Looking Backward

Most of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that
our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it
is held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to
wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which
also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfect
imagination and a flattering fancy.

But the period thus looked back on with a purely admiring regret, as
perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the
desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most
likely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the
Aeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with
our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in the
age of Pitt, that his ardent youth might have eaten the dearest bread,
dressed itself with the longest coat-tails and the shortest waist, or
heard the loudest grumbling at the heaviest war-taxes; and it would be
really something original in polished verse if one of our young writers
declared he would gladly be turned eighty-five that he might have known
the joy and pride of being an Englishman when there were fewer reforms
and plenty of highwaymen, fewer discoveries and more faces pitted with
the small-pox, when laws were made to keep up the price of corn, and the
troublesome Irish were more miserable. Three-quarters of a century ago
is not a distance that lends much enchantment to the view. We are
familiar with the average men of that period, and are still consciously
encumbered with its bad contrivances and mistaken acts. The lords and
gentlemen painted by young Lawrence talked and wrote their nonsense in a
tongue we thoroughly understand; hence their times are not much
flattered, not much glorified by the yearnings of that modern sect of
Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing--not themselves but--all their
neighbours. To me, however, that paternal time, the time of my father's
youth, never seemed prosaic, for it came to my imagination first through
his memories, which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily world
of discovery. And for my part I can call no age absolutely unpoetic: how
should it be so, since there are always children to whom the acorns and
the swallow's eggs are a wonder, always those human passions and
fatalities through which Garrick as Hamlet in bob-wig and knee-breeches
moved his audience more than some have since done in velvet tunic and
plume? But every age since the golden may be made more or less prosaic
by minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which
there was always an abundance even in Greece and Italy, the favourite
realms of the retrospective