he majority, the adult
population, in a pompous display of machinery for influencing that
very small fraction, the children. "Oh, but the destinies of the
empire depend on the rising generation!" Who has told us so?--how do
we know that they do not depend on the risen generation? Who are
likely to do more work during our lifetime, for good and evil,--those
who are now between fifteen and five-and-forty, or those who are
between five and fifteen? Yet for those former, the many, and the
working, and the powerful, all we seem to be inclined to do is to
parody Scripture, and say: "He that is unjust, let him be unjust
still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still."

Not that we ask any one to sit down, and, out of mere benevolence, to
write songs for the people. Wooden out of a wooden birthplace, would
such go forth, to feed fires, not spirits. But if any man shall read
these pages, to whom God has given a truly poetic temperament, a
gallant heart, a melodious ear, a quick and sympathetic eye for all
forms of human joy, and sorrow, and humour, and grandeur; an insight
which can discern the outlines of the butterfly, when clothed in the
roughest and most rugged chrysalis-hide; if the teachers of his heart
and purposes, and not merely of his taste and sentiments, have been
the great songs of his own and of every land and age; if he can see
in the divine poetry of David and Solomon, of Isaiah and Jeremiah,
and, above all, in the parables of Him who spake as never man spake,
the models and elemental laws of a people's poetry, alike according
to the will of God and the heart of man; if he can welcome gallantly
and hopefully the future, and yet know that it must be, unless it
would be a monster and a machine, the loving and obedient child of
the past; if he can speak of the subjects which alone will interest
the many, on love, marriage, the sorrows of the poor, their hopes,
political and social, their wrongs, as well as their sins and duties;
and that with a fervour and passion akin to the spirit of Burns and
Elliott, yet with more calmness, more purity, more wisdom, and
therefore with more hope, as one who stands upon a vantage-ground of
education and culture, sympathising none the less with those who
struggle behind him in the valley of the shadow of death, yet seeing
from the mountain peaks the coming dawn, invisible as yet to them:
then let that man think it no fall, but rather a noble rise, to leave
awhile the