HEADLONG HALL.
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εισιν, says Homer: 'such men as live in these degenerate days.'—'All things,' says Virgil[1], 'have a retrocessive tendency, and grow worse and worse by the inevitable doom of fate.' 'We live in the ninth age,' says Juvenal[2], 'an age worse than the age of iron: nature has no metal sufficiently pernicious to give a denomination to its wickedness.' 'Our fathers,' says Horace[3], worse than our grandfathers, have given birth to us, their more vicious progeny, who, in our turn, shall become the parents of a still viler generation.' You all know the fable of the buried Pict, who bit off the end of a pickaxe, with which sacrilegious, hands were breaking open his grave, and called out with a voice like sub-
