tented self-sufficiency, so observable
in your genuine Cockney. Leadenhall Street is to his notion the
touchstone of mankind, and a character on 'Change the greatest test of
moral worth. Hamburg or Frankfort, Glasgow or Manchester, New York or
Bristol, it is all the same; your men of sugar and sassafras, of hides,
tallow, and train-oil, are a class in which nationality makes little
change. No men enjoy life more, few fear death as much. This is truly
strange! Any ordinary mind would suppose that the common period of human
life spent in such occupations as Frankfort, for instance, affords would
have little desire for longevity--that, in short, a man, let him be ever
such a glutton of Cocker, would have had enough of decimal fractions and
compound interest after fifty years; and that he could lay down the pen
without a sigh, and even for the sake of a little relaxation be glad
to go into the next world. Nothing of the kind; your Frankforter hates
dying above all things. The hardy peasant who sees the sun rise from his
native mountains, and beholds him setting over a glorious landscape
of wood and glen, of field and valley, can leave the bright world with
fewer regrets than your denizen of some dark alley or some smoke-dried
street in a great metropolis. The love of life--it may be axiomised--is
in the direct ratio of its artificiality. The more men shut out Nature
from their hearts and homes, and surround themselves with the hundred
little appliances of a factitious existence, the more do they become
attached to the world. The very changes of flood and field suggest the
thought of a hereafter to him who dwells among them; the falling leaf,
the withered branch, the mouldering decay of vegetation, bear lessons
there is no mistaking; and the mind thus familiarised learns to look
forward to the great event as the inevitable course of that law by which
he lives and breathes--while to others, again, the speculations which
grow out of the contemplation of Nature's great works invariably are
blended with this thought. Not so your man of cities, who inhabits some
brick-surrounded kingdom, where the incessant din of active life as
effectually excludes deep reflection as does the smoky atmosphere the
bright sky above it. Immersed in worldly cares, interested heart and
soul in the pursuit of wealth, the solemn idea of death is not broken
to his mind by any analogy whatever. It is the pomp of the funeral
that realises the idea to him; i