FREE SCHOOL.

It is entertaining to contemplate the generations of fashion, which not
only influences our dress and manner of living, but most of the common
actions of life, and even the modes of thinking. Some of these fashions,
not meeting with the taste of the day, are of short duration, and
retreat out of life as soon as they are well brought in; others take a
longer space; but whatever fashions predominate, though ever so absurd,
they carry an imaginary beauty, which pleases the fancy, 'till they
become ridiculous with age, are succeeded by others, when their very
memory becomes disgusting.

Custom gives a sanction to fashion, and reconciles us even to its
inconveniency. The fashion of this year is laughed at the next.

There are fashions of every date, from five hundred years, even to one
day; of the first, was that of erecting religious houses; of the last,
was that of destroying them.

Our ancestors, the Saxons, after their conversion to christianity,
displayed their zeal in building churches: though the kingdom in a few
centuries was amply supplied, yet that zeal was no way abated; it
therefore exerted itself in the abbey.--When a man of fortune had nearly
done with time, he began to peep into eternity through the windows of an
abbey; or, if a villian had committed a piece of butchery, or had
cheated the world for sixty years, there was no doubt but he could
burrow his way to glory through the foundations of an abbey.

In 1383, the sixth of Richard the Second, before the religious fervor
subsided that had erected Deritend-chapel, Thomas de Sheldon, John