a dungeon! You must confess that our modern days of clubs, cabriolets, and comfort, is somewhat more advanced towards perfection."
Edward Lorraine.—"Why comfort is a very comparative term: it is true, I prefer the crimson carpet under my feet to the rushes with which my ancestors would have strewed my floor; but if I had never seen the carpet, I could not have missed it—as Cibber, in his beautiful poem of the Blind Boy, says—
'I do not feel
The want I do not know.'"
Mr. Morland.—"The hope of improvement is a quality at once so strong and so excellent in the human mind, that I, for one, disapprove of any sophism—or, if you will, argument—that tends to repress it. It is certain that nothing ever produces either the evil or the good prognosticated; circumstances always occur which no one could have foreseen, and which always both alter and ameliorate. Our age is a little self-important—so was its predecessor—so will be its follower: it is a curious fact, but the worst and the best is always said and thought of the existing time. For my part, I neither think that our present day is all but perfec-
