53: Yet in his essay _On Londoners and Country People_ we
find Hazlitt writing: "London is the only place in which the child
grows completely up into the man. I have known characters of this
kind, which, in the way of childish ignorance and self-pleasing
delusion, exceeded anything to be met with in Shakespeare or Ben
Jonson, or the Old Comedy."]

And the inhabitants of Coketown are exposed to the same objection as
their buildings. Every one sinks all traces of what he vulgarly calls
"the shop" (that is, his lawful calling), and busily pretends to be
nothing. Distinctions of dress are found irksome. A barrister of
feeling hates to be seen in his robes save when actually engaged in a
case. An officer wears his uniform only when obliged. Doctors have
long since shed all outward signs of their healing art. Court dress
excites a smile. A countess in her jewels is reckoned indecent by the
British workman, who, all unemployed, puffs his tobacco smoke against
the window-pane of the carriage that is conveying her ladyship to a
drawing-room; and a West End clergyman is with difficulty restrained
from telling his congregation what he had been told the British
workman said on that occasion. Had he but had the courage to repeat
those stirring words, his hearers (so he said) could hardly have
failed to have felt their force--so unusual in such a place; but he
had not the courage, and that sermon of the pavement remains
unpreached. The toe of the peasant is indeed kibing the heel of the
courtier. The passion for equality in externals cannot be denied. We
are all woven strangely in the same piece, and so it comes about that,
though our modern society has invented new callings, those callings
have not created new types. Stockbrokers, directors, official
liquidators, philanthropists, secretaries--not of State, but of
companies--speculative builders, are a new kind of people known to
many--indeed, playing a great part among us--but who, for all that,
have not enriched the stage with a single character. Were they to
disappear to-morrow, to be blown dancing away like the leaves before
Shelley's west wind, where in reading or playgoing would posterity
encounter them? Alone amongst the children of men the pale student of
the law, burning the midnight oil in some one of the "high lonely
towers" recently built by the Benchers of the Middle Temple (in the
Italian taste), would, whilst losing his youth over that interminable
series, _The Law R