reward, or in some cases even the prison and the stake--men who in
their youth felt themselves to be heirs of a nobility of spirit like
that of Bruno, of Swammerdam, of Spinoza, have too often found
themselves in the noon of life concentrating all the energies of body
and soul on the acquisition of ugly millinery and uglier upholstery, and
on spreading extravagant tables to feed uncultivated guests.

"It is impossible," says the writer of the article just alluded to, "it
is impossible to say why men were made, but assuming that they were made
for some purpose, of which the faculties which they possess afford
evidence, it follows that they were intended to do many other things
besides providing for their families and enjoying their society. They
were meant to know, to act, and to feel--to know everything which the
mind is able to contemplate, to name, and to classify; to do everything
which the will, prompted by the passions and guided by the conscience,
can undertake; and, subject to the same guidance, to feel in its utmost
vigor every emotion which the contemplation of the various persons and
objects which surround us can excite. This view of the objects of life
affords an almost infinite scope for human activity in different
directions; but it also shows that it is in the highest degree dangerous
to its beauty and its worth to allow any one side of life to become the
object of idolatry; and there are many reasons for thinking that
domestic happiness is rapidly assuming that position in the minds of the
more comfortable classes of Englishmen.... It is a singular and
affecting thing, to see how every manifestation of human energy bears
witness to the shrewdness of the current maxim that a large income is a
necessary of life. Whatever is done for money is done admirably well.
Give a man a specific thing to make or to write, and pay him well for
it, and you may with a little trouble secure an excellent article; but
the ability which does these things so well, might have been and ought
to have been trained to far higher things, which for the most part are
left undone, because the clever workman thinks himself bound to earn
what will keep himself, his wife, and his six or seven children, up to
the established standard of comfort. What was at first a necessity,
perhaps an unwelcome one, becomes by degrees a habit and a pleasure, and
men who might have done memorable and noble things, if they had learnt
in time to consider th