present generation would form an ample chateau for a large family of
our remote posterity. The mind, too, participates in the contraction
of the body. Poets and philosophers of all ages and nations have
lamented this too visible process of physical and moral deterioration.
'The sons of little men', says Ossian. '_Oioi nun brotoi eisin_,' says
Homer: 'such men as live in these degenerate days.' 'All things,' says
Virgil, 'have a retrocessive tendency, and grow worse and worse by the
inevitable doom of fate.'[10.2] 'We live in the ninth age,' says
Juvenal, 'an age worse than the age of iron; nature has no
metal sufficiently pernicious to give a denomination to its
wickedness.'[10.3] 'Our fathers,' says Horace, 'worse than our
grandfathers, have given birth to us, their more vicious progeny,
who, in our turn, shall become the parents of a still viler
generation.'[10.4] You all know the fable of the buried Pict, who bit
off the end of a pickaxe, with which sacrilegious hands were breaking
open his grave, and called out with a voice like subterranean thunder,
_I perceive the degeneracy of your race by the smallness of your
little finger!_ videlicet, the pickaxe. This, to be sure, is a
fiction; but it shows the prevalent opinion, the feeling, the
conviction, of absolute, universal, irremediable deterioration."

"I should be sorry," said Mr Foster, "that such an opinion should
become universal, independently of my conviction of its fallacy. Its
general admission would tend, in a great measure, to produce the very
evils it appears to lament. What could be its effect, but to check the
ardour of investigation, to extinguish the zeal of philanthropy, to
freeze the current of enterprising hope, to bury in the torpor of
scepticism and in the stagnation of despair, every better faculty of
the human mind, which will necessarily become retrograde in ceasing to
be progressive?"