Page:Varia.djvu/162

 150

With Peacock the history of English drinking-songs is practically closed, and it does not seem likely to be reopened in the immediate future. Any approach to the forbidden theme is met by an opposition too strenuous and universal to be lightly set aside. We may not love nor value books more than did our great-grandfathers, but we have grown to curiously overrate their moral influence, to fancy that the passions of men and women are freed or restrained by snatches of song, or the bits of conversation they read in novels.