rule in every grade of life, and harsh indeed was parental rule, until
the reader wonders that there was not a general rebellion of women,
children, scholars, and apprentices against the savage ascendency of
husbands, fathers, pedagogues, and masters.

But the fashions of this world, whether good or evil, pass away. In the
eighteenth century we find parents becoming more humane, though still
keeping their offspring pretty stiffly bitted. They shared in the
general melioration of the age. The father was "honored sir," and was
not too familiar with his boys. The great outbreak at the close of the
century did much for the emancipation of the young; and by the time that
the present century had advanced to a third of its years, youth had so
far got the best of the conflict, and treated their elders with so
little consideration, that it was thought the latter were rather
presumptuous in remaining on earth after fifty. Youth began to organize
itself. Young Germany, Young France, and Young England became powers in
the world. Young Germany was revolutionary and metaphysical, and
nourished itself on bad beer and worse tobacco. Young France was
full-bearded and decidedly dirty, and so far deferred to the past as to
look for models in '93; and it had a strong reverence for that antique
sentiment which exhibited itself in the assassination of kings. Young
England was gentlemanly and cleanly, its leaders being of the patrician
order; and it looked to the Middle Ages for patterns of conduct. Its
chiefs wore white waistcoats, gave red cloaks and broken meat to old
women, and would have lopped off three hundred years from Old England's
life, by pushing her back to the early days of Henry VIII., when the
religious houses flourished, and when the gallows was a perennial plant,
bearing fruit that was _not_ for the healing of the nations. Some of the
cleverest of the younger members of the aristocracy belonged to the new
organization, and a great genius wrote some delightful novels to show