Ellesmere. I should like the Young England party better myself if I
were quite sure there was no connection between them and a clan of
sour, pity-mongering people, who wash one away with eternal talk
about the contrast between riches and poverty; with whom a poor man
is always virtuous; and who would, if they could, make him as
envious and as discontented as possible.

Milverton. Nothing can be more strikingly in contrast with such
thinkers than Young England. Young Englanders, according to the
best of their theories, ought to be men of warm sympathy with all
classes. There is no doubt of this, that very seldom does any good
thing arise, but there comes an ugly phantom of a caricature of it,
which sidles up against the reality, mouths its favourite words as a
third-rate actor does a great part, under-mimics its wisdom, over-
acts its folly, is by half the world taken for it, goes some way to
suppress it in its own time, and, perhaps, lives for it in history.

Ellesmere. Well brought out, that metaphor, but I don't know that
it means more than that the followers of a system do in general a
good deal to corrupt it, or that when a great principle is worked
into human affairs, a considerable accretion of human folly and
falseness mostly grows round it: which things some of us had a
suspicion of before.

Dunsford. To go back to the subject. What would you do for country
amusements, Milverton? That is what concerns me, you know.

Milverton. Athletic amusements go on naturally here: do not
require so much fostering as in towns. The commons must be
carefully kept: I have quite a Cobbettian fear of their being taken