idual,
and such tenderness as that is an element of our religion, not the drift
of our teaching.

He grumbled at the heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this
oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government. It was poor
encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a mansion!

He paid the money, dying sour; a splendid example of energy on the road,
a forbidding one at the terminus. And here the moral of the popular books
turned aside from him to snatch at humanity for an instance of our
frailness and dealt in portentous shadows:--we are, it should be known,
not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be. Six months before his
death he appeared in the garb of a navvy, humbly soliciting employment at
his own house-door. There he appealed to the white calves of his footmen
for a day's work, upon the plea that he had never been a democrat.

The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the
various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had for
a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the line,
facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where, as our
popular words should do, it struck the spectator's eye and his brain
simultaneously with pugilistic force: a reference to the picture in the
catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident. 'I've worked a
good bit in my time, gentlemen, and I baint done yet':--SEE PROFESSOR
SUMMIT'S 'MEN WHO HAVE COME TO FORTUNE.' There is, we perceive at a
glance, a contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying to his
menials for a day's work at the rate of pay to able-bodied men:--which he
is not, but the deception is not disingenuous. The contrast flashed with
the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring, very popularly. The
fustian suit and string below the knee, on the one side, and the purple
plush breeches and twinkling airy calves (fascinating his attention as he
makes his humble request to his own, these domestic knights) to right and
left of the doorway and in front, hit straight out of the canvas. And as
quickly as you perceive the contrast you swallow the moral. The dreaded
thing is down in a trice, to do what salutary work it may within you.
That it passed into the blood of England's middle-class population, and
set many heads philosophically shaking, and filled the sails of many a
sermon, is known to those who lived in days when Art and the classes