The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate,
was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and
perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a
man who was so very far from remarkable,--a man whose virtues were not
heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not
the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and
unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that
complaint many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting character!" I think
I hear a lady reader exclaim,--Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who
prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets,
adultery and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who
is quite a "character."

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your
fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least
eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in
the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily
wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and
liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they
have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their
brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have
not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They
are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is
more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people--many of
them--bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the
painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys;
their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they
have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in
their very insignificance,--in our comparison of their dim and narrow
existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which
they share?

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me
to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy,
lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull
gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. In that
case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know wha