It may be, however, that our degenerate modern impulses afford us no safe clue to those halcyon days when sentiment was paramount and practical considerations of little weight; when wet feet and sore throats were not suffered to intrude their rueful warnings upon the majesty of nature; when ladies, who lived comfortably and happily with the husbands of their choice, poured forth impassioned prayers, in the Annual Register, for the boon of indifference, and poets like Cowper rushed forward to remonstrate with them for their cruelty.
"Let no low thought suggest the prayer,
Oh! grant, kind Heaven, to me,
Long as I draw ethereal air,
Sweet sensibility."
wrote the author of The Task, in sober earnestness and sincerity.
"Then oh! ye Fair, if Pity's ray
E'er taught your snowy breasts to sigh,
Shed o'er my contemplative lay
The tears of sensibility,"
wrote Macaulay as a burlesque on the prevailing spirit of bathos, and was, I think, unreasonably angry because a number of readers, his own mother included, failed to see that he
