We often pity our poor ancestors. How they contrived to make the ends
meet, surpasses our conjectural powers. What a weary waste must have
seemed expanding before their eyes, between morning and night! Don't
tell us that the human female never longs for other pastime than


"To suckle fools and chronicle small beer."


True, ladies sighed not then for periodicals--but there, in the depths
of their ignorance, lay their utter wretchedness. What! keep pickling
and preserving during the whole mortal life of an immortal being! Except
when at jelly, everlastingly at jam! The soul sickens at the monotonous
sweetness of such a wersh existence. True that many sat all life-long at
needlework; but is not that a very sew-sew sort of life? Then oh! the
miserable males! We speak of times after the invention, it is true, of
printing--but who read what were called books then? Books! no more like
our periodicals, than dry, rotten, worm-eaten, fungous logs are like
green living leafy trees, laden with dews, bees, and birds, in the
musical sunshine. What could males do then but yawn, sleep, snore,
guzzle, guttle, and drink till they grew dead and got buried?
Fox-hunting won't always do--and often it is not to be had; who can be
happy with his gun through good report and bad report in an a' day's
rain? Small amusement in fishing in muddy water; palls upon the sense
quarrelling with neighbours on points of etiquette and the disputed
property of hedgerow trees; a fever in the family ceases to raise the
pulse of any inmate, except the patient; death itself is no relief to
the dulness; a funeral is little better; the yawn of the grave seems a
sort of unhallowed mockery; the scutcheon hung out on the front of the
old dismal hall, is like a sign on a deserted Spittal; along with sables