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 never come back to me? Is a man the greater or wiser that he lived a hundred years ago or a thousand? Are reputations, like wine, the mellower and the more precious for mere age, even though they have been hid away in a cellar all the time? Is a thing actually fairer and better because I have almost forgotten how it looked when present, and shall never set eyes on it again? I entertain the greatest aversion to Horace's laudator temporis acti, shall always set my face against the superstition that 'there were giants in those days;' and yet wherever I went in the world previous to my retirement here that I might live with you, I found the strange maxim predominate, that everything was very much better before it had been improved!

"If I entered a club and expressed my intention of going to the Opera, for instance, whatever small spark of enthusiasm I could