
and thousands of people were less comfortable, less well
dressed, less entertained, less informed than they are today;
but it also meant that there was not a vast majority which
by its very numbers imposed its ideas, its prepossessions and
its tastes on the world in which the educated person must
now exist; the lower middle class, as it is the most consider-
able among consumers, dictates the canons of a taste which,
by its preponderating bulk, has corrupted and destroyed the
standards of language, of architecture, of entertainment
and of literature, which once prevailed. This development
has brought in its train a great increase in human happiness,
and it has annihilated something so precious that its very
absence has taken away from us the power to estimate its
value. One may find an apt illustration of our gain and loss
in the bear-ward who was Tony Lumpkin's companion at
The Three Pigeons: he led a dancing bear, something of
which we hate to think, but the tunes to which it danced were
Dr. Arne "Water Parted" and Handel minuet from
"Ariadne."

If it be permissible to dwell on the beauty of the eight-
eenth century without perpetually reminding oneself of its
horrors, it is surely so in relation to life in the country. The
countryside had then a twofold loveliness; not only were
the roads unspoiled, often unpaved, it is true, but bordered
with copse and meadow, orchard and stream, but such build-

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