and works of the Aristocracy or the Populace.

He admired the fine manners, the governing faculty, the reticent and
dignified habit, of the Aristocracy. He deplored its limitations and its
obduracy, its "little culture and no ideas." He made fun of it when its
external manifestations touched the region of the ludicrous--"Everybody
knows Lord Elcho's[24] appearance, and how admirably he looks the part
of our governing classes; to my mind, indeed, the mere cock of his
lordship's hat is one of the finest and most aristocratic things we
have." In a more serious vein he taught--and enraged the _Guardian_ by
teaching--that, "ever since the advent of Christianity, _the prince of
this world is judged_"; and that wealth and rank and dignified ease are
bound to justify themselves for their apparent inconsistency with the
Christian ideal. He pitied the sorrows of the "people who suffer," the
"dim, common populations," the "poor who faint alway"; but he pitied
them from above. He certainly did not enter into their position; did not
share their ideas, or feel their sorrows as part of his own experience.
In an amazing passage he says that, when we snatch up a vehement opinion
in ignorance and passion, when we long to crush an adversary by sheer
violence, when we are envious, when we are brutal, when "we add our
voices to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage," when
"we trample savagely on the fallen," then we find in our own bosom "the
eternal spirit of the Populace." That a spirit so hideous, so infernal
as is here described, is the eternal spirit of fallen humanity may be
painfully true; but to say that it is the special or characteristic
spirit of "the Populace" is to show that one has no genuine sympathy and
no real acquaintance with the life and heart of the poor. So far, then,
his account of his own transition is true. He had "broken with the ideas
of his own class, and had not come much nearer to the ideas and works
of Aristocracy or the Populace." But the work of his life had brought
him into close and continuous contact with the great Middle Class, which
practically had the whole management of Elementary Education in its
hands. He knew the members of that class, as he said, "experimentally."
He slept in their houses, and ate at their tables, and observed at close
quarters their books, their amusements, and their social life. Thus he
judged of their civilization by intimate acquaintance, and found it
eminentl